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Tag: Cloud Computing

  • Americans Think Cloud Computing Comes From Actual Clouds

    Americans Think Cloud Computing Comes From Actual Clouds

    Cloud computing has been on the minds of everybody in the tech industry for the past few years. The infrastructure has been slowly growing, but 2012 has seen tremendous growth in the sector. All the major tech companies now offer some form of cloud storage and computing for consumers and businesses. Even though it’s everywhere, Americans still don’t really grasp it.

    A recent survey of 1,000 Americans was conducted by Wakefield Research for Citrix. The results suggest that Americans like to think they’re on top of the latest innovations in cloud computing, but in reality know little about it. Unfortunately, even more people think that the cloud is tied to the weather in some way.

    To get the embarrassing statistics out of the way first, the survey found that 51 percent of respondents believe that stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing. A plurality of respondents (29 percent) also think that the cloud is an actual cloud. A paltry 16 percent actually knew what the cloud was.

    “This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing,” said Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix. “While significant market changes like this take time, the transition from the PC era to the cloud era is happening at a remarkable pace. The most important takeaway from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favorably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives.”

    Even worse, it appears that we live in nation of cloud posers. The survey found that 22 percent of respondents pretend to know what the cloud is during everyday conversation. Most of the faking takes place during work, but strangely enough, 17 percent have pretended to have knowledge of the cloud during a first date. Let’s be honest here, your relationship is not going to last long if you have to brag about knowing what the cloud is during a date.

    Cloud computing also shares a distinction with Linux. It’s everywhere, but people seem to think that they never use it. The survey found that 54 percent of respondents claimed to never use the cloud in their everyday lives, but 95 percent actually use something powered by the cloud everyday. Most of the cloud action comes from people using Facebook or online banking, but playing online games and file sharing are also big cloud activities.

    What has this survey proven so far? Americans are pretty stupid when it comes to the cloud. Thankfully, even some divine intelligence can shine through the darkest clouds. The survey found that 68 percent of Americans see cloud computing as the future and the key to saving the economy. That may be taking the benefits of cloud computing a bit far, but it does show that Americans are warming up to the idea of pushing businesses and networks to the cloud.

    Interestingly enough, 40 percent of respondents see the major advantage of the cloud is being able to work from home in the nude. I don’t know what kind of work they’re doing, but we can at least rest easy that the cloud enables them to do it from the privacy of their own home. Respondents also said the cloud helps them keep embarrassing videos off of their personal hard drive and allows sharing of files with people they’d rather not deal with in person.

    Finally, respondents seem to grasp the major concerns that cloud computing still has to deal with. Thirty-four percent of respondents said that cost is the largest concern while security and privacy concerns follow closely at 32 and 31 percent respectively.

    The future is inevitable. Everything is going to move to the cloud in one way or another. We’ll still have local storage solutions for a lot of data, but storage on the cloud is getting cheaper all the time. People will also soon become comfortable with the idea of storing their data on cloud servers as it’s far more convenient and sometimes more secure than local storage.

  • Amazon Glacier Launched For Cheap Data Archiving

    Amazon has launched a new low-cost storage service called Amazon Glacier. The company says it’s optimized for data that is infrequently accessed, and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable, in order to keep costs low.

    Glacier comes with a pay-for-what-you-need model, and customers can store data for $.01 per gigabyte per month. The monthly bill is based on the amount of data stored and transferred.

    Upload and retrieval requests cost $0.050 per 1,000 requests. LISTVAULTS, GETJOBOUTPUT, DELETE and all other Requests are free. Data Retrievals are free. Here’s a closer look at the data transfer pricing:

    Glacier Pricing

    “Companies typically over-pay for data archiving,” the company says. “First, they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth.”

    “This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money,” Amazon adds. “With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for what you use. Amazon Glacier changes the game for data archiving and backup as you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, and can scale your usage up or down as needed, while AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well. It only takes a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to set up Amazon Glacier and then you can upload any amount of data you choose.”

    Data in Glacier are stored as archives, which can be single files or combined files. You can use the AWS Management Console (or the Glacier APIs) to create vaults to organize archives.

    Glacier is, of course, designed for use with other Amazon Web Services. Users can import/export data into Glacier, and Amazon says that in the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option to allow you to move data between S3 and Glacier using data lifecycle policies.

  • Google Cures Cancer With 600,000 Processor Cores [Google I/O]

    You may be familiar with Google’s App Engine, a service that allows developers to host their apps on the cloud and take advantage of Google’s processing power to service thousands of users. Well, App Engine just got bigger – way bigger.

    At the Google I/O keynote today, the company announced Google Compute Engine. It’s App Engine on a massive scale. It’s intended for large scale operations that require lots of processing power and Google figures that their cloud service can help power the next generation of data processing.

    They used the example of a new app that is being used to research the genome that is helping to find potential cancer cures. Under current computational standards, Google pointed out that the research on the Genome Explorer app would take about 10 minutes to find each one match. To show off Compute Engine, they showed the same app being powered by 10,000 processor cores being powered by Google. This allows a match to be made every second.

    Compute Engine shows off the potential of cloud computing for research. A match a second wasn’t good enough for Google though and they showed a ticker that revealed there were now over 700,000 cores in Compute Engine. From there, they allotted 600,000 cores to the same genome app. Using that many cores, the app was able to discover multiple matches on a constant basis.

    Compute Engine has the potential to shake up the game in cloud computing. It’s only been used for personal or limited business uses for now. With Compute Engine, we can use cloud computing to push research and other large scale projects beyond previous thresholds.

    Compute Engine has been released today in a limited preview for partners to take advantage of. Google also said that it has been competitively priced to be affordable for all.

    UPDATE:

    Google released a blog post detailing Compute Engine and provided a bit more information on the service. Here’s the capabilities that you can expect from Compute Engine:

    Compute. Launch Linux VMs on-demand. 1, 2, 4 and 8 virtual core VMs are available with 3.75GB RAM per virtual core.

    Storage. Store data on local disk, on our new persistent block device, or on our Internet-scale object store, Google Cloud Storage.

    Network. Connect your VMs together using our high-performance network technology to form powerful compute clusters and manage connectivity to the Internet with configurable firewalls.

    Tooling. Configure and control your VMs via a scriptable command line tool or web UI. Or you can create your own dynamic management system using our API.

    You can sign up for a limited preview for Compute Engine at Google’s official site. If you have dreams of curing cancer or processing advanced mathematics, this may be the service for you.

  • Is Google About To Maim Amazon Cloud?

    Is Google About To Maim Amazon Cloud?

    I don’t like to use the word “kill,” when it comes to tech competition. Rarely does one product actually come out and kill its competitor. That goes especially for when the competitor is a market leader, and an Internet giant, but even giants can be vulnerable to severe competitive damage, and Amazon may soon have a big battle on its hands.

    Om Malik at GigaOm reports that Google is “very likely to launch” a cloud services platform at Google I/O next week, which would take on the popular Amazon EC2 Cloud.

    While we’re going to have to leave the news filed in the rumor department for now, it has long seemed like only a matter of time before Google would launch such an offering, given its various existing cloud offerings.

    Then there’s the fact that Google wants businesses everywhere to “Go Google”. Such an offering would be an important step in truly getting corporate infrastructure to go Google.

    Malik, pointing out that GigaOm wrote last month that Google would launch a a cloud service this year, writes, “It was one of the topics of discussion in the hallways of our Structure 2012 conference. We have since confirmed with multiple sources who are familiar with Google’s plans which include a more comprehensive offering that its current app engine and storage offerings.”

    If Google comes out with significantly lower pricing, it could totally disrupt the cloud market, as it disrupted email when it launched Gmail.

    Obviously, Google is not commenting on this, as the company never comments on rumor or speculation.

    One thing is nearly certain. Google will have plenty of major announcements at its developer conference next week, which starts on Wednesday. From the sound of things, you can also expect plenty on the Google+ front (and speaking of corporations, rumor has it that Google may soon launch an enterprise version of Google+).

    By the way, here’s a Google I/O preview video about cloud data sessions Google just uploaded:

  • Google: Google Apps Can Cut Organizations’ Energy By 85%

    Google claims that organizations can achieve energy savings of 65% to 85% by migrating to Google Apps. The company, citing numbers from a Carbon Disclosure Project study, says companies with over $1 billion in revenues could save $12.3 billion and up to 85.7 million metric tonnes of CO2 by 2020, simply by migrating to the cloud (which doesn’t necessarily mean Google Apps, of course).

    “A typical organization has a lot more servers than it needs—for backup, failures and spikes in demand for computing,” writes Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google. “Cloud-based service providers like Google aggregate demand across thousands of people, substantially increasing how much servers are utilized. And our data centers use equipment and software specially designed to minimize energy use. The cloud can do the same work much more efficiently than locally hosted servers.”

    Google shared the following diagram:

    Google

    Google 6 minutes ago

    Cloud computing is so energy efficient that a typical organization can save 65%-85% on energy costs by migrating to Google Apps. Check out the diagram below to learn about why the cloud is so efficient, or you can read more on the Official Google Blog: http://goo.gl/8kUg4 52    5 Powered by socialditto

    Google says the U.S. General Services Administration was able to reduce server energy consumption by 90% and carbon emissions by 85% by “going Google”. The organization will save $285,000 annually on energy costs, Google says.

    Google is working on making its own Data Centers more efficient. In March, the company announced some improvements, and claimed that its data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center.

    Google has data centers in South Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Carolina, Oregon, Finland, Belgium, Hong Kong and Singapore.

  • FAA Taps Microsoft Office 365 to Jump Into the Cloud

    The Federal Aviation Administration is following in the footsteps of its fellow government agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the states of California and Nebraska, and the cities of New York and San Francisco by choosing Microsoft’s Office 365 to provide it with cloud-based email and other office tools.

    The FAA will be transferring a total of 80,000 employees – 60,000 at the FAA and 20,000 associated with the Department of Transportation – to Microsoft’s cloud by way of Computer Sciences Corp., which was awarded a contract of $91 million to facilitate the transition to the cloud.

    “The FAA’s mission is essential to how our nation functions, and the agency’s decision to implement Office 365 validates our approach to enterprise security, privacy and compliance in the cloud,” said Curt Kolcun, vice president of U.S. Public Sector at Microsoft Corp. He cited Microsoft’s 30-year history of collaborating with government agencies to provide technological support as one of the reasons that the FAA decided to go with the software company.

    Office 365 provides an array of productivity services, such as email, instant messaging, calendars, web-conferencing tools, and other software that allows for colleagues to work together on documents. More, Office 365 allows users to access documents from any internet-connected device via Microsoft Sharepoint. In other words, FAA and DOT employees: you’ve got no excuse to miss deadlines and such anymore.

    The fat contract Microsoft sealed with the FAA should provide a soothing salve to that burn the Department of the Interior left last month when it reversed its decision to use Microsoft for its cloud services and instead went for Google Apps. While that was indeed a slight to Microsoft, this FAA contract is more than double the contract that the DOI had intended for Microsoft so that’s a pleasant comeuppance to Google.

    Although Microsoft announced last week its Office 365 for Government suite last week, the FAA won’t be using that service. Instead, the agency is said to be using Office 365 ITAR – as in, International Traffic in Arms Regulations – with ProofPoint Archive, Microsoft’s other offering for governments looking to adopt cloud-based technologies.

    So what’s the difference between Office 365 for Governments and Office 365 ITAR? A Microsoft spokesperson explained it as such: Office 365 for Government is a multi-tenant service that segregates U.S. government customer data. Office 365 ITAR is dedicated service for larger customers that is isolated & separate from other customers in a caged environment. The latter supports FISMA requirements, complies with ITAR regulatory controls, and offers Public Trust High Background Investigations of people who manage the data.

    And there you have it.

    P.S. – Whew. With all the talk of FAA, planes, clouds, flight, and so on, you have no idea how hard it was not to make a load of flying/sky puns in this article. However, feel free to add your own below in the comments.

  • Buddy Media CEO Dispels Fear with Video on VSD

    Yesterday, we brought you the news that enterprise cloud computing giant, Salesforce.com, intends to acquire Buddy Media. It’s great news for Michael Lazerow, chairman and co-founder of Buddy Media who will be on the receiving end of the near $690 million deal.

    Now we are hearing from Lazerow in a totally different capacity. In a very recent YouTube video of his own creation the successful media creator addresses his struggle with a lifelong heart condition (VSD) that rendered him lifeless several times, only to be saved by multiple surgeries and advanced medical technology.

    Interestingly, Lazerow doesn’t speak a word in the video. The entire narrative takes place on his iPad in what appears to be his home office. It’s obvious he is overcome with joy over the success of Buddy Media and the overwhelming deal he has just made with Salesforce.com making him a billionaire.

    The overarching theme is living without fear and how meeting death head on (literally) allowed him to see no need for fear in the way he lives his life. It’s an interesting way to celebrate success, but also a different side of business that we don’t often see. Take a look at his video and decide what you think about life’s struggles and people’s ability to make a difference.

  • Microsoft, Google Working on Competing Cloud Storage

    Will Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud soon be facing competition from Google and Microsoft? If reports are true, Amazon’s position as the preferred cloud storage facility for a number of web properties, including WebProNews, could be directly threatened.

    Thanks to a scoop from GigaOM, word is both tech giants are hard at work on cloud storage services, and both are expected to formally announce their existence later this summer. Apparently, the willingness of other companies to pay for these cloud storage services plays a big role in the motivation behind these developments:

    Although Google declined to comment on whether the offering is indeed on the way, an IaaS cloud would make a lot of sense for the company. It already has a popular platform-as-a-service offering in App Engine that is essentially a cloud-based application runtime, but renting virtual servers in an IaaS model is still where the money is in cloud-based computing… Microsoft clearly got the message on where developers are spending in the cloud, too, which is why it’s reportedly expanding its Windows Azure cloud to compete with Amazon more directly than it already does.

    Apparently, a willingness from both giants to compete with Amazon in relation to cloud computing prices. Amazon’s willingness to slash prices for their Amazon Web Services platform has not been lost on Google or Microsoft. In fact, Google has already shown a willingness to reduce prices on their Google Cloud Storage service.

    Currently, Google and Microsoft’s cloud services operate under the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, while Amazon operates with under the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The difference between the two methods is PaaS offers a computing platform, where the user/customer creates the interface based on tools and programs provided by the company offering the service. While the IaaS model is considered the more basic of the two, is it also gives customers access to storage facilities, all provided by the company instead of the consumer. The following graphic, borrowed from Wikipedia, gives you an idea of how each service functions:

    Cloud Computing

    With that in mind, GigaOm’s report indicates both Google and Microsoft may be offering the IaaS version to consumers:

    In terms of timing, this looks like a case of both companies realizing they got ahead of themselves and the market by centering their cloud computing plans around PaaS rather than IaaS. If Google really does roll out an IaaS offering, maybe it’s also a sign of its newfound maturity when it comes to rolling out new services that fit naturally into its existing business and that it can actually sell.

    If Google and Microsoft indeed dive into the arena that’s currently ruled by Amazon’s Web Services platform, does this mean Amazon’s days as the top provider of could storage are numbered?

    [Lead Image Courtesy]

  • IBM: New Software Helps Enterprises with Mobile & Cloud Computing

    IBM: New Software Helps Enterprises with Mobile & Cloud Computing

    During the recent IBM Impact 2012 Conference, the company made several announcements. Among them were the company’s introductions of new software systems primarily focused on mobile and cloud computing.

    Paul Brunet, VP of IBM Application and Integration Middleware IBM announced its Mobile Foundation, which is an effort geared toward helping enterprises capitalize on the entire mobile environment. As Paul Brunet, the Vice President of IBM Application and Integration Middleware, explained to WebProNews, this type of system is especially important given mobile’s dominance across the board. IBM studies show that the current $22 billion mobile market is expected to grow to $36 billion by 2015.

    With this foundation, IBM focuses on the parts that enterprises concentrate on as well, which are scalability and security.

    “There’s this middle ground of all the things that really make it scalable, reliable, secure… and that’s really what IBM is focused around in regards to delivering the mobile foundation,” said Brunet.

    The mobile foundation is built on IBM’s acquisition of Worklight but expands it to include the company’s WebSphere Cast Iron capabilities. As a result, organizations have the ability to build and connect applications to the cloud or other internal apps. Furthermore, Brunet told us, they have a stronger control over the communication and ideas that go out through the apps and mobile devices.

    IBM also announced new elements to its PureSystems family of expert integrated systems. According to Brunet, IBM is hoping to reduce the costs and complexities associated with IT and application development with this new offering.

    “The family of PureSystems really looks at integrating the hardware through networking, through storage – all the way to the middleware to the integrated management,” he said.

    At this point, many organizations are spending 70 percent or more on management and maintenance costs. Brunet told us that IBM is trying to change this trend by allowing businesses to get new services to their clients while also optimizing and driving greater efficiencies in their IT departments. The company has created “patterns of expertise” for streamlining these processes and is also enabling its clients to build their own patterns.

    “Harnessing these patterns and making sure that a client… who might typically take anywhere from 3-4 weeks to deploy one of these environments… is really allowing them to do it in a number of hours,” explained Brunet.

    Ultimately, he said that IBM wants to alleviate workloads in order for enterprises to focus on making their products and services better.

    IBM’s new software systems are currently available.

  • Google is all About the Cloud: Going Google

    Google wants to let everybody know, they are all about the cloud and cloud computing. To them it means bringing people together and never having to hit save or manage traditional software. Just last week they introduced their new Google Dive service which allows users a space to create, share, and store all kinds of things online.

    Here’s what Google lists as features of the Dive service:

    * Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.

    * Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just… there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

    * Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

    Here’s a video about the Google Drive service:

    Google has all sorts of products which actually function using cloud technology including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and of course, Google Drive, which I already mentioned above.

    Millions of organizations and institutions are already taking advantage of these tools and you can join them. Google is a great company because, for the most part, they don’t charge for their services.

    Take a look at this video about what they’re calling, Going Google:

  • App Engine 1.6.5 Released, Brings New Datastore Features

    Many businesses and developers rely on Google’s App Engine to deliver their content to the Web. It’s a good thing then that Google is not being lazy with constant updates being made to the platform. Yesterday marked the release of version 1.6.5 of the Google App Engine.

    The first update is being made to the Datastore. Google is introducing an experimental type of query called a projection query. The company says that this new type of query has the “same cost and performance characteristics as keys-only queries but return entity objects populated only with the requested properties.”

    On top of that, there are some other new features coming to Datastore as well. Here’s the full feature list:

    Each entity group now has a numeric version property that strictly increases on every entity group change. You can use this counter, for example, to easily and consistently cache the results of an ancestor query, such as the count of all entities in an entity group

    The Datastore Admin now allows you to restore individual Kinds from an existing backup, abort in-progress backups, and view more detailed backup and restore information.

    For Python users, the @db.transactional decorator now supports concurrent transactions. We’ve also expanded the options available for the db.run_in_transtion_options() function.

    There are some new features coming to the Images API as well. The first is that the Images API can now access image objects stored in Google Cloud Storage. The second has URLs generated by get_serving_url or getServingUrl can now be generated to serve over HTTPS.

    Google is also including additional Request Headers in the newest release. They’ve added Region, City and LatLng headers to each request “where this information can be inferred from the IP address.”

    A small note to Java developers, you now must include the threadsafe element in your appengine-web.xml file. If you don’t, it will cause an error in the dev appserver.

    Finally, Google is looking for Trusted Testers for Task Queue Statistics. The feature allows you to “fetch statistics and information about your task queue from within your application.” If that sounds like something you would want to test, you can apply to be a Trusted Tester here.

  • DropMyEmail Garners 500K Users in 8 Weeks

    DropMyEmail Garners 500K Users in 8 Weeks

    Since its inception on March 1st, e-mail backup platform DropMyEmail has seen 520,000 users sign up, a substantial level of growth for a new startup. The DropMyEmail freemium service basically copies existing user IMAP and POP3 email accounts and stores all of the data in its cloud. Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. users initially get 500mb of storage for free, and can upgrade to 5gb or 10gb accounts at $9.99 and $19.99 per year respectively. There is also a free up to 2GB user referral perk, which is likely helping the service to spread like wildfire.

    The company is based in Singapore, and has so far received seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments, Stanley Street Labs and other individual investors $290,000. CEO and founder John Fearon states, “People are using e-mail across the web and mobile more than ever. It only takes two clicks to back up your e-mail, and people are responding to how simple it is.” Fearon projects a global user base up 1 million within 3 months – growth that not even Twitter has seen. So far, 20% of users live in India, and U.S. clients only account for 2-3%. Fearon also points out that though the vast majority of its users are using the free service, roughly 10% are about to exceed their limits.

    DropMyEmail seeks to open a new office in San Francisco, and likely won’t have much of a problem getting more funding, considering its rate of growth. I tried out the service – the 2gb referral bonus comes in 24mg increments. This equates to the annoyance of many internet friends.

  • Rackspace Announces New Cloud Services

    Rackspace announced today that is has launched new cloud services. It is calling its new cloud capabilities the “world’s first large-scale, production ready next generation cloud.” The services are built on Rackspace’s OpenStack open-source cloud platform and backed by their “Fanatical Support” customer service guarantee.

    “The open era of the cloud is a reality and Rackspace has positioned itself at the forefront of this massive, technological shift,” said Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace. “We’re drawing a line in the sand against proprietary cloud providers. With this launch, Rackspace is providing an open cloud alternative, backed by Fanatical Support and our core expertise on OpenStack, to deliver a strong product portfolio that will help customers navigate their way through an increasingly complex cloud environment.”

    The products Rackspace is offering include servers, databases, block storage, and networks. This is in addition to existing Rackspace capabilities such as “Cloud Files” object storage, cloud load balancers, private clouds, and content delivery networks. The services are configurable through the “Cloud Control Panel” and can be monitored with Rackspace’s “Cloud Monitoring.”

    “The expansion to its OpenStack cloud offering has given Rackspace a more comprehensive portfolio of solutions, which now spans across computing, storage and networking. The ability to address critical business needs in these key areas will help them open new doors and extend their reach to a broader range of customers,” said Melanie Posey, research vice president at International Data Corporation. “Rackspace’s Cloud Networks solution in particular is going to eliminate some of the hesitation businesses have around cloud adoption by providing a programmatic approach to networking, which in turn, enables more seamless hybrid cloud and virtual data center implementations.”

    It’s clear that the market for cloud computing solutions is growing as the demand for flexible, on-demand platforms increases. Amazon Web Services last week announced its scalable CloudSearch service.

  • Netflix Making Its Cloud Software Open Source

    Whether it be for education, help with programming or just out of good will, a lot of companies are now putting their software up as open source. This allows developers to poke and prod at the source code to find out what makes it tick. One company that I never thought would go open source has recently announced it was making the software that runs its cloud business open source. That company is online rental company Netflix.

    Speaking to Wired, Adrian Cockcroft says that Netflix will be rolling out its “simian army” to the masses. For those confused by the term “simian army,” the company explained the software in a blog post last year. In short, it’s a collection of different programs that run the entirety of the Netflix empire. These programs called “monkeys” range from “chaos monkey” to “10-18 Monkey.” Their job is to make sure the various components of Netflix’s cloud infrastructure run smoothly.

    The plan right now is to release the source code of the monkeys over the next few months. Cockcroft says that they are going to “release pretty much all of our platform, including the Monkey infrastructure, over the rest of this year.” It’s going to start in the summer and continue into the fall. That’s all the information we have to go off for now since Cockcroft spends the rest of the interview talking about how they actually run the cloud business for Netflix.

    While we don’t have a lot of information to go off for now, the source code from Netflix should be especially helpful for startups and medium sized businesses. Cockcroft says just as much in the interview:


    “A lot of the medium-sized enterprises still have enough agility and don’t have too much holding them back, so they’re the the ones adopting cloud a little bit more aggressively. The really big ones are still trying to figure it out or are too entrenched in what they’re doing. And the startups — you can’t go to Sand Hill Road and not do cloud now. It’s taken as normal unless you have a very good reason for not doing it.”

    Developers would be wise to take advantage of this. Netflix must have some of the best code when it comes to using the cloud since the majority of their business revolves around it now with their streaming service still attracting millions of users.

    We’ll have more details for you once Netflix starts releasing the source code this summer. Check back then for more open source goodness. Open source software releases is on the way up and I’m sure we’re all excited to see which company decides to go open source next.

    [lead image: Moby Picture: Werner Vogels]

  • IBM Introduces PureSystems IT Soulution

    IBM Introduces PureSystems IT Soulution

    IBM has invested millions in R&D and acquisitions in an effort to streamline and add value to IT solutions over the past decade or so. Today they have announced a new category of “expert integrated systems” which promises to revolutionize the way we manage information.

    The new platform offers clients an alternative to current computing models and it will deliver a system that eliminates expensive set-up and maintenance fees. Sound good? IBM knows that many organizations are struggling to keep their IT budgets in check and that many current IT solution represent an enormous drain on both budgets and profits.

    Here’s some of what IBM promises with their new data management platform:

    * “Scale-In” System Design: With PureSystems, IBM is introducing a new concept in system design that integrates the server, storage, and networking into a highly automated, simple-to-manage machine. Scale-in design provides for increased density – PureSystems can handle twice as many applications compared to some IBM systems, doubling the computing power per square foot of data center space.[2]

    * Patterns of Expertise: For the first time, IBM is embedding technology and industry expertise through first-of-a-kind software that allows the systems to automatically handle basic, time-consuming tasks such as configuration, upgrades, and application requirements.

    * Cloud Ready integration: Out of the box, all PureSystems family members are built for the cloud, enabling corporations to quickly create private, self-service cloud offerings that can scale up and down automatically.

    Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of software and systems at IBM commented on their new PureSystems IT solutions:

    “With its new scale-in design and built-in expertise, PureSystems represents an important advance in the evolution of computing,”

    “By tightening the connections between hardware and software, and adding incomparable software know-how, PureSystems is designed to help clients to free up time and money to focus on innovation that many businesses cannot address due to ever rising costs and staffing needs in the traditional data center.”

    Check out this infographic from IBM:

    IBM Innovative IT Platform

    Now take a look at this Youtube video on the project:

    These new solutions are worth taking a look at. Investing in replacement or support of your current IT solutions could start saving you money today, and increase your bottom line a lot sooner than you think. I don’t know if these systems will actually revolutionize the industry, but it sounds like IBM has done their homework and they’re willing to put everything they have in PureSystems.

  • iBuildApp Releases Beta API For Developers

    iBuildApp, a service that allows users to create their own custom mobile apps without any kind of coding know how, has now released their API for those who have the coding know how. The API is currently in open beta, but it promises plenty of advantages for those who use it.

    Previously, users had to log into the iBuildApp platform to manage their apps built with the service. The API now allows users to manage and muck around with their apps without having to actually be logged in. This is all part of a grand scheme to “facilitate the development of mobile cloud apps that can access devices on iBuildApp cloud platform.”

    iBuildApp’s CEO Rafael Soultanov succinctly sums up the API’s main functionality, “If you’re already using a content management system to update your website or database, now you can push your content directly to your mobile app.”

    As said before, the API is in beta so there may still be some bugs. The company just wanted to get it out there to see what developers do with it. Soultanov confirmed this by saying, “We look forward to seeing how iBuildApp will innovate around its API in the future, and what kind of interesting apps developers will come up with. So go get an API key and hack away!”

    If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the API, you can check out the documentation at iBuildApp’s Web site. It has all you need to know to begin implementing the API into your current app strategy.

  • Cloud Usage Surging Among Small, Midsize Businesses

    New research from Microsoft took a look at how small and midsize businesses are utilizing cloud computing services and found that SMBs are expanding their reach and opportunities in new ways thanks to the cloud. So many more SMBs are adopting cloud technology that paid cloud services are expected to double in five years, while the number of the world’s smallest companies using at least one paid cloud service will triple in the next three years.

    “Gone are the days of large enterprises holding the keys to enterprise-class IT and services,” Microsoft’s Vice President of Operator Channels Marco Limena said in a statement. “The cloud levels the playing field for SMBs, helping them compete in today’s quickly changing business environment, by spending less time and money on IT and more time focused on their most important priority – growing their businesses.”

    Cloud computing presents an economic advantage to small and midsize businesses by providing cheaper operations and increased access to information from virtually any device. In fact, the research finds 59% of companies currently using cloud services report significant productivity benefits from information technology, compared with just 30% of SMBs not yet using the cloud.

    Moreover, despite a dogged state of the economy, 63% of SMBs using cloud services today expect to grow in sales in the next 12 to 18 months while 55% believe technology will power their growth. SMBs worldwide are embracing cloud services to reap those benefits and stay ahead of competitors – 50% of SMBs say cloud computing is going to become more important for their operations, and 58% believe working in the cloud can make companies more competitive.

    As more SMBs add more devices to their inventory of business tools, using cloud services presents the best opportunity for those businesses to improve their mobility. Additionally, businesses have less concerns over the security of cloud computing than in previous years as only 20% or so of SMBs think data is less secure on a cloud service than in actual on-site hardware.

    It’s true – while anybody with a crowbar and a mind for mischief can break into your place of business and steal your computers that have your information, it’s kinda hard to pry open a cloud in the same manner.

  • BigQuery: Google’s Data Analysis Platform

    BigQuery: Google’s Data Analysis Platform

    Let’s say you’re with a company that analyzes thousands of terabytes as part of its business. You can either build a giant data farm to sift all of the data, or you can, well, all you can really do is build a server farm. Google hopes to help those kind of companies with their data analysis by offering up their servers as an alternative.

    BigQuery, according to the Google Developers page, is a “Web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets – up to bilions of rows.” That’s pretty impressive and must take a lot of server space. That’s exactly the point though as Google is offering to let businesses and developers offload their data onto Google’s servers for analysis.

    ComputerWorld is reporting that Google product manager Ju-Kay Kwek spoke at the GigaOm Structure Data conference this week about the company’s plans for this new service. The boldest claim they can offer in regards to BigQuery is that they let businesses offload all the data onto the cloud. This prevents them from having to build data farms and it lets Google fine tune their data collection algorithms.

    Some of the trial users at the moment are using the service to collect data on how ads are doing or making fiscal projections. All this and more is done over the cloud at a price that is “quite reasonable” according to one company using the service.

    Interested companies can sign up for the BigQuery preview right now. This will put you on a waitlist and you will be notified when the service is ready.

    Here’s a talk from Google I/O 2010 that touched upon BigQuery:

  • Seagate Drives Hit 1 Terabit Per Square Inch

    Seagate has unveiled the first terabit-per-square-inch hard drive, essentially doubling the typical areal density of modern hard disks. First off, this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives, and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives – but Seagate expects to expand to 60TB and 20TB drives respectively.

    To have made such a big advance in drive density, Seagate incorporated a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). The size of each magnetic bit in a hard drive dictates its size – these bits can only be made so small before the magnetism of other bits begins to take effect. HAMR bits are made of compounds that can withstanding further miniaturization. Fujitsu developed HAMR in 2006, and the system adds a laser to the hard drive head. The drive head seeks as normal, but when it is time for data to be written, the laser comes on.

    seagate hamr

    Data is read in the conventional fashion. One terabit per square inch is roughly two million bits per linear inch, with each site being about 12.7 nanometers long – or about a dozen atoms. Theoretically, HAMR should accomodate areal densities of up to 10 terabits per square inch, which equates to 60TB, for a desktop hard drive. There’s no mention of the cost of HAMR drives, or about how the laser would affect power consumption.

    Still, one might wonder what the point of local storage will become, as cloud-based storage and computing advances. But 60TB local drives, coupled with 100Mbps internet connections might also make the idea of a cloud a bit pointless as well. Though, the latter is unlikely, as smartphones and tablets with flash memory, in tandem with cloud drives might eventually make mechanical hard drives obsolete for typical computing.

  • HP Planning Amazon Web Service Competitor

    HP Planning Amazon Web Service Competitor

    Hewlett-Packard is preparing to launch a cloud computing platform that will compete directly with Amazon Web Services. The project, which which will be more business-oriented than AWS, is expected to launch by May, according to the HP executive in charge of the program.

    In an interview with The New York Times, HP’s senior vice president and manager of cloud services Zorawar Singh said that the goal of the project is not to compete directly with Amazon, but to go above and beyond what Amazon offers. HP’s cloud platform will offer a variety of tools for businesses and developers, including support for a variety of software languages like Java and Ruby, database and data analytics tools.

    HP has apparently had this project in the works for some time. The project is meant to be a new way for HP to compete with Amazon’s cloud, as well as to compete with some of HP’s other, more traditional competitors, including IBM and Oracle. HP wants to offer a wider array of tools at a better price than any of its competitors in the market.

    HP has struggled in recent years thanks to a series of under-performing products and mismanagement by recent CEOs. Current CEO Meg Whitman has taken several steps to get HP back on track. Though this new cloud platform is one of them, the short-term goal of the project is not to have a major impact on HP’s overall revenue. Rather, Singh said, the goal is as much to help HP’s other divisions do their own business as it is to generate revenue.

  • Cloud Computing Emerging As A Coveted Business Model

    Cloud Computing Emerging As A Coveted Business Model

    The budding surge of cloud computing in businesses is only just beginning, according to a study released today by IBM. Over the next three years, the study found, the number of businesses that will adopt cloud computing is expected to more than double as business leaders look to capitalize on the rapid availability of data and the growing popularity of social media.

    Collaborating with the Economist Intelligence Unit, IBM surveyed over 500 business and technology executives from around the world in hopes of not only understanding more about how organizations use cloud today, but how this emerging model will affect the future of business.

    “Companies are starting to understand — cloud isn’t just about gaining efficiencies and cost savings; it’s about driving the kind of fundamental innovation that provides lasting marketplace advantage,” said Saul Berman, IBM global strategy consulting leader and co-author of the study.

    While 16% of the execs surveyed said they are already using cloud capabilities, 35% said they intend to use it to improve their business by 2015. Although more than half of all respondents named “improving organizational efficiency” as the top challenge for businesses today, only 31% believe that will be one of the top challenges for businesses in three years. One reason for why organizational efficiency won’t be such a problem in the future will be due to the implementation of cloud computing.

    Other notable findings on how cloud computing is set to change business include:

  • 62% of survey participants said increased collaboration with external partners is a key objective for adopting cloud.
  • 57% cited competitive cost advantages through vertical integration as a major motivation.
  • 56% pointed to opening new delivery channels and markets as an important objective.

    • “Cloud has the power to open doors to more efficient, responsive and innovative ways of doing business, and we believe the companies that will come out on top will be the ones that find ways to leverage it as a key point of differentiation in driving business value,” Berman said. “Whether they choose to tap cloud to optimize, innovate or even disrupt their business models, they need to start working on it now.”