Entries filed under “Cloud”

@WalmartLabs Announces Acquisition to Bolster Cloud Presence

By William | Published May 16, 2013

Over at TechCrunch, Josh Constine reports that @WalmartLabs has acquired OneOps to increase its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings. The retail giant also procured social software developers Tasty Labs in a related move.

OneOps developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that Walmart explains will enable it to “significantly accelerate” its PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies. The company offered developer tools built from the ground up for those who host their applications on cloud services like Amazon Web Services, for example, as well as Rackspace and HP Cloud. Developers could publish to any cloud and seamlessly port their apps elsewhere as needed, eliminating lock-in.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Cloud in Industry, Living in the Cloud, Software | Leave a comment

Job of the Week: Cloud Deployment Architect at Intuit

By William | Published May 15, 2013

Intuit in San Diego is looking for a Cloud Deployment Architect in our Job of the Week.

As a deployment architect you will act as a cross-organizational consultant working closely with product development teams to ensure that deployment is designed into their architectures early on in the development life cycle. You will also partner closely with corporate information security (CIS) and the CTO organization to ensure that every hosted (“cloud deployed”) service or offering meets its Cloud Ready objectives.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Jobs | Leave a comment

Cloud Big Data Market to Reach $16.52 Billion by 2018

By William | Published May 15, 2013

Over at Talkin Cloud, Chris Talbot reports that the business analytics market based in the cloud will see a significant increase over the next few years.

According to a new report from MarketandMarkets, the cloud analytics market and its related sub-markets will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.8 percent over the next five years. By 2018, that means the overall cloud business analytics market will total $16.52 billion. That’s a huge number no matter how you look at it, but compared to today’s market value of $5.25 billion, it’s clear the industry is expecting a spectacular increase.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Cloud in Industry, Migrating to the Cloud | Leave a comment

Chief Cloud Architect for Netflix Takes on Herculean Job

By William | Published May 14, 2013

Matt Petronzio at Mashable interviews Adrian Cockcroft about his role in the massive cloud deployment that Netflix utilizes.

My job is to have an overall view of the components and patterns that Netflix uses to build its streaming service in the cloud. When I see a gap or have an idea for something we need to build, my job is to set the context around that idea for the engineers, then get out of their way and let them figure out the details. I also document and explain the architecture by running internal training classes and external presentations at conferences. I have had most input on the availability and disaster recovery mechanisms built into the architecture.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Cloud in Industry, Service Providers | Leave a comment

Interop Panel Discusses the Relevance of SDN

By William | Published May 13, 2013

David F. Carr at Information Week covers the keynote panel at Interop and their conversation regarding the future of SDN and network admin.

The point of SDN is to make networks easy to configure and reconfigure in software rather than hardware, with many more networking functions migrating from being embedded capabilities of a network appliance to being defined in software. Network systems are migrating incrementally in that direction as networks follow the same path toward virtualization as servers and storage, he said. Ultimately, the goal is to provide every data center with the flexibility associated with cloud computing.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Cloud in Industry, Networking, Software | Leave a comment

Video: Adaptive Computing Named “Cool Vendor” in Cloud Management by Gartner

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 12, 2013

In this video from Moabcon 2013, Robert Clyde and Chad Harrington from Adaptive Computing discuss the company’s recent announcement that Adaptive has been named as a “Cool Vendor” in Cloud Management by Gartner.

We believe to be recognized as a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner for our cloud management technology is confirmation of our pioneering work in policy-based optimization for this space,” said Robert Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “Our Moab Cloud Suite allows enterprise IT leaders and cloud architects to maximize cloud return on investment through cost savings in capacity and management complexity. Moab’s ability to perform ongoing service optimization ensures organizations achieve both agility and service performance with their private cloud.”

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Events, HPC, Video | Leave a comment

Google to Switch to Debian Linux Distribution

By William | Published May 12, 2013

At Information Week, Charles Babcock reports that Google is no longer employing its custom version of Linux instead opting for the open-sourced Debian.

In moving to Debian, Google is demonstrating that it wants Google Compute Engine to become less Google-technology specific and more of a standard platform. Compute Engine’s predecessor, App Engine, a developer’s platform as a service, restricted itself to Google’s favorite language, Python, at its launch. Compute Engine workloads based on Debian means the favored operating system will be supported by a community larger than Google’s development team itself.

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The Future of Brick-and-Mortar Retail Lies in Big Data and the Cloud

By William | Published May 11, 2013

Over at Wired, Vish Ganapathy reports that Big-box retailers are using Big Data analytics hosted in clouds to learn more about their customers and to compete with the e-commerce segment.

Cloud computing involves a new way of thinking about data. In a cloud, a single server can host many virtual servers, slashing hardware costs. The virtual servers can scale on demand depending on the need for computer capacity. That’s very useful for retailers, whose businesses are notoriously seasonal. Automatically expanding capacity on Black Friday, for example, can reduce lines at checkout counters and ensure quick service.

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Also posted in Business of cloud, Living in the Cloud, Migrating to the Cloud, Virtualization | Leave a comment

RDMA and Storage at a Distance

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 11, 2013

Over at Forbes, Tom Coughlin writes that RDMA extends the capability of fast direct access to memory between computers in a cluster to greater distances, within a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN ) or even in a Wide Area Network (WAN) that can span continents.

RDMA over a WAN allows some very useful capabilities that can increase the overall power of a clustered computer system. It can provide remote collaboration with a remote file system allowing access as though it were local, enabling apparent real-time collaboration. RDMA also allows very efficient file transfer over a WAN. This direct data placement is accomplished with little impact on the processors on either end of the file transport. These features are very useful for working with large data files such as those common in many HPC applications. Storage at a Distance will not directly impact conventional client computing since these devices typically don’t have access to dedicated high-speed Internet connections. However with the growth of on-line (cloud) services the use of RDMA could accelerate many background processes within a given data center and between data centers. This could improve overall cloud performance and provide services such as fast backups and replications of data to provide data recovery. Thus Storage at a Distance could have a great impact on the overall performance and capabilities available over the Cloud.

Read the Full Story or see Coughlin’s recent Open Fabrics presentation over at inside-Cloud.

Also posted in I/O, Storage | Leave a comment

Australian HPC Company Looking to the Cloud for Rendering Blockbusters

By William | Published May 10, 2013

Trevor Clarke at The Sydney Morning Herald, writes that Animal Logic realizes the potential the cloud can provide when faced with the need for additional resources in rendering visual effects.

Despite this computing power, in the last nine months the company’s workload – it has been working on The Great Gatsby, Walking with Dinosaurs for the BBC and also Iron Man 3 – has meant it needed additional resources, which it sourced from service provider Steam Engine.

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