IBM Perspective on Cloud Computing

by admin on Friday 5 February 2010

IBM

IBM Perspective on Cloud Computing

Much is being written and spoken about cloud computing, by IT analysts, industry and business leaders and others. Some believe it is a disruptive trend representing the next stage in the evolution of the Internet. Others believe it is hype, as it uses long established computing technologies. So, what is cloud computing? From a user perspective, cloud computing provides a means of acquiring computing services without requiring understanding of the underlying technology. From an organizational perspective, cloud computing delivers services for consumer and business needs in a simplified way, providing unbounded scale and differentiated quality of service to foster rapid innovation and decision making. It is a service acquisition and delivery model for IT resources and, if properly used within an overall IT strategy, can help improve business performance and control the costs of delivering IT resources to the organization.

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Why Virtualization Matters to the Enterprise Today

by admin on Friday 5 February 2010

IBM

Why Virtualization Matters to the Enterprise Today

In IT today, the only constant is change. Achieving best business results from a complex enterprise-class IT infrastructure means more than simply deploying new solutions; it means redefining IT as a versatile instrument of business strategy, which can change in parallel with changing demands. Toward that end, many businesses have pursued big-picture strategies such as consolidation—to reduce the number of servers required to support IT services— and virtualization—to unchain those services from specific implementations and redeliver them in a more dynamic, virtual form. Through consolidation and virtualization, the enterprise can achieve a simpler, more scalable, more cost-efficient IT infrastructure that aligns more flexibly with emerging business goals. Originating at IBM around 40 years ago in the specific context of separate logical partitions running in parallel on a shared mainframe, virtualization has taken on new life in a number of contexts: virtual servers to virtual storage, optimized networks, workstations in virtualized environments, and application virtualization. And like any major paradigm shift in business, virtualization has become a success because it delivers core practical benefits that drive business value by:

- Decreasing IT costs and business risks

- Increasing operational efficiency and flexibility

- Simplifying deployment and management

- Enhancing overall business resilience

- Enabling new forms of innovation.

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Seeding the Clouds: Key Infrastructure Elements for Cloud Computing

by admin on Friday 5 February 2010

IBM

Seeding the Clouds: Key Infrastructure Elements for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an emerging computing model by which users can gain access to their applications from anywhere, through any connected device. A user-centric interface makes the cloud infrastructure supporting the applications transparent to users. The applications reside in massively scalable data centers where computational resources can be dynamically provisioned and shared to achieve significant economies of scale. Thanks to a strong service management platform, the management costs of adding more IT resources to the cloud can be significantly lower than those associated with alternate infrastructures.

What is driving the adoption of cloud computing? Many factors, including the proliferation of smart mobile devices, high-speed connectivity, higher density computing and data-intensive Web 2.0 applications.
As a result, vendors across the IT industry have announced cloud computing efforts of varying capabilities and among corporate clients there is an increasing interest in aspects of the cloud, such as infrastructure outsourcing, software as a service key processes as a service and next-generation distributed computing.

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Real World Disaster Recovery

by admin on Thursday 4 February 2010

IBM

Real World Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery (D/R) planning and testing has been a large part of my career. I’ve never forgotten my first computer-operations position and the manager who showed me a cartoon of two guys living on the street. One turned and said to the other, “I did a good job, but I forgot to take good backups.”

I’ve been involved in D/R exercises for a variety of customers, and I was also peripherally involved on a D/R event that happened after Hurricane Katrina. There’s a big difference between planned and unplanned D/R events.

Does your datacenter have the right procedures and equipment in place to recover your business from a disaster? Can your business survive extended downtime without your computing resources? Is your company prepared for a planned D/R event? What about an unplanned event? I’ve helped customers recover from both types of events. This article provides a place to start when considering

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Mass Customization: From “There is a plug-in for that” To “There is an app for that”

by Chirag Mehta on Thursday 28 January 2010

In a much anticipated mystic event Apple announced a tablet today called an iPad. Steve Job’s hypnotizing presentation convinced people that iPad is a magic. I was not there in person to see Jobs unveiling an iPad and somehow escaped the magic. That gave me time to think about the implications of a trend that an iPad endorses – mass customization. Firefox’s success in part can be attributed to its approach to allow the developers to write and publish extensions. There is a Firefox plug-in for pretty much anything. Then came the iPhone and we had an app for pretty much anything. Now we have an iPad and the trend continues.
Mass customization trend is about micro-chunking the software that we run on our devices ranging from cell phones to laptops. The emergent architecture and delivery model have empowered the consumers to buy only the chunks of software that they actually need. The cloud computing and SaaS have further enabled the consumers not to run any software other than a web browser for many daily tasks that they need to accomplish. Micro-chunking and webOS have grave implications on the large shrink-wrapped software packages that occupies the most space on consumers’ hard-drive, hogs memory, and provides a little value. I won’t go to the extent of calling this gold rush for the app developers but I do agree that the independent developers now have a level playing field to compete with the ISVs.
I certainly welcome this trend. I not only want to be in charge of the devices that I own but I also want to experiment and micro manage the applications that I run on my devices. If I can get a tall non-fat extra hot double shot latte at Starbucks why shouldn’t I expect a device that runs the exact software that I need – no less, no more.

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