IBM on Cloud Control
June 6, 2012
It is good to know IBM is asserting leadership in the cloud. Wired Cloudline (sponsored by IBM, by the way) reports: “IBM to the World: on Cloud Computing, You’ve Got Nothing on Us.” IBM recently put out a lengthy press release filled with details about its cloud services and who uses it. For example, about a million application users work in the IBM Cloud, and that Cloud processes 4.5 million transactions daily.
Writer Todd Nielsen shares (and comments upon) some highlights from the press release:
“*A New 99.9% Service Level Agreement for Smart Cloud Enterprise (Wow… not many cloud providers can promise that)
*Developers seem to be lining up with over 30 new ISV’s validated for IBM Smart Cloud (Cloud Providers live and die from applications. It is a strong statement that developers are seeing the value of the platform)
*SmartCloud Enterprise available in North America and Europe with plans for additional global roll-out in Q3 2012. (An important move for global business that not a lot of cloud providers can provide)
*Several tools are services are mentioned to improve and ease migration and transferring applications to the cloud.
*Improved licensing management and support for many operating systems and software packages”
Many more tidbits are available in both the write up and the original press release, including details on how different companies are using the resource. As Nielsen observes, it is clear that IBM has a good handle on this cloud thing. However, he wonders: how will IBM resellers benefit from all of this? Or will they?
We have a suggestion for Big Blue: why not run an instance of Watson in this cloud so we can explore its excellence?
Cynthia Murrell, June 6, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
A Semi New Approach to 1970 Timesharing
May 29, 2012
IBM seems to be reversing the old saying, ‘out with the old and in with the new’ according to the article IBM to park mainframes on the cloud. The basis behind their approach plays a familiar song to those that were computer savvy back in the 70’s.
Perhaps this is a new marketing tactic rather than a new system as:
“IBM is also promising to park its System z mainframe servers on the cloud, which is ironic considering the time-sharing, rental base ancient history of System/360 mainframes from the dawn of the computing age. (It’s even funnier if you think of a mainframe, which has had logical partitioning, multi-tenancy, and application frameworks of a sort for more than two decades now, as a kind of private cloud.)”
This diagram provides a visual for what is to come:
According to IBM, they currently have over a million users running applications on the SmartCloud processing 4.5 million transactions per day. They hope to increase that with this new, yet familiar software stack which will include; a basic processor, tape capacity with virtual tape, a disc, flash copy and mirroring services for disks. IBM plans to have their mainframes added to the SmartCloud in the United States and United Kingdom later on in 2012. We thought this was the 1970s approach to time sharing, but according to IBM, it is now it a “new” approach?
Jennifer Shockley, May 29, 2012
Is IBM Delivering a Speedier File System?
May 27, 2012
IBM’s Parallel file system just got a makeover, but speed and synchronization took a hit in the process. The article IBM Parks Parallel File System on Big Data’s Lawn gives us a breakdown on the pros and cons of GPFS 3.5.
On a positive note, this is a big data friendly system. GPFS has a multi-cluster synchronous replication feature enabling a central site to be mirrored with remote sites. The user gets continuous file access to mirrored sites.
Clients lose some control with the new GPFS. Data access is only available at a lessor local network speed instead of high speed. Users also can’t control the amount of data they take in from mirrored sites.
GPFS adds additional user requirements as;
“IBM expected GPFS customers to use flash storage with de-clustered RAID to hold its specific metadata.”
“GPFS is pretty much independent of what goes on below the physical storage.”
“GPFS 3.5 can also be run in a shared-nothing, Hadoop-style cluster and is POSIX-compliant, unlike Hadoop’s HFS. GPFS 3.5 is big-data capable and can deliver big insights from a big insight cluster. This release of GPFS does not, however, have any HFS import facility.”
One might view the overall convenience as a balance to the issues. However, when speed and synchronicity are necessary, GPFS’s efficiency is put to question. We like the parallel file system, but we have to wonder if synchronization is a concern?
Jennifer Shockley, May 27, 2012
Scoop: Is It a Surprise That Google and Microsoft Target Amazon?
May 22, 2012
Okay, “real” journalists are causing my blood pressure medicine to work overtime. I did not know that Amazon was a big deal. I am delighted that a major “real” news outfit reported for the first time in the history of mankind this insight: “Scoop: Google, Microsoft Both Targeting Amazon with New Clouds.” The insight which knocked me on my tail feathers was:
Google and Microsoft are two cloud providers that should have Amazon Web Services shaking a bit, in a way Rackspace and the OpenStack haven’t yet been able to. Google and Microsoft both have the engineering chops to compete with AWS technically, and both have lots of experience dealing with both developers and large companies. More importantly, both seem willing and able to compete with AWS on price — a big advantage for AWS right now as its economies of scale allow it to regularly slash prices for its cloud computing services.
Even though we have provided some insight to our hopeless befuddled investment bank clients, we totally missed the fact that Amazon had a cloud service, that Google and Microsoft seem to be playing a me too game, and that Amazon is rolling out new services.
How could the goslings have failed me? We thought Amazon was really a purveyor of hard backed books and diapers? I expect that the financial outfits who pay us to analyze the more subtle aspects of companies engaged in online will be firing us in the next minute or two. Now I know my IQ is below 70, not even “dull normal.”
I suppose I can become a WalMart greeter.
Stephen E Arnold, May 22, 2012
Sponsored by no one. I mean who would pay money to an outfit who did not know that Google and Microsoft were interested in cloud revenue.
SAP Floats Into Amazon Cloud
May 19, 2012
Amazon will soon host SAP’s All-in-One applications, GogaOm informs us in “Amazon and SAP Put All-in-One in the Cloud.” Writer Barb Darrow posits the move could boost the appeal of Amazon EC2, since SAP BusinessObjects analytics, Rapid Deployment solutions, and most of Oracle’s business applications already run on Amazon. The write up notes:
“The conventional wisdom is that big companies are wary of running ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and other enterprise applications in a public cloud — because they tend to be quite customized and tied into other applications, which makes them difficult to forklift into the cloud. But Amazon is working to change that perception.”
I imagine so. Amazon Web Services director Terry Wise promised the next mission will launch SAP’s Business Suite ERP for larger customers into Amazon’s cloud, followed closely by SAP’s BusinessOne, the ERP for smaller companies.
Founded back in 1972 by five former IBM workers, SAP is headquartered in Walldorf Germany but has operations in over 50 countries. A longstanding leader in enterprise software, the company serves over 183,000 customers. It markets its solutions primarily through licensed local subsidiaries.
So, Amazon is edging into the enterprise. Google, are you watching?
Cynthia Murrell, May 19, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Onix Inks Deal With Federal Government
May 11, 2012
A $34.9 million contract with the federal government has recently been inked and means big business for a Detroit Avenue tech company.
Onix Networking will provide cloud-computing services to the Department of the Interior, according to the Lakewood Patch article, “Lakewood Company Lands $35 Million Contract with Federal Government.” The company, founded in 1992, provides services like cloud computing, storage solutions, and Enterprise search. It is also a Google-centric vendor. The article asserts:
“The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said shifting to a cloud-based email system will modernize the ways the agency does business and cut costs, amounting to ‘good government, plain and simple.’
He added that the contract is part of an initiative to ‘leverage modern technology to save up to $500 million in taxpayer dollars by 2020.’
The news may mean more growth for the Detroit Avenue company as it looks to expand into its nearly 40,000-square-foot location in the Georgetown Row half of the former Bonne Bell headquarters at the corner Detroit and Graber avenues.”
What else does this news release mean? Since Onix is a long-standing partner with Google (the first Google Premier Enterprise company to be precise,) it means the Google Search Appliance, at least in the US government market, is still alive and kicking.
Andrea Hayden, May 11, 2012
Sponsored by IKANOW
Stunning Statistics about Amazon Cloud Reach
May 9, 2012
Wired’s Robert McMillan recently reported on an oddly scary statistic in the article “Amazon’s Secretive Cloud Carries 1 Percent of the Internet.”
According to the start-up DeepField Networks, Amazon has one of the fastest growing cloud infrastructures. Apparently, one-third of the several million users in the study visited a website that uses Amazon’s infrastructure each day. It is also very popular with many big name companies like Netflix. However, no one really knows exactly how big Amazon’s cloud is.
McMillan states:
“Gartner researcher Lydia Leong estimates that Amazon’s cloud business was $1 billion in 2011, more than five times the size of its closest competitor, Rackspace. Last week Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates was happy to tell us how many servers he has in his data centers: 80,000. But only 23 percent ($189 million) of Rackspace’s 2011 business was in the cloud. That implies that Rackspace could do the same amount of cloud business as Amazon with maybe 100,000 servers.”
It appears that Amazon’s business as slowly been growing faster than we ever realized. Maybe Google and Facebook should stop fighting each other and start paying attention to other threats.
Jasmine Ashton, May 9, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Half of Amazon Cloud Users Overpay
May 7, 2012
Are you an Amazon Web Services [AWS] user? Business Insider reports, “Amazon’s Cloud Is Cheap, but You’re STILL Probably Paying Too Much.” Data from NewVem indicates that about half of Amazon Cloud’s users subscribe to more computing power than they actually use, wasting money. Writer Julie Bort reports:
“[NewVem] found that 53% of light AWS users leave more than half their instances idle. That means they are spending for twice as much as much cloud capacity than they really need. Heavy users do a better job. They are wasting less than 10% of their instances.
“It only costs between 8 cents (Linux) and 11.5 cents (Windows) per hour for an instance for small users, so the wasted ones don’t really add up to a lot of money. About $138 a month apiece. But if you are a budget-conscious startup, there are better ways to spend that cash.”
Indeed. Every little bit counts for small businesses.
NewVem, the company that supplied this data, is founded on an interesting concept. This startup provides a service, now in free beta version, that analyzes cloud operational data and makes recommendations so companies can get the most from their cloudy investments.
Cynthia Murrell, May 7, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Down to OpenStack Versus CloudStack?
May 5, 2012
Apparently, there’s now an open source cloud war. That’s what ZDNet declares in “OpenStack vs. CloudStack: The Beginning of the Open-Source Cloud Wars.” The opening volley, it says, was fired by Citrix when it announced it was moving from OpenStack to CloudStack. Then OpenStack fired back by declaring that it is launching with the big boys, like AT&T, IBM, Red Hat, and other heavy weights.
Writer Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains:
“So, what’s the conflict here? Simple, like open-source Eucalyptus, Citrix CloudStack’s application programming interface (API) provides compatibility with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2), the world’s most popular public cloud. The OpenStack Foundation members would like businesses not to use EC2, thank you very much, but to use public clouds built by its major vendors—such as Dell, HP and IBM—instead. . . .
“The name of their game will be to try to offer corporate customers vertical software/hardware cloud stacks. Citrix, on the other hands, hopes that EC2 customers will use their CloudStack for their private clouds while using the EC2 APIs to integrate with Amazon’s public cloud.”
So, OpenStack partners on one side and the Amazon/ Citrix coalition in the other. Vaughn-Nichols posits that other competitors like Eucalyptus and Windows Azure will be left “scrambling to stay relevant.” Hmm. Perhaps it is just me, but it seems a little early to be narrowing the field so tightly just yet.
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Our Cloudy Future
April 27, 2012
CNet News looks down the road in “Where IT is Going: Cloud, Mobile, and Data.” Of course, cloud computing, mobile devices, and big data are related. All are part of the move away from powerful, independent PCs to remotely accessed, communal data repositories.
Writer Gordon Haff rightly notes that “cloud” is a beleaguered term, suffering from “definitional overload,” but he manages to define it, rather broadly, for the purposes of his article:
“Think of cloud computing as being about trends in computer architectures, how applications are loaded onto those systems and made to do useful work, how servers communicate with each other and with the outside world, and how administrators manage and provide access. This trend also encompasses all the infrastructure and ‘plumbing’ that makes it possible to effectively coordinate data centers full of systems increasingly working as a unified compute resource as opposed to islands of specialized capacity.”
Mobile devices are the way we access this “unified compute resource,” but for Haff the term extends beyond smartphones and tablets. He cites sensors on large systems like power grids, and the ability for that system to use sensor information to make changes, as another example.
Big data is the well of information manipulated through the cloud, and Huff notes that our huge data collections are forcing a change in how that information is stored. We are moving away from disk arrays toward software-based storage spread across servers.
The article contains a good deal of information, and is a valuable read for anyone interested in the direction in which we are moving.
Cynthia Murrell, April 27, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
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