Monday, 30 November 2009

Tesco to offer iPhone in the UK


iPhone
Supermarket giant Tesco has joined a growing number of UK firms offering Apple's popular iPhone.

A spokesperson for the firm said that it hoped to offer the phone "in time for Christmas". Although Tesco has not revealed tariffs, the spokesperson said that its prices were "competitive". In September, it was revealed that O2 had lost its exclusive deal to sell the phone, which had been in place since its launch in 2007. Both Vodafone and Orange have signed deals to sell the phone.

Orange has already begun selling the touchscreen whilst Vodafone will offer it from early 2010. Orange said it had sold more than 30,000 handsets on its first day. Tesco Mobile is a joint venture with O2. It offers phones on both contract and pay as you go tariffs from its stores around the UK. O2 has offered the iPhone in the UK for more than two years. Its popularity allowed the firm to win subscribers from other networks, according to analysts. Earlier this year, O2 said it had sold more than 1m of the phones. All of the firms will offer the iPhone 3G and the newer iPhone 3GS.

Saturday, 28 November 2009

High-Performance Unified Threat Management

Ambitious UK 'Start-Up' Answers Small Business Demand  


NetPilot's UTM Range Boasts Industry's First On-Board 3rd Generation SSL VPN

Bristol-based NetPilot Internet Security (NIS) has today unveiled its advanced range of Unified Threat Management solutions which benefit organisations from 25 to 500 users with the highest possible level of end-to-end security, compliance and access controls whilst not compromising performance. The NetPilot Guardsman, Vanguard and Globemaster appliances incorporating SSL VPN Plus™ provide outstanding throughput that exceeds IPSec and can even exceed wire speed performance. NetPilot's are the only UTM appliances available with SSL VPN Plus™, powered by Neoaccel.

"Small and mid-sized businesses depend upon fast IP links, but many security manufacturers struggle to meet these demands with solutions that take too much time to process traffic," commented Jamie Pushman, Director of Sales and co-founder at NIS. "The trend toward greater cloud computing is pushing computing resources even further away from users, increasing the need for strong encryption and policy enforcement from endpoint to endpoint, and increasing the strain upon performance and uptime. However, our unique OEM agreement with international industry leaders Neoaccel puts our UK customers at a distinct advantage. The NetPilot platforms' comprehensive UTM capabilities inspect traffic for all major threats, while SSL VPN Plus™ optimises the connection."

The NetPilot range scales from the 25-user Guardsman S2025 right up to the 500-user Globemaster R2500. All come fully loaded with a range of advanced features including minimum 40GB solid-state storage (up to 160GB for the R2500), on-board SSL VPN Plus™, and a full range of UTM components including email anti-virus (Clam or Sophos depending on bundle purchased), email policy filtering, advanced firewall, anti-spam and URL filtering. All but the smallest appliances also feature anti-spyware, browsing anti-virus and IDS.

SSL VPN Plus™ supports RSA, Citrix, reverse proxy, RADIUS and AD, and comes with comprehensive user-based access controls, data leakage prevention, and full log/audit reporting as standard. Its self-installing Java agent also eliminates costly remote client management issues.

Prices (including UTM Standard bundle) start at £895 plus VAT. The NetPilot appliances are also available at base units providing firewall and VPN functionality only.
 
visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Friday, 27 November 2009

SugarCRM on Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform

SugarCRM today announced that it will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure to enable its customers and value-added resellers to benefit from the real-time scalability, high availability and on-demand infrastructure of Microsoft Corp.'s cloud platform for web applications and services. "With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today," said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM.

"Windows Azure enables SugarCRM value-added resellers to create and deploy unique solutions for customers around the globe. This new service is another key component of the Sugar Open Cloud, the SugarCRM cloud strategy for delivering simple, affordable CRM anywhere based on customer need. Sugar on Windows Azure combines the most user-friendly CRM application on the market with a highly available, scalable and secure cloud computing platform."

The process for making SugarCRM applications available on Microsoft Windows Azure was simple and straightforward, taking just a couple weeks of development time. This rapid implementation period was enabled by the strong native support the Microsoft Azure platform delivers for PHP, the programming language in which Sugar is written.

"We are pleased to have SugarCRM running on Windows Azure," said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft Corp. "The ease by which SugarCRM was able to offer its CRM services demonstrates how the openness of the Windows Azure platform allowed it to deliver Web applications using its tools of choice."

Windows Azure is an Internet-scale cloud services platform that is hosted in Microsoft data centers. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used separately or together. Windows Azure offers a scalable infrastructure with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enables customers to pay for the service as they consume it, rather than buying and managing on-premises technology.

SugarCRM provides CRM cloud applications designed to run in any computing environment, including cloud platforms such as Windows Azure, partner clouds provided by SugarCRM partners such as BT and Tata Communications or in private clouds managed directly by SugarCRM customers. SugarCRM is delivering the Sugar Open Cloud because customers demand control and flexibility around how their CRM applications are managed and first generation CRM SaaS providers create risk for customers by locking them into a set of monolithic and inflexible services.

Microsoft and SugarCRM began working together in 2006 to deliver Sugar applications on top of Microsoft technology. SugarCRM supports IIS as well as Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. The two companies have continued to collaborate as part of the Interop Vendor Alliance. In August, SugarCRM announced Sugar Community Edition on the Microsoft Web Platform, a framework for developing, deploying and hosting Web applications.

Thursday, 26 November 2009

Cloud AntiVirus Company Secures $2 Million in Funding


Immunet, developer of next generation AntiVirus technologies, announced today that it has raised $2 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Altos Ventures with participation from Atlanta-based TechOperators. Ho Nam, General Partner of Altos Ventures, has joined the board of Immunet. Immunet launched Immunet Protect, its first product, in August 2009. Immunet Protect is the first free, cloud-based antivirus application focused on protecting your community. Immunet Protect harnesses the growing power of social networks with its community sharing features and "Collective Immunity(TM)" technology to protect personal computers from virus threats.


Upon installing Immunet Protect, users immediately become protected members within the "Immunet Community" (at 20,000 users and expanding rapidly). The Immunet Community leverages the collective knowledge of threats gathered from its users to defend ALL members in real time against thousands of new threats created every day.

Immunet's defenses grow stronger with every new user that joins the Immunet Community. This provides users with a natural incentive to share the product through its community-sharing features, which use Facebook Connect, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and regular email.

"Immunet Protect is unlike any antivirus software on the market because it is the first product focused on protecting an individual's own community," says Immunet Founder and CEO Oliver Friedrichs, a former Symantec and McAfee security veteran and entrepreneur. "Immunet Protect acts as a shield for entire communities, and that shield becomes stronger with each new user and each new threat that is detected. We want to spread the goodness of antivirus protection with Immunet Protect and allow our users to do so easily. We encourage users to 'Get Immunet Protect Before You Connect' "

"Immunet combines the collective intelligence of the Immunet Community with the power of social networks to create a powerful application that users have a common incentive to share for the greater good for all users," said Ho Nam of Altos Ventures. "We look forward to working with the Immunet team to support the viral growth of applications in the cloud AntiVirus space over the coming year and are excited to have them in our portfolio."

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

MindTouch Goes Cloud


MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today extended its popular enterprise collaboration platform to the cloud. The new offering makes it easy for business power users with no programming knowledge to mashup data from existing enterprise systems into real time charts, graphs, reports and tabular data.

MindTouch Cloud allows companies to replicate the features and functionality of MindTouch 2009 Standard in seconds with the swipe of a credit card and without a call to their IT department.


"MindTouch has essentially built an open source, cloud-enabled SharePoint that is accessible to non-programmers," said Sam Ramji, Vice President of Strategy at Sonoa Systems, a provider of analytics, management and cloud governance solutions for APIs and cloud services. "The more I look at what they've done, the more I realize they've built a business platform more than a technology platform."

The new platform is the company's first foray into cloud computing and is the first SaaS-based solution to give organizations the ability to easily collaborate across data from multiple enterprise systems and web applications.

Never before have non-programmers been able to so easily overlay critical data from commonly used enterprise systems --Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, support ticketing, accounts payable, ERP-- all within an easy to use collaborative environment. Pricing for the company's new SaaS offering starts as low as $7 per user per month.

Tuesday, 24 November 2009

New Approach Needed to Cloud Security

Arguably the greatest barrier to businesses taking full advantage of cloud computing is the issue of security. Recent high-profile breaches of the cloud (the attack on Twitter being perhaps the most publicized) have only served to heighten concerns. It's true; the potential consequences of a breach of cloud security are catastrophic, and this knowledge has served to make the debate rage even more fiercely.

A cloud security issue within an organization has the potential to be a major business crisis, and against a backdrop of heightened public awareness of data loss and privacy issues such as ID theft, it's understandable.

read more

Monday, 23 November 2009

How the Enterprise Cloud Will Affect the Datacenter

There are a variety of applications that support numerous business lines across an enterprise. These applications exhibit a wide range of operational characteristics as they service the diverse business demands. That diversity is the key to business success, but it has consequences. Ask an enterprise application architect about how IT should run a data center and you will find that the range of behaviours exhibited across the portfolio of applications cannot be run on one set of standard platform configurations. Most critical applications have extreme operational requirements that require specialised adjustments to operating environments.


Ask any data center manager about accommodating those different application behaviours and they will tell you the proliferation of platforms makes it impossible to contain costs, manage complexity or maintain reliability, especially for those critical applications.

Ask any business executive about how business is running and they will tell you that applications cost too much to develop, run and maintain. They cannot correlate growth to investment in IT.

Offering IT as a service requires a paradigm shift in technology, operational processes and thinking about how business demand – manifested by applications – affects the use of all data center resources. Enterprise Cloud Computing enables IT as a service and is the next phase in data center evolution to solve this spiralling dilemma. The question is, how does business successfully operate this expensive investment?

ENTERPRISE CLOUD IN BRIEF
The Enterprise Cloud combines a series of evolving and maturing technologies with associated techniques that make it easier to leverage the power of distributed processing while minimising the complexity and difficulty associated with such distribution. The location of compute, network and storage resources required to operate applications becomes transparent through virtualisation and dynamic allocation. Applications are serviced by pools of infrastructure services that do not have to be dedicated to an application. This fluidity is supported by advances in resource monitoring, advanced security and faster networking. The promise of cloud computing is providing significantly improved user experience, while balancing cost and efficiency – three critical pillars that must be satisfied for a business to succeed. But IT promises rarely live up to the hype, and the reason is simple: IT typically builds such projects with little input from the business on growth and general usage.

The cloud, even with all its new technologies, is not magic. It is an operating environment that needs to be designed to perform optimally. The design must start top-down, with business requirements taking into account:

• How the business operates;
• What are the peaks, cycles and key operating drivers; and
• How vital is availability, or processing massive throughput?

The typical IT response has been to design from the bottom up. In a sufficiently large enterprise, the answer will be yes for many requirements questions, but not for all the applications, nor for all lines of business. In the absence of that knowledge, the answer has been to design from the bottom up, resulting in an overengineered operating platform, which increases cost and complexity while causing data center sprawl to swell, thus reducing reliability.

Sunday, 22 November 2009

NTT Uses OpSource to Compete with AT&T’s Cloud

When Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the world's biggest telco, took a piece of the $10 million E series funding going into OpSource earlier this year, the pair reportedly didn't know they would be going into the cloud business together – or that it would be on the same day that AT&T told people to stand by because it was about to launch an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks a lot like Amazon.


Carriers like NTT and AT&T can give cloud-craving enterprises a warm and cuddly, hesitancy-overcoming feeling because of the way they have with security, availability and performance - and their ability to make production clouds cheaper than Amazon can because they can cut a deal on outbound connectivity. And Amazon can't run a security check on who's using its cloud the way carriers can to make the metaphor safer.

So now OpSource is piggybacking on NTT America, a subsidiary of NTT Communications and one of Google's main networking suppliers that provides enterprise hosting, managed networks and IP networking services worldwide, in the name of the enterprise public cloud adoption.

 NTT America is kicking in its secure data centers and Tier 1 global IP network as the underpinning of the OpSource Cloud, starting in America and eventually branching out.
According to OpSource CEO Trib Ryan, it's unlikely NTT will pick up another girl to dance with - let alone take home.

Friday, 20 November 2009

ScaleMP’s Talking BIG Clouds

ScaleMP, which builds SMP machines for HPC by aggregating multiple x86 blades into a single virtual x86 system, has become one of the cloud people.

It's adding some widgetry called vSMP Foundation for Cloud, currently in beta, to its vSMP Foundation line. It enables the dynamic, on-the-fly aggregation of x86 servers into big SMP virtual systems - sort of like what 3Leaf is doing - but ScaleMP uses virtualization for the server aggregation and the software is cloud-specific, meant for provisioning and re-provisioning large virtual-machine resources - large memory capacity and high memory bandwidth, say - mostly in private clouds.

It can currently aggregate 16 Nehalem-based x86 servers and create a virtual SMP machine with up to 128 cores and 4TB of main memory. Not your run-of-the-mill cloud ware. It doesn't need a cluster file system and can be used to create virtual machines on a per job, per project or per customer basis. The company says it eliminates the need to deploy dedicated shared memory systems.

It integrates with systems management and provisioning tools and supports any programming model (serial, throughput, multi-threaded or large-memory) without machine boundary.

ScaleMP founder and president Shai Fultheim says, "vSMP Foundation enables organizations to run large workloads in their cloud that previously required dedicated hardware infrastructure. This will result in increased cloud utilization, offering incredible return on investment."

The company has also enhanced its underlying vSMP Foundation for SMP product with what's called Direct Connect 2 (DC2) technology, which targets entry-level customers by aggregating up to four Intel systems using point-to-point InfiniBand connectivity.

Without needing an InfiniBand switch, the cost of virtual SMP implementations can fall by as much as 20%.

visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Thursday, 19 November 2009

Rackspace Cloud Biz Doubles

Budding cloud merchant Rackspace Hosting came in with better-than-expected net revenue of $162.4 million for the September quarter, up 17.4% year-over-year and up 6.8% sequentially. Earnings were up 45.3% year-over-year to $7.6 million or six cents a share and up 8.8% quarter-over-quarter.

Managed hosting revenue increased to $147.1 million, up 6% sequentially. Cloud revenue increased to $15.3 million, up 17% from the previous quarter. The company said its cloud business now represents ~10% of its total net revenues, up from 5% this time last year.

Total server count increased to 54,655, up from 52,269 servers and total customers increased to 80,944, up from 70,803 in Q2.
Capital expenditures were $46.7 million, including $28.7 million for purchases of customer gear, $4 million for data center build outs, $5.4 million for office buildouts and $8.5 million for capitalized software and other expenditures. These capex costs hurt.
Rackspace expects to have total capex of ~$185 million for the year, including $110 million for customer gear, $35 million for data centers, $15 million for office space, and $25 million for capitalized software and other.

It's got $103 million in the bank and $58.5 million in debt. Employment is up to 2,730 people.

visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Wednesday, 18 November 2009

SecuCloud Chooses OpSource to Help Secure Enterprise Data

OpSource announced that SecuCloud has successfully deployed OpSource On-Demand to bring its business-critical database security and compliance solution to the enterprise. SecuCloud offers a comprehensive and automated database security and compliance solution that is designed from the bottom-up to meet the specific needs of each company or enterprise.

SecuCloud chose OpSource On-Demand to provide the infrastructure of the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) version of this solution because of OpSource On-Demand's unmatched reliability, security and partner-friendly reputation.

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Riverbed in talks to acquire Expand Networks

Riverbed in talks to acquire Expand Networks: Advanced negotiations are for a deal at $30-40 million, after the WAN optimization start-up raised $85 million.


Shmulik Shelah and Ron Steinblatt
Nov 16, 2009 (Globes - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Sources inform "Globes" that Riverbed Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: RVBD) is in advanced negotiations to acquire Israeli start-up Expand Networks Ltd. for $30-40 million.

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SuccessFactors Joins EuroCloud as Founding Member

Today SuccessFactors, Inc. the global leader in business execution software , added its weight behind Europe's first ever Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud services business community, EuroCloud. Led by Pierre-Jose Billotte, President and Founder of the French ASP Forum, with a team of SaaS and cloud computing players from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, with discussions under way in ten other countries including Germany, Italy, Poland and the Ukraine, EuroCloud gathers together leading SaaS vendors, enablers, integrators and industry experts to share best practice, and facilitate expansion of their respective businesses across the continent.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090602/SF26086LOGO)

As one of the market's leading cloud-computing vendors, SuccessFactors recently unveiled its Business Execution (BizX) Software suite, which enables companies to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. The Business Execution Software suite empowers the C-level and human resources professionals alike to tie the performance of their people directly to overall business goals and execute more effectively everyday.
"With capital budgets under pressure, customers are demanding more cost effective alternatives to on-premise systems, fuelling the growth of cloud computing. As a company, we are at the forefront of that growth and innovation," said Tom Fisher, Vice President Cloud Computing, SuccessFactors. "SuccessFactors is one of the leading vendors spearheading the cloud-computing adoption model with more than five million users globally as demand for cloud computing continues to mature and grow at the enterprise application level. The EuroCloud initiative is a fantastic opportunity to create a regional cloud services community, influence other existing communities on the financial and operational benefits of the cloud, and harness the huge potential market across Europe."

According to industry analysts IDC, worldwide IT spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching US$44.2 billion by 2013 (IDC eXchange, "IDC's New IT Cloud Services Forecast: 2009-2013" - http://blogs.idc.com/ie/,October 5, 2009)

Monday, 16 November 2009

Orange sells 30,000 iPhones on first day

Orange sells 30,000 iPhones on first day


Mobile phone company breaks O2's two-year exclusive grip on the Apple handset in the UK Orange sold more than 30,000 iPhones within hours of becoming the first network to break O2's two-year exclusive grip on the Apple handset in the UK.

The mobile phone company, which lost out to O2 on the original deal at the last minute, reckons the level of sales reached by 4pm is a new first-day record for a British mobile phone launch. As well as the network's own shops, the device is being sold through independent retailers Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U. Coincidentally the latter today launched a rather eye-catching and potentially controversial new festive look for its website.

Nestled alongside the latest handset deals, is a dishevelled-looking cartoon Santa Claus with his Y-fronts around his knees, urinating against the Phones4U logo. On another part of the site, Santa can be seen smoking a cigarette surrounded by what appear to be beer cans.

The screens of the handsets shown on the site as "the hottest phones at the coolest prices", meanwhile, depict scenes including a fight between two snowmen, which appears to culminate in decapitation, garrotted turkeys and Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer's severed head.

"In keeping with the rest of our 'Great Deals 4 Popular People' advertising campaign we have decided to use some tongue-in-cheek and light-hearted imagery on our website and in our stores to support our seasonal promotions this year," said a Phones4U spokesman.

"This imagery will continue to change throughout the campaign to keep it fresh and interesting. The aim of the campaign is to engage with our target audience of 16 to 24-year-olds and reinforce our unique tone of voice through fun, anti-kitsch advertising that challenges the stereotypical portrayal of the holidays you see on the high street."

In contrast, the launch of the iPhone on Orange is being backed by a far more sober multimillion pound advertising campaign by the network, which is owned by France Telecom. Rather than focus on price Orange is basing its attempt to lure customers onto its network on the promise that it has better coverage than any of its rivals. In fact there is hardly any difference between the cost of the iPhone on Orange and the existing cost of the device with O2.

Vodafone will also be selling the device in the UK, but not until the start of next year. Speaking after the company's first-half results on Tuesday, however, Vodafone's chief executive Vittorio Colao refused to say whether the business will undercut its rivals in the race to attract British iPhone users. "You don't expect me to tell you two months in advance what we will do in the UK," he said. "The only thing I can tell you is if Orange customers are unhappy they can go into red shops."

The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing

SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal Expands Again Its List of Most Active Players in the Cloud Ecosystem

A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing.

Read on here - http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/770174


visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Friday, 13 November 2009

Cloud Computing & Political Correctness

I woke this morning to read David Lithicum's article "How to kill the cloud: Claim it's about job loss," originally published at InfoWorld.com.

Here is my initial thought: are you kidding me ? David's theory is that the adoption of Cloud Computing would be far more "acceptable" (aka politically correct) if we didn't have executives like Unisys's Richard Marcello saying: "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization."

To be fair, I think David is a really brite guy and he correctly observes that technology innovation often sets forth unrealistic expectations when it comes to realizing cost reductions and other benefits. But to read this: "The message here is that the cloud computing industry needs to think a bit about what it's saying in the promotion of cloud computing. Some of the "cloud computing experts" are sending wrong and inaccurate messages. In other words, they're not helping." What are they not helping ? Don't you believe that enhancing the quality of systems and reducing the expense of deploying them for the benefit of customers isn't at the core of innovation ? Isn't that what its all about ? For those who don't think so I suggest a view of Danny Devito's Larry the liquidator speech from the movie Other People's Money below. Amen, you just heard a prayer - the prayer for the "dead".


Bottom line is that the IT world along with players in a variety of industries are at peril because the value paradigms they are operating around are no longer relevant to the market. Its only a matter of time until a combination of forces including globalism, technology advancements and mega cultural shifts turn over their proverbial apple carts. David do you honestly believe that the "press" people get around the "truth" (being that reengineering significant aspects of business models via cloud computing will eliminate vast segments of the job market and redeploy them abroad) will stop this revolution ? Perhaps it would help advance our industry to be more transparent about obsolesence, change, and continuing to get an increasing share of a shrinking market.

read more

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Thursday, 12 November 2009

Trust and Reliability in Cloud Computing


Vordel, a provider of governance products for Cloud Computing and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) announced at VordelWorld, its annual user conference in Dublin, Ireland, the release of the Vordel Cloud Service Broker. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker aggregates and manages multi-domain services. This creates a trusted environment for enterprises to leverage the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Organizations who wish to use Cloud services in conjunction with their own SOA and those of their partners face major issues related to reliability and trustworthiness. One significant challenge is aggregating services from multiple domains including Public, Private and Community Clouds - into coherent composite services and applying policies to them. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker solves this multi-domain problem by registering services from all three domains into a single repository – the multi-domain registry repository - enabling monitoring, management and policy enforcement. Additionally, the Vordel Cloud Service Broker offers value-added services such as caching, acceleration, and transformation saving enterprises time and money while creating a trusted and reliable environment.

Gartner commented that “The future of cloud computing will be permeated with the notion of brokers negotiating relationships between providers of cloud services and the service consumers. In this context, a broker might be software, appliances, platforms or suites of technologies that enhance the base services available through the cloud. Enhancement will include managing access to the services, providing greater security or even creating completely new services.”1
Vordel CEO, Vic Morris, speaking about the company's Cloud Service Broker news said "Trust is a major barrier to Cloud adoption particularly among enterprises. It's clear that many organizations see the value of incorporating Cloud Services into their IT infrastructure, but they also have concerns about the reliability and performance of these services outside their domain of control. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker addresses these issues by providing a trustworthy and reliable onramp to Cloud services allowing businesses to monitor and manage them in the same fashion as their own internal services. This means that composite applications can be built in a completely seamless fashion offering users full visibility, trust and control".
Key valued added services provided by the Vordel Cloud Service Broker include:
Multi-Domain Registry Repository
The Multi-Domain Registry (MDRR) aggregates together services across domains. These domains include not only Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, but also local on-premises services, and business partner services. In this way, all of the services on which a business depends are managed in one place. This becomes a single point at which compliance to Service Level Agreements, compliance to privacy and security mandates, and usage statistics can be viewed.
Analytics for visibility
Organisations require a record of how they are using Cloud Computing, not least because they will be billed for this usage. The Vordel Cloud Service Broker provides an independent audit trail of Cloud service usage. Analytics of Cloud Computing usage includes not only raw usage information, but also information about service quality, patterns of usage over time, and identity of users. In this way, an organization can understand how they use Cloud Computing.
Content Analysis
All content sent to Cloud services must be analysed for leaked data, in order to enable Data Loss Prevention. In addition, content-level threats must be detected and blocked. This includes application-level attacks at the API and payload level.
Caching
Caching protects the enterprise from latency associated with connecting to the Cloud service. Cloud Service Broker’s cache saves the organization money by allowing some requests to be serviced by the broker itself, removing the need for a (billed) connection up to the Cloud provider.
Composition
Vordel Cloud Service Broker allows developers to link together local applications with Cloud-hosted applications. The local applications may be accessed via Web Services interfaces, via database calls, via message schemes such as MQ or JMS or simply via the file system.
Content transformation
Content sent to the Cloud service may need to be transformed, for example in order to mediate between different versions of applications. In addition, many Cloud services use REST API interfaces whereas internal services may use SOAP, JMS or older technologies such as COBOL. Vordel’s technology includes an accelerated transformation engine which allows data to be transformed at speed.
SLA Monitoring
Vordel Cloud Service Broker complements the Cloud Service providers by offering a comprehensive Service Level Agreement monitoring to monitor the response time of the Cloud service, and the entire transaction throughput time.
Traffic Throttling
Throttling is the “surge protector” of Cloud Computing. If an application makes a high number of calls to a Cloud service then a Cloud Service Broker can deflect a portion of the calls to back-up service, newly provisioned for this purpose.
Event Alerting
Events such as Cloud outages must be alerted, so that remedial measures can be put into place.
Extensibility 3rd Party Valued Added Services
Organizations may wish to add their own value-added services from 3rd party sources, or indeed add their own pluggable modules.

Vordel Cloud Service Broker will be available in Q1 2010.

visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

Expand Networks Revamps UK Channel Strategy to Support Growing Market Demand for Advanced WAN Optimisation

Slough, UK. –November 11th 2009 – Expand Networks www.expand.com , the leader in optimising WANs for branch office consolidation and virtualisation, today reveals its revamped channel strategy for the UK market in light of the continued and growing success of its channel partners in key market areas including server-based computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtualised and cloud based IP infrastructures and satellite based communications.

To better support its partners and enable them to take advantage of these burgeoning market opportunities Expand has overhauled its distribution model with the appointment of three new value-add distribution partners – Cloud Distribution, CDG UK and Sematron – and plans to continue its aggressive reseller recruitment programme over the coming months.

Newly formed Cloud Distribution will focus on the WAN optimisation requirements of virtualised and cloud-based IP infrastructures as more and more organisations move toward the web as a delivery platform for applications and services. Expand’s Virtual Accelerator solution is ideal for these environments with a unique ability to be deployed on virtual machines as a virtual appliance as well as being able to accelerate virtualised applications and Expand Network’s Mobile Accelerator Client, with unique HIVE technology, is a key innovation that will help maximise this market opportunity.

The relationship with CDG UK, a current Expand partner across other European territories, will be extended into the UK market with a focus on server-based computing and VDI where Expand’s Accelerator appliance and Virtual and Mobile Accelerators enable the delivery of applications and services to distributed enterprise environments.

Finally, Sematron will focus on the growing area of satellite based communications where Expand has a unique solution to overcome the latency challenges faced when delivering data services over satellite links. “WAN Optimisation is a key enabler for many of today’s major enterprise IT initiatives,” explains Adam Davison, VP Corporate Sales & Marketing, Expand Networks. “Having aligned our go-to-market focus earlier this year we have seen a growing appetite within the channel for our solutions, as WAN Optimisation becomes increasingly recognized as something of a recession-bucking technology.

We are seeing tremendous market success and company growth and needed to restructure our channel model and strategy to better support this.” “These distributor signings lay the foundations of an energised channel strategy that will support our resellers in meeting the changing business initiatives of the UK enterprise, both now and into the future.

Expand has worked hard to place itself among the top players in the market and to further establish this leadership, we require a high-quality channel, that is fully committed to our solutions. With CDG, Cloud Distribution and Sematron on board, we all share a common goal focused on delivering strategic solutions to meet key enterprise initiatives. This collaborative approach, underpinned by strong sales support and value adding services will ultimately allow our partners to benefit from the best margins available," concludes Davison.

visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Secure Enterprise Clouds

Big news on the Cloud Standards front, I was just informed that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) - JTC 1 have formed a new Subcommittee (SC) at their Plenary last week that includes working groups for SOA and Web Services as well as a Study Group for standardization of cloud computing. (This information has not yet been made public, my source has indicated that I am allowed to share this)

The scope will include Standardization for interoperable Distributed Application Platform and services including Web Services, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Cloud Computing. SC 38 will pursue active liaison and collaboration with all appropriate bodies (including other JTC 1 subgroups and external organizations, e.g., consortia) to ensure the development and deployment of interoperable distributed application platform and services standards in relevant areas.

Similar to other ISO initiatives each member country that’s interested in participating in this group will come up with their own structure to provide feedback on work items and establish voting positions, including the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) who will be the US TAG.

Administrative support and leadership of SC 38 will be provided as follows:

The US National Body will serve as Secretariat for the SC and its Working
Groups, and Dr. Donald R. Deutsch from the US National Body will serve as the Chair for the SC. The National Body of China will provide Ms. Yuan Yuan as the Convenor of the Working Group on SOA. The US National Body will provide the Convenor of the Working Group on Web Services. The National Body of Korea will provide Dr. Seungyun LEE as the Convenor of the Study Group on Cloud Computing. The National Body of China will provide Mr. Ping ZHOU as the Secretary of the Study Group on Cloud Computing.


visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

World's first iPhone virus changes your wallpaper... to a picture of Rick Astley, hacker claims

Any iPhone estate should investigate www.mobileiron.com - www.cloud-distribution.com/mobileiron/ to ensure their iPhone's are protected from this security risk. A 21-year-old Australian claims to be the first hacker in the world to infect the iPhone with a virus. It spreads between phones with each call but the damage extends to changing the device's wallpaper - to a photo of Eighties pop star Rick Astley famous for his hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Sydney student Ashley Towns said he wanted to raise the issue of security, adding: 'What I've done has shown that anyone can easily hack into an iPhone.' iphone rick Attack: The virus infects iPhones with a picture of 80s pop star Rick Astley He added: 'The virus pretty much exploits people's laziness in not changing their password.' Rick Astley is a popular choice for mischievous computer users. Video-sharing website YouTube has spawned the phenomenon of 'Rickrolling', where a person provides a weblink to an innocent-looking topic but this actually takes the user to a video of Rick Astley singing 'Never Gonna Give You Up.' Mr Towns' virus can only infect iPhones which have been 'jailbroken' by their owners - an action that allows phone owners to install applications on their phones which have not been approved by Apple. Telecommunication experts warn that jailbreaking phones can stir Apple's wrath and that of telephone companies, but there have been few complaints of owners being punished by having their service discontinued. Mr Towns said that after jailbreaking their iPhones people should always change their password because all iPhones use the same password. He said that somebody with more malicious intent could have done anything - broken into a phone to read SMS messages, search through emails and view contacts and photos. 'I'm unaware whether I'm breaking any laws by starting the virus,' said Mr Towns. 'I've been informed that I may have broken some, but not being a lawyer I don't know. 'The virus itself is not malicious and is not out to hurt people. It's just poking fun and hopefully waking people up a little.' He is certain it's the first virus of its kind in the world - 'especially the first that spreads from phone to phone.' He has no idea how many people his virus has affected so far, but he knows that in the initial stages it struck around 100 iPhones. Mr Towns wants to assure users that apart from changing the wallpaper, the virus is not harmful and is quite easy to get rid of. Anyone whose iPhone is infected, he says, need take only a couple of minutes to remove the Rick Astley photo by changing the phone's password and deleting a few files from the phone. The message, he says, is for people to change their passwords whenever they do something new on their iPhones - or the instrument could be struck with a far more dangerous virus than the one he has spread. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1226288/Rick-rolling-worm-hits-iPhone--virus-changes-wallpaper-picture-Rick-Astley.html?ITO=1490#ixzz0WRxKq4O3 visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Security and Compliance in the Cloud

Terry Woloszyn, Founder of PerspecSys, emphasized security and compliance in his session at the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Nov. 2 – 4. In his session – "Addressing Data Privacy, Residency, and Security when Adopting Cloud Applications" - focused on new technologies and techniques that allow sensitive data to appear to be in the cloud, but really remain behind the enterprise firewall.

Woloszyn emphasized that "there should be a segregation of the data and the functionality. All the business sensitive date should be behind the firewall."

read more

Monday, 9 November 2009

Secure Enterprise Clouds

There is so much waste in the data centers of Fortune 1000 companies today that a CIO – as an officer of the company – could be considered in breach of their fiduciary duty to stockholders given the dollars in question. Of course that requires costs transparency, so sadly most are safe for now. It seems that every new technology innovation brings the promise of greater efficiencies and cost savings but in reality tends to leave a mess of ‘legacy’ infrastructure on the floor that results in a net higher TCO than the CIO had in the first place.
So what does this have to do with Cloud Computing? While there is no shortage of companies trying to ply their wares as the ideal enabler for Cloud, I am surprised by the lack of attention from vendors that have the most to gain – the Cloud providers themselves. If I put on my CIO shoes here are the things I care about:
  1. Business/IT synchronicity,
  2. Mitigation of risk,
  3. Leverage of new technologies/approaches to reduce the cost of delivering the IT services that the business requires.
Those three items, in that order of priority, are what I need to do to keep my job. Cloud, as a new delivery paradigm, certainly offers the potential to help with #1 and impact #3…but right now when I look at #2 most of the Cloud offerings make it worse, not better. Let’s be real here – if I pursue the Cloud offerings from IBM, Savvis, or Sun/Oracle I’ll feel more comfortable that my concerns about risk mitigation are addressed, but at the expense of the cost savings and business flexibility that prompted me to consider it in the first place. And as for the Google & Amazon offering...I’ll commend Amazon’s latest twist of a Virtual Private Cloud as a step in the right direction, but personally I’m still not going to bet my job on it.

Why can’t highly capable organizations like IBM make this easy for me? I mean, they have the software, services, and outsourcing (Cloud delivery) capabilities to make this easy for me. Why don’t they?

Here’s a thought: how about a Cloud vendor that provides the software tools and services to allow me to set up my own Cloud internally? And better yet, provide remote management capability to help me run it. Heck, while we’re running down the wish list I want the tools deployed locally to allow me to deploy remotely in your Cloud. Even better still – because I’m a suspicious, risk adverse CIO – how about you just offer that “run in my Cloud” as a scenario for Disaster Recovery? I like the sound of that…run in my data center under my control, with Cloud-like attributes to improve business relationships via responsiveness and reduced cost…best of all with my Vendor absorbing the cost and risk of guaranteeing Disaster Recovery. Now that’s a service I’d sign up for.

Sound like utopia? Guess what (IBM, Sun, Savvis, Amazon, Google, et al)…there’s a latecomer to the Cloud party called Unisys that’s offering this today. Why aren’t you?


visit our website @ http://www.cloud-distribution.com

Friday, 6 November 2009

Cradle to Grave Smartphone Management for the Enterprise

There is about to be a sea-change in the UK Enterprise Mobility space. Apple's iPhone
- until now exclusively on O2 - will be available to Orange and Vodafone customers
in the next 90 days.

What does this mean to the channel ? Every Enterprise will now be considering a
move from their present mobile platform to iPhone and both Orange and Vodafone will
be pushing hard for them to adopt it.

However, neither of these operators (or O2 for that matter) can deliver a management
platform which secures, manages, backs up and controls the iPhone as well as all
 other major Smartphone platforms such as Windows Mobile, Symbian & Blackberry
(with Android and PalmPre coming soon).

We do. It's called MobileIron and it's available now from Cloud Distribution.

Q - Do you have Enterprise clients who are considering Apple's iPhone for corporate
deployments ? If so, we'd be happy to provide evaluation accounts for you to impress
them with the cradle to grave provisioning, backup, security and management MobileIron
provides.

To find out more, please visit our web site:

http://www.cloud-distribution.com/mobileiron/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Introducing MobileIron

MobileIron is the only Enterprise platform which is able to provide 'cradle to grave'
device management across all of the major Smartphone platforms including;

* Apple iPhone
* Microsoft Windows Mobile
* Blackberry
* Symbian (in Beta)
* Google Android (Q1 2010)

Smartphones in the enterprise introduce new challenges not addressed by traditional
laptop mobility strategies.

High cost: The mobile expense line is exploding. Both the business and end users
 demand smartphones. Carrier costs are spiraling upward, and getting them under
control is a difficult policing effort at best.

Poor visibility: Any data on a laptop can also live on a smartphone. Companies lack
a clear view of their data and application exposure. Massive aggregate storage on
such easily lost units is a security timebomb.

Too many platforms: There is no industry standard for smartphone operating systems.
BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Symbian, and Android are all here to stay. Single
platform strategies will not allow companies to keep pace with innovation and end-user
demand.

Consumer-driven: Consumers, not IT, drive the smartphone market. As employee-owned
phones start accessing company data, security and privacy become a difficult balancing
act.

The MobileIron Virtual Smartphone Platform is the first solution to combine data-driven
central management of smartphones with deep visibility into real-time usage and
cost drivers. It is a simple-to-install appliance that plugs into your corporate
 network and lets you quickly gain control of your smartphone operations. Smartphone
data moves to the cloud, giving IT, finance, and end users full visibility and control
of smartphone operations through a central window.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Free MobileIron Partner trial

Please contact Greg Harris on 01635 800412 to reserve a FREE MobileIron trial today
or email him @ greg@cloud-distribution.com

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Best regards
eMarketing
Cloud Distribution Ltd

Thursday, 5 November 2009

Key Considerations for Cloud Networking


Every enterprise has a unique network infrastructure for accessing servers and allowing applications to communicate between components.  Various layers support the management of network addressing, deliver critical services, and ensure security.  The infrastructure includes specific addressing (sub-nets), address services like DHCP/DNS, identity and directory services like LDAP, and firewals and routing rules – all reflecting the specific requirements and evolution of the given enterprise.

Clouds are not different from the enterprise in this respect; they have unique networking infrastructures that support complex and flexible multi-tenant environments.  Remember that the cloud providers have to control their networking so that they can route traffic within their infrastructure.  More important, their design is completely different from your enterprise networking architecture, design, and addressing.  This is not a problem if you’re doing something stand-alone in the cloud because you don’t care what the network structure is as long as you can access it over the internet.  However, if you want to extend your existing networks and use your existing applications, there are serious discontinuities that have to be addressed.
First, you have to deal with addressing.  The typical cloud provider will assign you a block of addresses as part of your cloud account.  For example, Flexiscale and GoGrid essentially give you get a block of assigned addresses that you can attach to the servers you create.  In some cases these are external addresses (meaning that they are public addresses that can be accessed from the internet), while in others, they are internal. 

In either case, they are not assigned as part of your addressing.  This means that even if you manage to connect these resources to your data center, you need to build new routes and alter your services to allow these “foreign” addresses into your system. Amazon originally took a different approach by providing a dynamic system where an address is assigned every time a server is started.  This made it hard to build multi-tier applications, requiring developers to design systems able to pass changing address information between application components.  The new VPC offering partially solves this problem for connecting to the Amazon cloud, although some key challenges remain.  Other cloud providers are investigating similar networking capabilities.

The next major issue with networking in the cloud is data protection.  In your data center, there is a secure perimeter defined and developed by your IT organization that is comprised of firewalls, rules, and systems to create a protected environment for your internal applications.  This is important because most applications need to communicate over ports and services that are not well protected and certainly not safe for general internet access.  Since applications are developed for the protected environment of the data center, it can be dangerous to move them unmodified into the cloud.  Under normal circumstances, the application owner or developer has to build protection on a per-server basis and enact corporate protection policies.

The loss of control of the infrastructure mentioned earlier has additional implications – in most clouds you can’t control the physical interface level.  That is, in addition to assigned IP addresses, you get MAC addresses assigned to you as well.  These addresses can change every time a server is started which means that the identity of the server (and associated IP addresses) cannot be based on this familiar attribute.
All of these networking issues are at play whenever enterprise applications require the support of your data center infrastructure – things like identity services, naming services, and access to internal databases and other resources.  Because of this, your cloud resources need a way to connect to your data center, of which the easiest approach is a VPN.  In building this solution, you need to design for routing to the cloud and provide a method for cloud applications to “reach back” to the applications and services running in your data center. Ideally, this connection would allow Layer-2 connectivity because a number of services require this level to function properly.

To wrap up this segment, networking, like storage, is a very important part of your IT infrastructure, and the cloud adds a number of interesting new variables to the design and operation of your data center environment.  What’s needed is a well-constructed architecture and a good understanding of the limitations imposed by the cloud if you want to integrate successfully with the public clouds.  Today, this can be a major barrier to cloud adoption since enterprises are understandably reluctant to re-architect their network environments or become knowledgeable about the complexities of each cloud provider’s underlying infrastructure.  When designing your cloud strategy, make sure to select a migration path that addresses these issues and protects you from costly engineering projects and cloud risks.

Original Article - http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1166941

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

Google energy monitor arrives in UK


Google energy monitor arrives in UK


Online tool allows householders to monitor energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, thereby reducing consumption and saving money. Google may be best known for helping you find things on the web, but the online search company's latest move is a bid to make futuristic low-energy eco-homes a reality.

Launching for the first time in the UK today, Google Powermeter is an online tool that allows householders to monitor their home's energy use and greenhouse gas emissions via the web, and so reduce their consumption and save money.

Already being trialled in the US, the free energy-monitoring service uses new smart meters, or an add-on clip for conventional meters, to send electricity consumption to a personalised iGoogle web page. Users will be able to check their energy use anywhere in the world via a computer or mobile phone.

The idea is that householders will be persuaded to stop overfilling kettles, switch appliances off standby and turn off unused lights after being confronted with their daily energy use. Studies by organisations including the government's Energy Saving Trust have suggested such energy monitoring leads people to cut their bills by 3-15%, potentially saving the average UK household £75 a year.

Google Powermeter is itself free, but will initially be available to British homeowners either by buying a gadget called AlertMe Energy or switching to first:utility, a small energy supplier. AlertMe's device works using a broadband hub and a clip for your electricity meter. It can be bought from today for £69 with a £3 monthly subscription fee. First:utility customers will have to wait until next month to try the service.

Powermeter works by showing graphs of a user's energy consumption over time – by day, week or month – and comparing it to their previous usage and regional averages. Ben Coppin, an employee at AlertMe who has trialled it for the last six months, said using the software had led him to switch off an unnecessary immersion heater that was costing £300-400 annually, and to halve his tumble dryer's energy use by switching from its highest setting to its lowest.

Jens Redmer, director for business development at Google, said Powermeter's value came from "immediate feedback". He told of testers in California discovering pool pumps they hadn't used for years but that were draining energy, and one woman who saved her apartment from burning down by detecting a burning toaster while at work and alerting a neighbour.

Redmer added that a social element could be a next step for the service, which keeps users' energy usage private. "In the future, one new feature could be friendly competition – why can't I challenge my friends to say I'll save 10% over a year, and then trigger alerts when they're falling behind, so I could ping them to encourage them?"

Pilgrim Beart, the founder and CEO of AlertMe, said: "Many consumers feel they can't protect themselves from rising energy costs or do anything to stop climate change. However, more than a quarter of all energy use happens in our homes and this gives consumers the power to monitor, control, and reduce the energy they use." Heating and power for UK homes account for 27% of the UK's carbon footprint.

Powermeter's move into the UK puts it a step ahead of Microsoft's rival project, Hohm, which is in a US-only beta trial and works by creating an online dashboard of energy data from partnered utility companies. Unlike Google's software, it covers both electricity and gas use, and you can enter your usage manually.

Enthusiasts have previously developed kits using open-source code that allow homes to post their energy usage to Twitter, and several companies sell energy monitors – such as the OWL and Wattson – which show real-time electricity consumption on wireless handheld displays. One such gadget available in the US, the TED 5000, already works with Powermeter.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

Virtualization 101

With Virtualization becoming intertwined with cloud computing it is worth taking a step back and looking once again what virtualization is, and is not. Virtualization and Emulation are often compared, but there are a set of important differences. Emulation provides the functionality of a target processor completely in software. The main advantage being that you can emulate one type of processor on any other type of processor.

Unfortunately it tends to be slow. Virtualization however involves taking a physical processor and partitioning it into multiple contexts. All of which take turns running directly on the processor itself. Because of this, Virtualization in faster than emulation.

Virtualization introduces an abstraction layer on top of resources, so that physical characteristics are hidden from the user. This abstraction layer takes care of resource allocation in order to meet the needs of the applications being run. In essence virtualization enables you to create one or more virtual machines that can run simultaneously at the same time as the host operating system. In its early days virtualization was more specialized and was utilized specifically in a vendor-controlled way, such as IBM’s LPAR approach for example. Virtualization vendors claim consolidation ratios of 4, with the potential for making available up to 75 percent of new infrastructure available in a date center.

Chipset manufacturers are now optimising the processors to support virtualisation. Both Intel and AMD have extended the instruction sets of their newer processors to give increased support for virtualisation. ‘AMD-V’ is what AMD have labelled their technology and Intel’s technology is called ‘VT.’ Expect even further advances. For example the Intel Xeon 7400 Dunnington processors include something called FlexMigration. This allows virtual machines to be moved around easily in a server pool.  You will need to understand in detail the processors that any virtualised environment runs upon as they offer a key mechanism for optimization.
Key to the virtualisation architecture is the hypervisor, the virtual machine manager. A hypervisor is a program that allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host. Although each operating system appears to have the host’s processor, memory, and other resources all to itself, the hypervisor is actually controlling the host processor and resources. It allocates what is needed to each operating system in turn, and these allocations can be managed and tuned.

There are two types of Hypervisor:
q Type 1: This is referred to as a bare-metal or native hypervisor. This type of hypervisor is software based and runs directly on a specific hardware and hosts a guest operating system. XEN, VMWARE, ESX, Parallels Server, Hyper-V all have examples of this type of hypervisor.
q Type 2: This type of hypervisor runs within an actual operating system. VMWARE Server (GSX), VirtualBox, Parallels Workstation and Desktop are examples of this type of hypervisor. The Type 2 Hypervisor is typically people are referring to when they think of Virtualisation.

There is a third element: Paravirtualisation. This is when the Operating System has been modified to be aware of the Hypervisor that is running. This makes the interaction and integration between the two much smoother and in theory less prone to any errors that may be generated. ‘Enlightenment” in Windows Server 2008 is an example of this as it enables the OS to interact directly with the Hypervisor.

With computing resources at a premium in terms of space, power, location, and cost, the use of virtualised infrastructures is a very compelling proposition for existing servers and hardware that are under utilised or have spare capacity cycles. Virtualisation can actually be thought of as addressing one of the deficiencies of building a large infrastructure, that of resource. It also addresses differences in OS infrastructure, software stacks etc. With virtualisation, on-demand deployment of pre-configured virtual machines containing all the software required by a job is possible. Flexibility is also added to resource management and application execution. For example running virtual machines can be controlled by freezing them (similar to check-pointing) or by migrating them in a real-time scenario while keeping the virtualised infrastructure running
Indeed this type of proposition is beginning to be thought of as a ‘private cloud’, in which virtualisation is used to deliver services across an organisation and in which best practices utilised in ‘public clouds’ are used to deliver this. These include Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service type concepts in which Virtualisation and PaasS providers are releasing products and tools to enable the deployment and management of such private clouds. Examples of this are GigaSpaces who recently announcing tighter integration with VMWare which enables GigaSpaces to dynamically manage and scale VMWare instances and enable them to participate in the scaling of GigaSpaces hosted applications. A PaaS cloud provider such as GigaSpaces is able to do this due to VMWare’s launch of VSphere which opens up their VM product to allow management of both internal and external clouds. VMWare is pitching vSphere as the first Cloud-OS, which is able to break up separate hardware platforms into what they offer in terms of resources.

In terms of virtualisation, there are also drawbacks to watch out for. When you communicate ‘to’ and ‘from’ a virtualized node, the packets needs to pass through the virtualised communications layer. This is an overhead and you should estimate between 10-20% of a performance hit for this. Furthermore the VM is not an indication of the speed or performance of your grid. For example running four virtual machines on a 4 core 4-GHz chip is not the same as having 4 & 1Ghz dedicate chips for each VM. Also when one of your virtual machines is idle, if other VM’s are co-hosted they will get the majority of the power.

As the machines are virtual, and using resource cycles that are not in use, you may find that certain nodes are not available when you need or expect them. To this end you should ensure you have the ability to burst when required and have virtualised management infrastructure in place to handle this.

If you intend to embrace virtualisation then you will need to review machine specifications, paying special attention to processors and RAM,  and review storage and network infrastructure.

The positives however far outweigh any drawbacks and ultimately virtualisation will, over time, save money and, with all the innovation currently occurring around virtualisation, will make server administration easier.

Original Article - http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1161571

Monday, 2 November 2009

Virtual Infrastructure: What Is Required for the Cloud

Too often organizations have deployed virtual infrastructure tactically to reduce server sprawl or speed application deployments. Without a higher level view of organizational priorities, bad habits persist; unused snapshots and zombie VMs become more the rule than the exception causing budgets to continue their upward spiral. As organizations begin to view virtualization strategically and consider its role in cloud infrastructure, it is important to consider the success factors of this foundational element.

In his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Adam Hawley, Director of Product Management for Oracle VM, will examine virtualization considerations such as workload availability, performance, and integration with enterprise systems and resources that are necessary to improve operational efficiency and service delivery.

Original Article - http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1164865