Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its Magic Quadrant report for the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market.
It is interesting that missing from this quadrant figure are big-name companies that have invested a lot in the cloud, including Microsoft, HP, IBM and Google. The reason is that report only includes providers that had IaaS clouds in general availability as of June 2012 (Microsoft, HP and Google had clouds in beta at the time).
Gartner reinforces what many in the cloud industry believe: Amazon Web Services is the 800-pound gorilla. Gartner has also found one big minus on Amazon Web Services: AWS has a “weak, narrowly defined” service-level agreement (SLA), which requires customers to spread workloads across multiple availability zones. AWS was not the only provider where there was something negative to say on the service-level agreement (SLA) details.
Read the whole Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article to see the Gartner’s view on clould market today.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: How Reproducible Is Arithmetic In the Cloud?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/13/11/21/2255209/ask-slashdot-how-reproducible-is-arithmetic-in-the-cloud
“For example, say I create a virtual OS instance on a cloud provider (doesn’t matter which one) and install Mathematica to run a precise calculation. Mathematica generates the result based on the combination of software version, operating system, hypervisor, firmware and hardware that are running at that time. In the cloud, hardware, firmware and hypervisors are invisible to the users but could still impact the implementation/operation of floating point math.”
Comments:
Use Fixed-point arithmetic.
In Mathematica make sure to specify your precision.
Look at ‘Arbitrary-Precision Numbers’ and ‘Machine-Precision Numbers’ for more information on how Mathematica does this.
Submitter is entirely ignorant of floating point issues in general. Other than the buzzword “cloud” this is no different from any other clueless question about numerical issues in computing. “Help me, I don’t know anything about the problem, but I just realized it exists!”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM heading to information security
IBM is expanding its operations in the security market. The company was started in October of cooperation to develop the content distribution technology with Akamai to provide better security, denial of service attacks.
Akamai servers goes up to 15-20 percent of network traffic. Its technology is the future part of IBM’s cloud security services offering.
IBM’s security unit of the Director Julian Meyrick says that the partnership behind the success of Akamai DDOS attack prevention.
Attacks fight directly to the cloud, and sometimes even completely invisible.
“One of their clients was attacked two days without anyone noticing anything special operation of the network,” he says.
The number of attacks is increasing. IBM’s more than 4 000 customers on the basis of the material, large companies will have to fight every week an average of 1 400 cyber attacks in some degree.
Akamai, in turn, reported in the second quarter, 54 percent of the increase in denial of service attacks.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/ibm+puskee+tietoturvaan/a947476
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Compute Engine Hits General Availability, Drops Instance Prices 10%, Adds 16-Core Instances & Docker Support
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/02/googles-compute-engine-hits-general-availability-drops-instance-prices-10-adds-new-16-core-instance-types-and-docker-support/
Google today announced the general availability of the Google Compute Engine, the cloud computing platform it launched in the summer of 2012. As part of the GA launch, Google also announced expanded support for new operating systems, a 10 percent drop in pricing for standard instances, new 16-core instances for applications that need a lot of computation power and a new logo to update its branding.
Compute Engine is the cloud platform Google has developed on top of the vast infrastructure it manages to run its own search engine and its other properties. The company offers 24/7 support and promises a 99.95 percent update in its SLA.
Until now, Compute Engine supported Debian and CentOS, customized with a Google-built kernel. Starting today, developers will also be able to use any out-of-the-box Linux distribution, including SELinux and CoreOS, the Y Combinator alum with the OS designed to mimic Google’s cloud infrastructure. The company is also announcing official support for SUSE, FreeBSD and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
As part of this update, Google is also announcing support for Docker, the increasingly popular tool for creating virtual containers from any application. With Docker, developers can build and test an application on their laptops and then move this container to a production server for deployment. The company submitted Docker as an open-source project last month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SaaS superstars’ cynical sales schemes make them dinosaurs-in-waiting
Quadrant-sketcher says elasticity fibs will produce snap-back of a new buying cycle
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/03/saas_business_model_collapse/
Distinguished Gartner analyst Robert P. Desisto has offered up an interesting theory: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giants are on the way to making themselves so bloated and cynical you’ll want to find new sources of software.
“In my experience of reviewing 100s of contracts a year, SaaS vendor salespeople behave just like their on premise ancestors,” he writes. That behaviour sees them ignore the promise of elastic usage and payment models and instead go for lock-in with multi-year contracts that fix prices.
“This means there is no ability for a SaaS customer to pay for what they use,” he writes, lamenting the state of affairs because “This was supposed to be one of the foundational [sic] tenants of SaaS but has rarely been offered because SaaS vendors want large contract lock in.”
Users will enjoy this approach from SaaS players just as much as they enjoy it from vendors of conventional software, he argues.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google makes its Compute Engine official
Googlified Vms now run SUSE or REHL on up to 16 cores with 99.95% SLA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/03/google_compute_engine_launches/
Google has cut the ribbon on its Compute Engine, bringing it into the world of virtual machines by the hour and into combat with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and VMware.
Google’s been talking up the Compute Engine for a while now, recently teasing on the topic of automatic failover for virtual machines. But everything still had The Chocolate Factory’s BETA stamp on it.
Google says it has 1,000 people working on the cloud service and that their days are spent toiling on Google’s own infrastructure as well as the bits used to run Compute Engine.
Uptime of 99.95 per cent uptime is offered under a new service level agreement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP dishes up FAIL-filled public cloud
OpenStack-based tech has more ‘known issues’ than ‘features’, says HP
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/02/hp_public_cloud_release/
HP’s “general availability” version of its public cloud has more “known issues” than “features”, which may provoke worries among admins mulling the value of the company’s “enterprise-grade” OpenStack infrastructure cloud.
The 13.5 release of the public cloud was announced on Monday, and brought with it “lots of great new features,” HP said in a blog post.
For example, HP has apparently dropped support for both Amazon EC2 APIs and private cloud Eucalyptus tools. The AWS EC2 APIs are widely used and have become a de facto standard for building cloud apps – but not in HP land. “The ec2 API and euca-tools are not supported in this release,” the company wrote.
We asked Eucalyptus chief Marten Mickos whether he had been informed about this change in advance. “Nope, know nothing,” he told us.
Want to configure your network using OpenStack’s new (and notoriously flaky) “Neutron” networking manager? Nope. “Neutron port-update does not support attaching an instance to a port. You must use nova boot to attach a pre-created port to an instance,” HP says.
How about resetting passwords via the Windows command line interface? Nope. “Not currently available,” says HP.
Do you need to quickly tear down your storage volumes? Well, good luck.
Both HP and Rackspace’s public clouds are based on OpenStack – an ambitious open source technology that aims to take on Amazon.
But given these issues, it seems like the cloud OS currently lacks many key features for large infrastructure-as-a-service deployments, reminding us of a Gartner analyst’s recent opinion that “for one promising or successful deployment there are several that fail and that will forever remain undocumented.”
HP’s cloud has promise and failure in equal measure
Tomi Engdahl says:
In the cloud storage gateway game? Prepare to be AMAZONED
The Bezos boys are coming
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/05/cloud_gateway_biz_amazon/
Jeff Bezos’s big biffing business is building its own cloud storage gateway hardware to get data into Amazon’s S3, striking fear and loathing into the hearts of existing storage gateway suppliers.
Amazon’s existing Storage Gateway is software-only, and runs in a VM in a customer’s own data centre server and moves data back and forth, using CIFS and NFS, between Amazon’s S3 cloud and the storage array’s in said customer’s data centre.
It supports both VMware and Hyper-V and is a dedicated on/off-ramp to S3 and Glacier. Competing cloud storage gateways from Avere, Nasuni, Panzura, Riverbed, Microsoft’s StorSimple and TwinStrata are on/off-ramps to multiple cloud storage services suppliers and are not locked in to Amazon, or Azure in StorSimple’s case.
The product “is a complete, plug-in replacement for your existing physical tape infrastructure.” As a VM it can also run in the Amazon cloud as an EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Western Digital My Cloud
This Cloud Is All Yours
http://www.wired.com/reviews/2013/12/western-digital-my-cloud/
It’s almost impossible these days not to create digital “baggage.” You start by backing up your PC’s data. Then the rest of your devices need more storage space — from backups to storing secondary media libraries, offloading photos, and more. If you’re like me, you may have turned to a cloud-based storage service for help.
But with the Western Digital’s WD My Cloud, a 2TB external NAS (network-attached storage) device, you can create your own personal cloud in your home, consolidating your data within easy reach — not on some server in San Jose. Because this external hard drive connects via an Ethernet cable to your wireless router rather than the traditional USB to your PC, your iOS and Android devices — in fact, any Wi-Fi-enabled mobile device — can read and write to the drive.
My Cloud provides enough capacity to bring all your files to one centralized place and gives you a deep storage well for your mobile devices — without relying on paid external cloud services, which generally cost at least $10 a month depending on your storage level. You only pay about 30 bucks more for My Cloud — so compared to services like Dropbox, Box, et al., it offers instant return on investment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Small Business Owners and the Cloud
http://www.improvedatarecovery.com/300/small-business-owners-and-cloud
There are a number of reasons why larger enterprises choose to move to the cloud:
Reduced costs
Faster recovery times and fewer downtime events
Provides redundancy and reduces risk
Improves collaboration and efficiency
Highly scalable, offering flexibility and speed in meeting new demands of the enterprise
Reduced energy costs
Better control of data
Reduces IT labor costs
Small business owners (SBO) can enjoy the same benefits (and competitive advantages they bring). Research published by Autodesk indicates that SBOs used four cloud services on average in 2012 and that number is expected to grow to 7 by 2015.
some 60% of SBOs use direct-attached storage (DAS) to keep their data backed up while only 30% use cloud-based or hosted backup and recovery solutions. Further, some 70% of the respondents considering private, hybrid, or public cloud backup solutions indicated that they’d prefer to go the private or hybrid route.
Considering that some 54% of the respondents said that hardware failure was to blame for a data loss and related recovery fees averaged $9,000, it would seem that using a cloud backup and recovery approach would produce huge benefits for SBOs – immediately.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Online backup service SugarSync moves to paid-only model
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=A964CC3F-C672-5423-37ADC35E93D1F349
SugarSync, which has offered 5GB of free capacity since its founding, today announced it will only offer that as a trial and that all capacity after the trial will have to be paid for.
Previously, SugarSync offered users 5GB of free capacity. Users can still try the SugarSync service with a 90-day 5GB trial or a 30-day trial with higher capacities of 60GB or more.
“There are many companies in this space that are giving away free storage However, most of these companies will not be viable. We are already in a solid financial position and this shift will further strengthen our business,” said SugarSync CEO Mike Grossman.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Your cloud provider may be lost
Up to a quarter of all cloud services for enterprises that will disappear in a few years. Research firm Gartner forecasts that up to one in four of the operator either stops or is acquired, the latter being the more general situation.
Cloud services providers are currently faced with the pressure to reduce prices, but the buyers should not be too hard to tighten the service providers, advises Gartner Data Center Conference in spoken analyst William Maurer.
“Buyers need to ensure that the service is successful. Also, they need to be given the opportunity to get the benefit of their investments. If the money is not available, soon there will be no service at all, “Maurer warns.
Cloud buyers seem to be well aware of the potential risks, as many as half of the Data Center Conference event participants saw the cloud services outsourcing “significant risks”.
Nevertheless, Gartner predicts that up to 80 percent of all organizations to use cloud services for end of this year.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/pilvitoimittajasi+voi+kadota/a953372
Tomi Engdahl says:
When Symantec’s away… 28-year-old Asigra becomes ‘overnight’ cloud backup success
Backing up to the cloud… who would have thought it’d be a thing?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/12/backup_is_big_business/
There are dozens of backup system and software providers and it’s easy enough for the ones not in the front rank to fade into the background, until you read something like this: “Asigra … has reached the one million customer site deployment milestone with nearly half of new instalments produced in the past 12 months.”
There has been an 82 per cent increase in Asigra’s adoption rate over the past year and a half, and that business has passed through a channel of one thousand managed service providers (MSPs), cloud service providers (CSPs) and VARs. That channel is shifting a lot of Asigra Cloud Backup orders; what a good business to be in.
That’s phenomenal growth, and it’s happened as Amazon has become, we believe, a big player in the cloud backup scene.
A pair of stray thoughts. Backup to the cloud is becoming more popular. Customers that backup to the cloud don’t buy backup storage systems; the MSPs and CSPs do instead.
It seems clear that demand for cloud backup is maintaining its momentum – and Symantec has just exited the field. If you miss the cloud boat in this business you can find yourself becalmed – and then screwed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Popular cloud service becomes chargeable
Cloud services usually provide for sampling some free space and customers are lured to pay for additional space. Popular SugarSync has decided to abandon free space completely. Customers are attracted to it instead of a hearty storage on the farm.
SugarSync cloud service has been acclaimed for its broad hardware support, and versatile sync options, thanks. The popular cloud service has so far been free for five gigs of storage space, but on February 8th the day it is out of range.
SugarSync interested in you will get 5 gigs of storage for a 90-day trial. Another option is to test the 30-day period more room in 60 gigs of storage space, which is the most affordable monthly payment ($ 7.49 per month or $ 75 per year)
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/suosittu_pilvipalvelu_muuttuu_maksulliseksi
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft has announced the worldwide Cloud OS Network, which includes 25 cloud services providers. There are also companies operating in Finland.
Finland network includes CGI, Fujitsu and Information. A network of company services based on Microsoft’s cloud platform, consisting of Windows Server Hyper-V, System Center and the Windows Azure Pack.
The network’s members provide their customers with a uniform cloud platform to the public as a partner on their own cloud.
Cloud OS, a network of partner companies have a presence in over 90 countries around the world, serving a total of about three million customers on a daily basis, says Microsoft. Servers are more than 2.4 million about 425 data center.
Source: http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/microsoft_rakensi_pilvestaan_verkoston
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Cloud Infrastructure Pricing Is Absurd
http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/12/13/1652243/why-cloud-infrastructure-pricing-is-absurd
HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar.
Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute.
AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close.
Microsoft is taking the ‘middle of the road,’ never offering the best or worst pricing.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Confirmed: Cloud infrastructure pricing is absurd
http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/387149/confirmed-cloud-iaas-pricing-absurd
A new “codex” released by 451 Research, designed to help businesses figure out the wildly different pricing models used by cloud infrastructure providers, makes one thing abundantly clear: cloud pricing is insanely complicated. It’s virtually impossible for customers to price shop, as vendors use a wide range of models and some don’t actually publish their prices.
These kinds of pricing analyses, though, can offer some great insight into where the vendors are heading.
– HP offers the best compute value and instance sizes for the dollar.
– Google offers the best value for memory, but to get there it appears to have sacrificed compute.
– AWS is king in value for disk and it appears no one else is even trying to come close.
– Microsoft is taking the “middle of the road,” never offering the best or worst pricing.
The top key finding of the 451 Research report: “Cloud computing once promised simple, usage-based charging for resources, similar to other utilities such as electricity; unfortunately, the current reality is far from this ideal.”
The vendors further muddy the water by not being out front about their pricing; 451 Research found that only 64 percent of providers publish their pricing online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Updated IaaS Pricing Patterns and Trends
http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/12/09/updated-iaas-pricing/
A few overall takeaways, with the reminder that this is merely a survey of standard instances:
Amazon remains the standard against which other programs are judged and/or judging themselves. In virtually every category, Amazon is amongst the leaders, with competitive providers looking to advantage themselves by either matching or exceeding the price/component offered by Amazon.
Intentionally or not, providers are signaling their prioritizations from an infrastructure perspective. HP, for example, is clearly attempting to separate itself from the pack on the basis of compute value for the dollar (not to mention instance sizes), while Google is doing the same for memory. Disk, meanwhile, seems to be something of an afterthought, with multiple providers not including it as a standard portion of the offering and no one attempting to outcompete AWS as they are in compute and memory, save perhaps Joyent.
Given the aforementioned prioritization, it will be interesting to observe its impacts moving forward. Amazon is essentially pursuing a leader’s course: highly competitive by each factor, but not necessarily obsessed with being the absolute leader in each. Two obvious competitive strategies emerge from the above deconstruction. The first, exemplied best by Microsoft here, is a middle of the road value proposition, never the most expensive but never the least. The second appears to be a weighted bet, sacrificing performance in one category (e.g. Google with compute) to achieve leadership in another (Google in memory).
Besides the implications for users, it will be interesting to monitor how a given vendor’s price prioritization may vary over time, based both on customer demands as well as internal resource availability and costs. Google and HP’s strategies, as but two examples, certainly appear to have evolved since the last snapshot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The future of Microsoft as seen by an insider who could be its next CEO
http://qz.com/157521/satya-nadella-the-future-of-microsoft-as-seen-by-an-insider-who-could-be-its-next-ceo/
It’s been a fun couple of weeks for Microsoft watchers. First Ford CEO Alan Mulally dominated headlines as a favorite for the top job at Microsoft, even as his board publicly said he would stay at the auto manufacturer at least through the end of 2014. Then, last night, Bloomberg reported that Steve Mollenkopf, chip-maker Qualcomm’s chief operating officer was in consideration. This morning Mollenkopf was promoted to CEO (paywall) of Qualcomm.
Amid the rumors about external candidates, some Microsoft watchers have focused on Satya Nadella, the Indian-born head of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise division who is known to staff as one of the most articulate and intelligent people in the company.
On how the shift to the cloud is changing how the technology industry works
“In the past, there was hardware, software and platforms on top of which there were applications. Now they’re getting conflated. That is all going to get disrupted by the move to the cloud. Because when somebody is running their application on Azure [Microsoft's cloud platform], they’re not having to buy hardware, to set up their own network, or to do a lot of things that they did in the past. So what used to be these distinct categories are getting mixed up in the move to the cloud.”
On what the cloud business means to Microsoft
“We have a pretty massive commercial business: 58% of our overall business is commercial. That’s about $45 billion of our revenue. Cloud is just emerging but it’s high growth. In the last quarter we the cloud business grew over 100%. Azure is adding over 1000 customers a day and over 50% of Fortune 500 companies are using Azure. There is also the private cloud. We make the cloud infrastructure we’re using available as servers for others, and that is going through double-digit growth both. So all put together we’re doing very well.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Web Services runs out of (some) servers
Cloudy concern also reveals new Linux-slurping plans
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/17/amazon_web_services_runs_out_of_some_servers/
Amazon Web Services has run out of servers. Or at least the special type of server it uses to power the new C3 instance type.
C3 instances are “compute optimised” thanks to the presence of an Ivy Bridge Intel Xeon running at 2.8 GHz, along with a solid state disk. Launched at AWS’s desert talkfest AWS re:invent back in November, C3 instances have proved so popular AWS has admitted that “some of you are not getting the C3 capacity you’re asking for when you request it.”
In other words, it’s out of servers
AWS may well be ramping up its server population for another reason, because it’s just announced an expanded Linux-server-cloudification offering. Those of you running a variety of 64-bit Linux virtual machines in VMware, Xen or Hyper-V formats can now import them to AWS’ cloud, where you could either put them into production or leave them ready to fire up as a disaster recovery resource
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Web Services Blog
VM Import / Export for Linux
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/vm-import-export-for-linux.html
If you have invested in the creation of “golden” Linux images suitable for your on-premises environment, I have some good news for you.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why IT execs stick with cloud computing despite NSA snooping scandal
The benefits of cloud technology are a powerful draw, and IT execs are taking steps to mitigate their risk
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/why-it-execs-stick-cloud-computing-despite-nsa-snooping-scandal-232208?source=IFWNLE_nlt_cloud_2013-12-09
Explosive revelations in the past six months about the U.S. government’s massive cyber-spying activities have spooked individuals, rankled politicians and enraged privacy watchdogs, but top IT executives aren’t panicking — yet.
So far, they are monitoring the issue, getting informed and taking steps to mitigate their risk in various ways. But the alarming reports haven’t prompted them to roll back their decisions to host applications and data in the cloud.
That’s the consensus from about 20 high-ranking IT executives interviewed in North America and Europe about the effect that the U.S. National Security Agency’s snooping practices have had on their cloud computing strategy. The news broke in June, after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking the earth-shaking secrets to the media.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Study: Downtime for U.S. data centers costs $7900 per minute
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/ponemon-downtime-study.html
A study recently conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Emerson Network Power (ENP) shows that on average, an unplanned data center outage costs more than $7,900 per minute. That number is a 41-percent increase over the $5,600-per-minute quantification put on downtime from Ponemon’s similar 2010 study. “Data center downtime proves to remain a costly line item for organizations,” ENP said when announcing the study’s results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco takes on AWS with cloudy desktop-as-a-service plan
VMware and Citrix dive into DaaS for private or public clouds
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/18/cisco_takes_on_aws_with_cloudy_desktopasaservice_plan/
Works with VMware and Citrix to deliver DaaS from your bit barn or the cloud Cisco and VMware have responded to Amazon Web Services Workspaces desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) plan with their very own offering that can be deployed to private or public clouds.
The new offering blends VMware’s recently-acquired Deskone with a Cisco Validated Design (that’s Cisco-speak for a reference architecture) said to be capable of delivering 252 virtual desktops from a single UCS server. There’s also a Citrix-centric version of the Validated Design.
The collaboration is being pitched at service providers keen to kick off a DaaS offering or organisations looking for a simple route to desktop virtualisation (VDI) delivered from a private cloud.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s cloudy chief: Azure reliability knocks your own kit for six
‘If you want to reach the globe the most, we’re the cloud vendor to do it’
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/12/16/scott_guthrie_azure/
Just announced is a new Azure datacentre in São Paulo, Brazil.
More Reading
“We have more regions than Amazon, we have coverage in places like China that they’re not in,” Guthrie told The Register at London’s New Developer Conference earlier this month. “If you want to reach the globe the most, we’re the cloud vendor to do it.”
There is also a new scheduler service, which means you can schedule a task without relying on a specific virtual machine, and a new service called read-only secondaries.
Read-only secondaries are a way of taking advantage of globally replicated data. “We have globally replicated storage, which means that if you’re storing your data in North Europe, you can automatically back up your storage account in West Europe,” explains Guthrie, though this is a paid-for option, rather than something that happens by default.
“In the past it’s only been in a disaster that you’d actually failover. What we give you now is the ability to access the replicated data in read-only mode. That enables you to build apps where you can failover yourself to read the secondary, or check to make sure the data’s there.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM follows Microsoft, Amazon into China with new cloud doodad
NSA leaks ‘not affecting Big Blue’s plans in any way’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/18/ibm_cloud_china/
IBM is launching a cloud service hosted in a Chinese data center as Big Blue tries to pursue what it reckons could be a huge market – despite NSA revelations causing paranoia among some non-US data services punters.
To do business in the Middle Kingdom, companies must partner with a Chinese firm, which may assuage concerns, though it does mean IBM’s cloud will likely be probed by the US and Chinese governments – rock, hard place, etc.
IBM partner 21Vianet operates in more than 40 cities throughout China, and provides various connections via its fiber-optic network into the Chinese internet backbone.
“We are going to locate or co-locate a data center within [21Vianet's] data center,” explained IBM spokesperson Michael Azzi to El Reg. “Our equipment will go inside their data center. They will help to manage that for us with their existing personnel and skillset.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
EVault takes on Amazon with faster-than-Glacier cloud archive
Ever-so-slightly pricier, though
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/18/evault_launches_fasterthanglacier_cloud_archive/
Seagate’s EVault cloud backup sub has launched a Glacier cloud archive competitor, priced at $15 per TB per month with instant data access and data preserved intact for decades. It will use Seagate Kinetic drives in the future.
Amazon started the cloud archive ball rolling big time with its Glacier service costing $0.01/GB/month with data retrieval access taking three – five hours. Retrieval can also cost money but Amazon says customers get five per cent of retrievals free each month.
LTS2 is EVault’s Long Term Storage Service, with data stored in EVault data centres using Seagate disk drives. The service effectively costs $0.015/GB/month; you pay half as much again as Amazon for the much faster retrieval. It is an object-based storage scheme, built on the OpenStack Swift technology
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon Makes Nice With Beijing, Expands Cloud Empire Into China
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/amazon-china/
Amazon is expanding its cloud empire into China.
On Wednesday, after signing an agreement with the Beijing and Ningxia governments, the American internet giant announced that it will soon offer its Amazon Web Services — online services for building and running large software applications — from data centers in Western China.
But unlike in other parts of the world, Amazon will not operate these computing centers on its own. It will offer its new services through local Chinese data center operators and internet service providers such as ChinaNetCenter and SINNET.
This the most practical way, it seems, that the big American web giants can move their cloud services into China. Microsoft uses a similar arrangement in the country, partnering with a local Chinese outfit, 21Vianet, to provide its Windows Azure and Office 365 cloud services in the region. This means, according to 21Vianet, that the services are subject to Chinese law, not U.S. law.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bah! No NSA-proof Euro cloud gang. Cloud computing standards will ‘aid data portability’
European Commission ropes in ETSI, plans to look at copyright issues
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/cloud_standards_should_aid_data_portability_say_meps/
New cloud computing standards to be developed within the EU should facilitate users’ ability to transfer data and services between cloud providers, MEPs have said.17 Dec 2013
Cloud computing TMT & Sourcing Outsourcing TMT Advanced Manufacturing & Technology Services
The European Parliament has backed a new resolution on cloud computing in response to actions the European Commission has set out under its cloud computing strategy. The Commission has engaged the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to help set out what new standards are required for the way that cloud services work.
Standards that could be formed may relate to data security, interoperability and data portability, the Commission said previously.
The resolution also set out the Parliament’s view that cloud providers should be said to be ‘data controllers’ under EU data protection laws
Tomi says:
IBM’s secret weapon to battle Google, Amazon, Microsoft clouds: AN UPSTART MOVIE STAR
Big Blue goes to Hollywood, charms a clever beauty
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/ibm_aspera_acquisition/
IBM has bought Emmy-winning bulk data transfer biz Aspera to ease the shipping of large files from on-premises boxes to remote data centers including those operated by cloud providers.
The acquisition was announced on Thursday, and will see Big Blue put Aspera’s UDP-based “fasp” transfer protocol and associated software-only tech to work in its in-development SoftLayer-based “SmartCloud +” product line.
One uncomfortable decision faced by IBM is what to do about the company’s “Aspera On Demand” tech, which provides fast data uploads and downloads to clouds operated by Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud Storage), and Microsoft (Windows Azure) – given that IBM now competes with all these IT giants via its SmartCloud product, it has some decisions to make here.
Competition-aside, why would IBM buy the company? The answer is in Aspera’s claim that it can provide more stable upload and download rates by snubbing classic TCP for its proprietary “fasp” transmission system.
Fasp can be used on wide-area network infrastructure and commodity hardware to perform data transfers “that are hundreds of time faster than FTP and HTTP [on TCP],” according to the company.
Tellingly, the biz reveals fasp “transfers use one TCP port for session initialization and control, and one UDP port for data transfer.”
even under the most favorable conditions, transferring about 10TB of data will take more than a week over a 16.5MBps line – at which point it makes sense to just stick your data on a handful of hard drives and courier them
Tomi Engdahl says:
It’s CLOUD WAR says Larry Ellison: parachute in the sales team
Don’t bring a price cut to a volume/commodity knife fight
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/12/20/oracle_in_transition/
Larry Ellison has promised to bring holy price down upon the heads of cloud computing infidels.
Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace and Salesforce are all on notice: Ellison’s database giant will take them on, in infrastructure, platform and on apps.
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Ellison told Wall St on Wednesday he will be “price competitive” with Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Rackspace.
“At the infrastructure level, we intend to be price competitive with Amazon and Microsoft Azure and Rackspace,” Ellison said on his company’s Q2 analyst call.
“We intend to compete aggressively in, what I will call, commodity not being a bad word, the commodity infrastructure as a service market place.”
Put bluntly, Oracle intends to be: “A player in all three levels of the cloud,” Ellison said.
Oracle as always been aggressive on price, so don’t underestimate the rhetoric – setting them high and willing to discount for the customer who’s willing to haggle.
And Ellison has assets in place to throw into war on all levels – infrastructure and platform as a service and on market places.
He’s acting as both arms dealer and service provider: on the former two, Oracle is bundling its hardware and software and selling them as components to let you build infrastructure and platform as a service offerings. Public or private, Larry doesn’t care.
But there’re also Oracle’s own database and Java as cloud for developers and it offers its own iTunes/AppStore-like Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
Amazon is the market share leader by volume of data held in cloud; Salesforce a mind-share leader. Both are growing – Amazon by volume Salesforce by revenue.
Looking at Oracle’s results this week, it’s pretty clear where Oracle’s business is come from: milking the existing customer base for upgrades and support.
Nearly half is from upgrades and support – 49 per cent, and that business grew six percent during the last three months. That was Oracle’s only growth.
Oracle is a legacy maintenance business. Full stop.
But, don’t write Oracle and Larry off: while Oracle is a legacy maintenance business, Larry knows this and has put in place a transition plan.
Coming back to the beginning: Oracle is a long way behind those it would take on in a Holy price war.
And, the lesson from price wars against commodity players is they are a fruitless exercise: Microsoft tried to undercut Amazon AWS in establishing Windows Azure. Amazon, the king of high-volume and low price, responded by cutting its prices further and also by adding more features to AWS.
Microsoft has had to take the long-road to growth instead: adding a rich mix of features, having its sales people engage with existing Windows customers.
What it must bring to the game is a more complex and sophisticated sell: it must give a reason for enterprises, entities that prize value-added services, service levels agreements and water-tight security, a reason for abandoning the controlled world of software running on their own servers in their own data centers and to trust a cloud service provider.
Winning that argument is not just about adding new technology features or cutting prices, it’s about convincing people. It is: a sales pitch.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rackspace roadmap preps new cloud tools to take on big-bucks giants
Our mole reveals the skinny on Texan hoster’s upcoming plans
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/20/rackspace_cloud_update/
Rackspace has a raft of upgrades planned that could make life easier for sysadmins who work with the company’s public cloud and hosted managed servers, we’re told.
This is according to roadmap slides, shown to The Register by a source, that were presented during Rackspace’s webcast with customers earlier today.
To confront the threat posed by rivals Amazon and Microsoft, Rackspace has so far launched a refreshed range of flash-stuffed “Performance cloud servers” with generous amounts of RAM.
According to the slides, one of the main upcoming features will be virtual machine image sharing, which will let developers share client images between Rackspace’s public and private cloud services.
It will also upgrade its public cloud by adding volume cloning to Cloud Block Storage; launching an upcoming cloud database service named “CloudDatabase – Reds”; and revealing an orchestration and telemetry service named “CloudFeeds” that uses the open-source Chef tool.
It is also going to roll out an upgraded access system that can mate Rackspace portal IDs with internal login systems via SAML authentication, we’re told.
Along with this, it will shortly roll out support for the upcoming Icehouse distribution of open-source cloud control-freak OpenStack for its private cloud.
As Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have invested more resources into their clouds, Rackspace has been caught in the tough position of being large enough to compete with them – but small enough that matching them on features and price can be painful.
It has tried to counter their proprietary tech stacks by relying on the open-source OpenStack software, a troubled project with great potential.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AWS imposes national borders on Cloudland
‘Geo Restriction’ feature keeps foreign undesirables away from your content
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/20/aws_imposes_national_borders_on_cloudland/
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has drawn up borders within its cloud with a new ‘Geostriction’ feature for its CloudFront service.
CloudFront is AWS’ content distribution offering and speeds downloads for all manner of media, often by locating it closer to users.
Click here
AWS can now ensure that only the users you want – or at least those within borders you desire – can access content served from CloudFront thanks to the Geo Restriction feature. Amazon says the new feature means “you can choose the countries where you want Amazon CloudFront to deliver your content.”
You might wish to do that, AWS says, because “licensing requirements restrict some media customers from delivering movies outside a single country.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
A quarter of British and Canadian businesses want their data taken out of U.S., according to Peer1
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/08/a-quarter-of-british-and-canadian-businesses-want-their-data-taken-out-of-u-s-according-to-peer1/
Summary: The cloud provider, which has infrastructure in the U.S., Canada and Britain, says last year’s NSA revelations are starting to hit home.
The NSA’s shenanigans are having a very real effect on businesses’ data storage decisions, according to Canadian cloud and hosting provider Peer1.
The company surveyed 300 businesses in the UK and Canada and discovered that 25 percent intended to move their company data out of the United States over NSA fears. U.S. laws compel any company located there to give intelligence agencies access to customer data if they ask for it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
2013 data centre rental: Rackspace? Microsoft? No. Twitter nom-nommed through most megawatts
20MW data centre biggest new deal of last year
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/twitter_leases_biggest_data_centre_2013/
Twitter leased the single largest data centre of any tech, cloud or media company during 2013, beating the usual suspects in the size-really-does-matter race.Twitter leased the single largest data centre of any tech, cloud or media company during 2013, beating the usual suspects in the size-really-does-matter race.
The micro-blogging site topped a tech league table of the industy’s largest hitters, according to a survey of who rented and built what during 2013.
The runner-up was Rackspace, with a relatively puny 10 megawatt rental. Filling out the rest of the top five were Microsoft, Shutterfly and LinkedIn.
Overall, it was mega deals by cloud service providers and social networks that saw the volume of data centre leases jump by a quarter in 2013.
While deals surged another trend also continued: for social networks, cloud firms and tech companies to stop relying on others and to build their own.
Microsoft topped that table, beating Google and Facebook with the largest purpose-built building – its $677.6m West Des Moines, Indiana, facility.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building Russia’s cloud computing platform
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/russia-cloud-uptime-video.html
Rostelecom is Russia’s largest national telecommunications operator, with presence in all Russian regions. In 2011, the organization launched a project to develop a national cloud computing platform. In the following video from Uptime Institute, Rostelecom’s Data Center Project Manager Alexander Martynyuk discusses how his organization is meeting priorities, deadlines and budget on this complex project.
Rostelecom started building its main data center in Moscow, which will become the largest in Russia, around 37 megawatts and 40,000 square meters. The organization will build smaller, 3 MW data centers in regional locations.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Using Hadoop for data on Google’s cloud? Google would rather you didn’t
And it’s got just the replacement for it: a shiny ‘Google Cloud Storage Service’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/google_hadoop_connector/
Google wants to shift heavy users of its cloud services away from an open-source, community-developed filesystem and into its own proprietary Colossus tech.
The upgrade was announced by the web overlord in a blog post on Tuesday that announced admins could now store Hadoop-destined data directly in Google’s closed-sourced Colossus-based “Google Cloud Storage Service”, and threw mud at the traditional Hadoop File System (HDFS) plugin.
Since Hadoop’s genesis at Yahoo! in the 2000s it has become a standard component of any data analyst’s open-source toolkit, and its development is stewarded by companies including Cloudera and Hortonworks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel uncorks marketing syrup, pours over 16 cloud providers
First of many brandgasm ‘waves’ to come
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/intel_cloud_marketing/
Cloud computing has wrecked the carefully tended brands of tech infrastructure providers by smothering their dodgy logos in layers and layers of opaque software, and Intel is not content to let all that expensive marketing go to waste.
Instead, the world’s largest chip design company announced on Wednesday that it is slipping some marketing dosh to 17 cloud providers – including Amazon Web Services and Rackspace – to have them highlight the Intel chips running in their cloud.
The “Powered by Intel Cloud Technology” scheme loops in 16 new providers* with a cumulative cloud services revenue of $3bn between them to go along with previously-announced Amazon Web Services.
Though Intel is making a big deal of this, for perspective Amazon’s predicted cloud revenue for 2013 was around $3.5bn, so the new providers don’t amount to much relative to Bezos & Co.
The reason for the scheme is that Intel wants to push some of the more advanced capabilities of its advanced Xeon processors such as their AES-NI (Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions) chip instructions, and so on.
Savvy developers can usually check the underlying hardware their instances if they’re willing to poke around a bit – for example, by running cat /proc/cpuinfo in Linux.
But Intel thinks its worth branding these instances with a big badge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM pumps $1.2 billion into global cloud data centers
http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/16/cos-china-operating-system/
Dispelling any lingering doubt that IBM sees cloud computing as the way of the future, the company announced that it will invest US$1.2 billion this year in expanding its global cloud infrastructure.
“Having lots of data centers in lots of different countries around the world will be important in the long term,” said IBM SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. “We want the world to understand that cloud is transformational for IBM.”
The company plans to open 15 new data centers this year, more than doubling the cloud capacity it acquired when it purchased SoftLayer last year for $2 billion. It plans to combine the new data centers, the existing SoftLayer data centers, and the data centers it already ran before the SoftLayer purchase into a single operation that would provide public and private cloud services to its customers, as well as provide services for internal operations.
IBM is estimating that global cloud revenue will grow to $200 billion per year by 2020. IBM hopes to generate $7 billion in cloud revenue in 2015.
While Amazon got an early start at dominating the cloud market, IBM is betting that its expertise in serving enterprises will offer a competitive edge. It has deep expertise in meeting local market and country regulations such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), for example.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OneDrive is Microsoft’s Rebranded Name for SkyDrive
http://techpp.com/2014/01/27/onedrive-microsoft-skydrive/
Microsoft has just announced that SkyDrive, their cloud storage service will be renamed to OneDrive very soon. This follows the news of trademark infringement case filed by British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB) last year over SkyDrive branding. Microsoft had initially hinted at fighting BSkyB’s claims over SkyDrive branding, but then decided to step back and rebrand their cloud offering.
Microsoft is positioning the new OneDrive naming as the one place for documents, photos, and other content that is seamlessly connected across all the devices you use. SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro will be rebranded to OneDrive and OneDrive for Business respectively.
“Changing the name of a product as loved as SkyDrive wasn’t easy”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Duracell powers into cloud storage market
Promises service ’250-1000 times faster’ than rivals, unlimited cloud capacity
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/04/duracell_powers_into_cloud_storage_market/
Yes, you read that right: the battery-maker (and Gillette subsidiary) Duracell now does cloud storage. And does it at the intriguing rate of $US199/month for 2TB of on-premises storage in an on-premises NAS/cloud storage gateway plus unlimited cloud storage.
We’re not sure if Condre is using the Duracell name or if the battery-maker is fronting Condre.
The service looks to be US-only for now
Tomi Engdahl says:
HPCaaS experiment becomes commercial service
UberCloud Marketplace goes live
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/04/hpcaas_experiment_becomes_commercial_service/
UberCloud has launched a commercial service to help academic HPC users find cloud-accessible resources for their projects: a kind of HPC-as-a-service matchmaker.
UberCloud says its original free HPC Experiment attracted “hundreds” of service providers and “independent experts”
Amazon is included among the providers offering cycles via the UberCloud Marketplace
Tomi Engdahl says:
Duracell, The Company That Makes Batteries, Wants To Compete With $10 Billion Dropbox
http://www.businessinsider.com/duracell-wants-to-compete-with-dropbox-2014-2
Every day it seems that more companies want to be the next Dropbox and Box by offering you cloud storage.
The latest one caught our eye because the company is better known for making batteries: Duracell.
It’s standing out from the crowd by combining an old-fashioned hard drive that you would pick up at the store with unlimited cloud storage.
For $20 per month, you’ll get a 1 terabyte hard drive and unlimited cloud storage, the company says. Business-tier service starts at $199 and comes with a 2 TB local drive and unlimited cloud storage.
Duracell’s website claims that using its network drive can make backups “up to 1000x faster” — it’s unclear if consumers will be willing to pay for something that from a non-techie perspective looks like a more complex setup
Tomi Engdahl says:
Just how solid is cloud storage in 2014
Airy-fairy vapour or something firmer?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/06/storage_in_the_cloud_in_2013/
We’re not bothering with private clouds here; they’re enterprise IT re-branded, re-tooled and re-priced but they are still private enterprise IT resources. No, it’s the public cloud, accessed remotely and made available through a cloud services provider (CSP) that we’re considering in this review.
This area is dominated by the AGA threesome of Amazon, Google and (Microsoft) Azure who each have large consumer businesses buttressing their enterprise cloud efforts.
windows8activatorloader says:
Good post. I learn something new and challenging
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exciting to read content from other writers and practice something from their web sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside Microsoft’s Autopilot: Nadella’s secret cloud weapon
Redmond man spills the beans on Microsoft’s top-secret software
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/07/microsoft_autopilot_feature/
Autopilot is the system that lets Microsoft knit together millions of servers and hundreds and hundreds of petabytes of data into a great, humming lake of compute and storage capacity. Without Autopilot, Nadella’s former divisions of Server and Tools, Online Services, Search and Advertizing, and Cloud and Enterprise, would have performed poorly and been less reliable.
Microsoft rarely talks publicly about Autopilot, and has only published two official documents about it
“Autopilot software now completely automates the entire server operational lifecycle, from power on and OS installation, to fault detection and repair, to power cycling and vendor RMA,” explains Microsoft.
In other words – if Microsoft’s servers are puppets, Autopilot is the unseen puppeteer that animates both them and the stage they dance upon.
Neil compares Autopilot to a 747 jet: “It’s a big, complex, honking thing,”
“We have all the information about processor loading, memory loading,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
UpCloud reckons Finnish privacy laws can protect data hosted in US
http://gigaom.com/2014/02/07/upcloud-reckons-finnish-privacy-laws-can-protect-data-hosted-in-us/
The Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service provider is moving into the U.S. with a slightly secretive new model that, it claims, will protect customers’ personal data from U.S. authorities.
Part of this involves carefully-constructed contracts, and part involves keeping all customers’ personal information in Finland – in other words, the authorities in the U.S. won’t have what they need to match any seized data to its owner.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Secrets of the Magic Quadrant revealed
Back to back presentations filled with ‘broad statements and grandiose claims’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/secrets_of_the_magic_quadrant_revealed/
“Be concrete in your information, and incorporate quantifiable, tangible data whenever possible. Analysts are under a constant deluge of broad directional statements and grandiose claims all the time, and we are usually unimpressed by them.”
Quick tips for Magic Quadrant briefing presentations
http://blogs.gartner.com/douglas-toombs/quick-tips-for-magic-quadrant-briefing-presentations/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finnish security company F-Secure has been opened Younited cloud storage services for all.
There are three versions: a free version (5GB storage), medium (200GB), and a premium (500GB)
The service is carried out in privacy in mind: user data is stored in encrypted format in data centers that are located in Finland
Supported operating systems are iOS, Android, Windows, and OS X. The product also has a web interface.
Younited includes Facebook, Picasa and Dropbox integration
Source: Tietokone
http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/nyt_paasee_mukaan_jonottamatta_f_secure_avasi_pilvipalvelunsa_kaikille
celine says:
The way this is graphed is really fascinating to see! So this was in 2012 in Oct., where do you suppose it is now? That would be interesting to see an updated version of this graph.
Celine | http://www.ascequipment.com.au
Tomi Engdahl says:
That was fascinating graph see.
I have not seen any more up-to-date data on the same format.
Some update on related information:
Who is leading in cloud? Data and context matter…
http://blogs.gartner.com/douglas-toombs/who-is-leading-in-cloud-data-and-context-matter/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enterprise cloud services: Who’s responsible?
http://searchcloudapplications.techtarget.com/opinion/Enterprise-cloud-services-Whos-responsible
There’s not enough security in cloud environments said over 32% of the nearly 1,300 business and IT respondents to TechTarget’s first quarter 2013 Cloud Pulse survey. About 34% were put off by not having enough control over cloud environments, certainly a related topic.
In “Security in 2013,” the security responsibilities of Amazon Web Services and customers were spelled out:
AWS: facilities; physical security; physical infrastructure; network infrastructure; virtualization infrastructure.
AWS customer: operating system; application; security groups; network ACLs; network configuration; account management.
Amazon takes care of security for its in-house systems and infrastructure, “but they don’t want to be in the database [security] business,” said “Security in 2013″ speaker Sherry.
Cloud Security Configurations: Who is responsible?
http://blogs.gartner.com/kyle-hilgendorf/2013/04/02/cloud-security-configurations-who-is-responsible/