One in five businesses will ditch their IT as cloud takes hold | Formulate a big data disaster recovery plan today Formulate a big data disaster recovery plan today It's only a matter of time before IT is asked about its plans to back up, restore, and recover from a disastrous big data outage. Put your big data-specific DR plan with this guide. Read more → Information for IT grads before accepting a job offer Information for IT grads before accepting a job offer IT grads are in demand. GE's FirstBuild: Can they harness startup mojo? GE's FirstBuild: Can they harness startup mojo?
General Electric is looking to students, entrepreneurs, and makers to co-create the products of the future. Lyndsey Gilpin // April 15, 2014, 4:00 AM PST Photos: 15 gadgets to reduce your energy consumption Earth Day is April 22, so it's a great time to look at your personal energy consumption. Editor's Picks Master the art of big data job scheduling Wrap your traffic: Configure a VPN on Chromebooks White House attacks climate change with hackathons. The Great Cloud Rush of 2009. Q&A: Cloud Computing's Pros, Cons, and Potential -- TDWI. Question and Answer: Cloud Computing's Pros, Cons, and Potential Consultant and TDWI instructor Steve Dine talks with BI This Week about some of the ins and outs of cloud computing for business intelligence.
By Linda L. BriggsDecember 2, 2009 As the term “cloud computing” leaps into the headlines lately, it seems that every BI vendor is using the phrase, but what is really meant by “the cloud” and what potential does the technology present for business intelligence? BI This Week spoke with Steve Dine, founder and president of Datasource Consulting, whose firm has tested BI architectures on cloud computing platforms for the past two years. BI This Week: Your consultancy works extensively on projects involving cloud computing and BI.
Steve Dine: There isn’t necessarily one definition of the cloud, which is why it’s such a challenge for people to understand it and why there’s a lot of confusion -- there are so many definitions out there. Data Center Exchange | Presented by Information Management. Data clouds pose an interesting dilemma to enterprise IT organiza-tions. On one hand, they promise to drastically reduce the cost and complexity of storing enterprise data. On the other hand, they create numerous migration challenges. When considering a data cloud implementation, enterprises currently have two primary options: they can deploy an internal data cloud or they can rely on an existing third-party, public data cloud like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Rackspace Cloud. While some of the fundamental challenges like appropriate security and governance potentially exist in both deployment scenarios, a deployment in a public cloud has an additional and critical limitation - moving a large amount of data into a public cloud can take months or years because of the constraints imposed by insufficient network bandwidth.
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com, describes this issue in his blog, “All Things Distributed.” Understand cloud computing terminology with this guide | Network. Cloud busting: Will the payoff be worth the setup challenge? | L. Cloud storage adoption slow for businesses | Servers and Storage. According to a Forrester Research survey, only eight percent of businesses have plans to utilize cloud storage, and only three percent are using it now. A new Forrester Research survey of 1,200 IT decision makers found that only 8% of businesses (small, medium, and enterprise) have any current plans to utilize cloud storage and only 3% are using it now. These results suggest that, while there is a lot of potential for cloud storage (43% claimed some interest), concerns about privacy, security, and pricing are keeping most companies from moving data out of their data centers, at least as a primary storage option. There does seem to be more interest in using the cloud as a backup medium, which requires a much smaller leap of faith and is far easier to implement than remote primary storage.
This study seems to bode well for products such as CommVault's integrated cloud storage connector, which is integrated into its backup and archival software platform called Simpana. Hybrid storage models. The Real Promise of Cloud Computing. HP Launches Cloud Design Service. Hewlett-Packard ratcheted up the battle for a share of increasing cloud computing revenues this week by launching a new design service aimed at helping organizations accelerate the adoption of cloud-based infrastructures. The practice, called HP Cloud Design Service, will see HP work with clients to understand their requirements and existing IT investments. HP consultant’s will then create customized cloud blueprints and an implementation plan, including cost estimates, guidelines for deployment, testing, management, governance and support. “Organizations of all types are struggling to understand how to build a cloud-specific infrastructure that is safe and effective while meeting their business objectives,” Alan Wilson, vice president of HP’s Solutions Infrastructures Practice, said in a statement announcing the service.
Key services offered by the practice include: Cloud Confusion Reigns. IDC: Data Warehouse Shakeup. Worst-Kept Secrets. Products and Pricing for IBM Information Server on the Amazon Cl. An IBM Developerworks newsletter has the details and links to pricing for running DataStage and QualityStage on the Amazon elastic cloud. The article Cloud: IBM InfoSphere Information Server has the overview and links.
IBM has partnered with Amazon Web Services to make available a pre-bundled InfoSphere Information Server AMI containing InfoSphere DataStage and InfoSphere QualityStage for production use. This AMI consists of InfoSphere DataStage V8.1 and QualityStage V8.1 pre-installed on Novell SUSE Linux® Enterprise Server V10 (SLES 10 SP2) for the server and Windows® 2003 Server for the InfoSphere Developer client licenses. So you can start using DataStage and QualityStage STRAIGHT away! Another option is to use your own product licenses. And here is the pricing from Amazon for the server side of DataStage: Pricing for Instances running IBM InfoSphere DataStage/QualityStage This is for the execution (dev, test, prod) of DataStage and QualityStage jobs.
Open Source Cloud Computing. The move to Open Source Software (OSS), server virtualization and cloud computing seems like a logical progression. And indeed I have worked with customers to execute on that roadmap. The move to OSS, server consolidation and virtualization saves money short-term and puts IT is a good position to move applications to the cloud long-term. With OSS, it is possible to deploy your applications wherever you wish without paying a license fee for each server instance - for example, you could use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to define your own Amazon Machine Image (AMI) based on OSS (or use and existing OSS based image) and create as many Amazon EC2 virtual instances as you want without concern of software license violations.
But, Tim O'Reilly brings up an interesting point in the posting referenced below. Could cloud computing stifle OSS innovation and put the direction of OSS in the hands of the big IT vendors and lock in customers with their massive investments in data centers? What Are The Top Cloud Computing Threats? Pay No Attention to the Pricing Model Behind the Curtain.
Cloud Computing Quality of Service. I just read the second cloud computing book from a so called expert that gets the cloud computing QoS issue all wrong. You don't negotiation terms of QoS and compare QoS statistics to determine where to run applications in the cloud unless you are simply hosting applications. You plan and design for poor QoS! Applications designed to run in the cloud must be designed to recover from failures that happen all the time. You have to assume the QoS will be poor from PaaS vendors and design for failures. See the examples below and look at the capabilities of Amazon's availability zones. If you are using services like EC2 you have to assume they will fail and design the application to run in multiple availability zones. Amazon EC2 cloud service hit by botnet, outage - The cloud-based EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was kept jumping this past week by two incidents: a compromised internal service that triggered a botnet, and a data center power failure in Virginia.