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Dreamforce. What role does open source play in cloud computing innovation? How can open-source cloud management tools like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula (the European open-source cloud effort of which I am director) impact the adoption of cloud technology? I see it happening in a few broad ways. Lowering the barrier to entry First, most organizations adopt cloud to optimize their IT investment, to improve existing services or to support new business and service models. In this scenario, open-source lowers the barriers for new organizations to build their private cloud. Many organizations have adopted OpenNebula to build their private cloud.

Some are very small clouds with tens of hosts, some are very large infrastructures composed of several data centers. In many of these cases, paying license fees for commercial software was simply not an option. Facilitating custom clouds Second, many organizations like the fact that open source allows great customization to meet individual requirements. Open-source clouds beget more clouds. The Tale of Two Clouds – What is the future of cloud adoption in IT? — Cloud Computing News.

When You Move To The Cloud, Plan For The Storms. Cloud Management Broker: The Next Wave In Cloud Computing. India Gov't To Load Critical Data To The Cloud. Is The Cloud Really Ready For Business? Two Clouds Equal a Storm of Productivity. Individual cloud offerings, when paired together, can offer value equal to more than the sum of their parts. Growing up, one of my favorite meals was PB&J, the classic combination of peanut butter and jelly found in many American kids’ lunchboxes.

The concept seemed simple enough: spread peanut butter onto bread, add a healthy dose of jelly and presto! A satisfying meal. Some things just belong together. They are great individually, but together? Exponentially, so much more. What would Batman be without Robin? You may be wondering- what does this have to do with productivity? Mark P. Solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365 elevate a user’s productivity when paired. Independent IT solutions provider Champion Solutions Group is focused on cloud and virtualization services as well as data management solutions that reduce costs, increase productivity, and mitigate risks.

Champion Solutions Group found their peanut butter and jelly. How to deal with cloud failure: Live, learn, fix, repeat — Cloud Computing News. Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest knocked out by storm-related power outage at Amazon. Compute Engine v. Azure: Is Google’s offering really 50% cheaper? Today at its I/O event, Google announced Compute Engine, a Infrastructure as a Service product to complement its Platform as a Service App Engine offering. You can read details of the product here. In this post, we are going to examine a claim that the company made on stage, and has continued to make on its website: “Get up to 50% more compute for your money [by using Compute Engine] than other leading cloud providers.” Google explained that hefty discount by claiming that its ten years’ work bringing down the had led to savings that it was now prepared to pass on to developers. In theory, a 50% cut could drive huge amounts of business to the company’s product; such a discount could produce staggering savings for large customers.

And, as large customers drive big business, Google’s claim matters. Microsoft has been working to stoke the fires of its Azure product for some time now – this headwind is certainly most unwelcome. Apples and Apples 1 core, 3.75GB RAM: $0.145 per hour Well then. Autodesk Acquires Vela Systems, Aims To Bring Construction Management Systems To Tablets. Autodesk took to the wires this morning to announce its acquisition of a long-standing partner, Vela Systems, which is described in the announcement as “a provider of cloud and mobile field management software for the construction industry.”

It’s Autodesk’s hope that this move will better equip the company, and the whole construction industry for that matter, to better utilize cloud storage and mobile products. Terms of the transaction were not revealed. Vela Systems’ products will eventually join Autodesk’s growing collection of mobile products that focus on content creation. This builds upon Autodesk’s current Building Information Modeling products. “BIM has tremendous value in the planning and design aspects of construction projects, but if you can’t get that rich data into the field, at the point of construction, you are leaving out the critical ‘last 100 yards’ in the process.

Citrix's Project Avalon Delivers Windows via the Cloud | Cloudline. Among the number of announcements under its “path to the cloud” banner at its Synergy show, Citrix Systems has launched Project Avalon, which it says “enables enterprises to transform some of their most important workloads, Windows desktop and Windows applications, to run on cloud infrastructure.” Citrix’s Sheng Liang, writing in the company’s blog, calls it a “giant step in cloud transformation,” one that has “taken major engineering efforts to transform the XenDesktop product, which was designed to run on enterprise virtualization architecture, to work seamlessly on Apache CloudStack and Amazon Web Services.” “It was not easy but we did it,” wrote Liang, who is CEO and founder of Cloud.com, which was bought by Citrix, and who now heads Citrix’s CloudStack product line. Project Avalon will use its XenDesktop and CloudStack technologies to give companies the ability to shift apps and desktops into public clouds, deliver cloud era-friendly capacity on demand.

BYOD Strikes Again. Does Cloud Computing Matter? IBM Aims to Ease IT With Cloud-Friendly PureSystems | Cloudline. IBM outlines today's IT headaches. Image: Courtesy of IBM In a big move today, Big Blue announced “a new, simpler era of computing” with PureSystems, what it calls “expert integrated systems” of enterprise IT elements physical and virtual. “The new systems family offers clients an alternative to today’s enterprise computing model, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain,” IBM said in a release. Citing a recent study, IBM said two-thirds of corporate IT projects are delivered over budget and behind schedule. ”The prime challenge facing companies worldwide is the need to spend 70 percent or more of IT budgets on simple operations and maintenance, leaving little to invest in innovation,” IBM said.

So what exactly is in the box with this so-called magic box? IBM’s Steve Hamms writes at the company’s Smarter Planet blog: All IBM PureSystems are designed for cloud, the company says. Cloud Storage Competition Heats Up With RiakCS. Add Basho to the companies looking to take a chunk of the cloud storage space. Today, the company announced RiakCS, a "multi-tenant, distributed, S3-compatible cloud storage platform" that runs on top of the Riak-distributed database. The question isn't really whether Basho can cut into Amazon's business, but how much.

According to J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth, Amazon Web Services overall is expected to be a $2.6 billion business by 2015. We've noted previously that Amazon S3 is seeing staggering growth. RiakCS Versus Amazon S3 Is RiakCS competitive with Amazon S3? The company is targeting service providers that might want to offer S3-compatible storage or Dropbox-like services, and companies that might want to host their own S3-compatible storage.

Note that the Basho white paper is inaccurate in at least one regard. It may not be a very good SLA, but it's an SLA. There's at least one feature discrepancy between S3 and RiakCS, in terms of supported object size. To Boost Windows Azure, Microsoft Launches Company’s First-Ever Direct Startup Accelerator. Today, Microsoft is launching the first startup accelerator* in the company’s history in an effort to encourage more entrepreneurs to build their cloud-based applications using Windows Azure. The program will take place at the Microsoft Israel Research and Development Center, and is a part of the Israel R&D Center’s outreach program Think Next as well as the Microsoft BizSpark program for startups. Like most accelerators, Microsoft will provide the typical accouterments, including free office space, coaching, mentorship, legal assistance and more, but in this case, it’s specifically after companies building cloud-based startups.

The companies will be provided with free access to Windows Azure, but will not receive seed funding. According to Zack Weisfeld, Sr. Israel has a very active startup community, Weisfeld explains. The new accelerator aims to tap into the region’s activity, by encouraging startups to launch using Microsoft software. As for what’s in it for Microsoft? Move to the cloud? The two decisions that matter. Recently, I wrote about how the software company I work for, Precise, cut 70 percent of its IT budget by migrating its applications and infrastructure to cloud and SaaS technologies.

That amounts to $2 million dollars in savings a year — no small chunk of change for a business of 200 employees. Moving to the cloud and SaaS is easier and simpler than many executives believe and can deliver significant business gains in a relatively short amount of time. But clearly, internal politics and personal agendas sometimes get in the way of what should be a fairly straightforward decision. Otherwise, wouldn’t more small and midsize companies have made the switch to 100 percent cloud environments by now?

There are two key decisions that a company should make when considering its cloud strategy. Decision 1: Show me the money Back in 2008, after being spun out of our former parent company Symantec and into a new private company, cost management was critical for our near-term and long-term survival. Driver for Deploying Any App to Any Cloud Available for Free. Last December, a company called GigaSpaces began demonstrating a unique kind of Java-based abstraction layer made for use within cloud platforms. Cloudify is a layer that abstracts the application platform from the cloud that it's running on. So you can literally do this: You can set up and fully flesh out your SaaS application on your local system, complete with middleware, just as though it's running in the cloud.

Then once it works, you relocate it. A unique cloud driver makes the homogenous application cloud run atop the specific platform cloud. On Tuesday, GigaSpaces concluded Cloudify's beta program, opening it up as a commercial service with an optional free tier. Cloudify, writes GigaSpaces architect Sean Kumar, "makes any application agnostic to the underlying deployment environment. A self-service portal and 24/7 customer support, among other features, brings Cloudify's fee up to $1,000 per month. The recipe specifies how your application will be deployed and monitored. Don’t look now but Microsoft Azure is a kick-butt cloud — Cloud Computing News.

Upload at your own risk: Most cloud storage services offer no data guarantee. Cloud Roundup for January 25, 2012 - ReadWriteCloud. FireHost is expanding and offering European services, Dell is letting its customers have Linux their way, and EnterpriseDB wants to "cloudify" PostgreSQL. FireHost's European-Based Secure Cloud Hosting Services Go Live – FireHost has announced an expansion into Europe, with services through data centers in London and Amsterdam. Microsoft's plan for Hadoop and big data – Edd Dumbill looks into Microsoft's plan for Hadoop.

"One of the most interesting features of Microsoft's work with Hadoop is the addition of a JavaScript API. Working with Hadoop at a programmatic level can be tedious: this is why higher-level languages such as Pig emerged. " Dell OEM Solutions Makes Available SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to Customers – Now it's possible to get Dell servers preloaded with images built using SUSE Studio. Postgres Plus Cloud Database – EnterpriseDB is launching a "cloudified" version of PostgreSQL that runs on top of Amazon EC2.

Cloud Roundup for January 20, 2012 - ReadWriteCloud. Little bit of news around Node.js today, Amazon has added support for Identity Federation, and Oracle customers might want to pay attention to a fundamental flaw that's been discovered in Oracle database systems. Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs. Identity Federation to the AWS Management Console – Amazon is announcing single sign-on to AWS using corporate credentials. "We have extended IAM's Identity Federation functionality to also enable federated users to access the AWS Management Console. Announcing node.js support – .Net PaaS provider AppHarbor has announced beta support for Node.js.

Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed – If you're using Oracle's database software, you might want to pay attention to this InfoWorld piece by Paul Venezia. Why a Hybrid Approach to Cloud Computing Works Best for Now. Don’t run your own data center if you’re a public IaaS — Cloud Computing News. How Has Cloud Computing Impacted Businesses Around the World? [INFOGRAPHIC] CloudOn. Cloud 101: What the heck do IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do? How can big data and smart analytics tools ignite growth for your company? Find out at DataBeat, May 19-20 in San Francisco, from top data scientists, analysts, investors, and entrepreneurs. Register now and save $200! Anyone who who follows technology trends has undoubtedly heard the term “cloud service” thrown around a few gazillion times over the past few months.

But if you don’t know the difference between terms such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS, don’t fret — you’re far from alone. Let’s start at the beginning. When you break it down, any company offering an Internet-based approach to computing, storage and development can technically be called a cloud company. Not everyone is a CTO or an IT manager, so sometimes following the lingo behind cloud technology can be tough. Layers of the cloud A cloud computing company is any company that provides its services over the Internet. Here is a chart showing simplified explanations for the three main layers of cloud computing: Alphabet Soup in the Cloud: Understanding "aaS" - ReadWriteCloud.

There's a new one born every minute. I don't mean the P.T. Barnum quote, I mean acronym. Today it seems to be Infrastructure-as-a-Platform (IaaP), to join all the other "as a" acronyms that are difficult to keep straight. If technology could just hold still for a few years, everybody could get up to speed on all the terminology. Alas, that's not going to happen anytime soon. If you're new, or new-ish, to cloud services you're probably a bit muddy on what all the different "-as-a-Service" terms are. Want to know your SaaS from your PaaS and your IaaS? Here's a quick primer on the differences between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Software-as-a-Service Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been around in one form or another for years. So what is it? With the SaaS model, you're basically buying or using the solution without having to tend to the software in any way. Here's a few good, and popular, examples of SaaS: 10 cloud startups to watch in 2012 — Cloud Computing News.