IT Knowledge Hub » Cloud Computing

U.S. Air Force Manages Aircraft Site Using Powerful Storage Virtualization Platform

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:01:13 +0000

U.S. Air Force Manages Aircraft Site Using Powerful Storage Virtualization Platform Objective: Meet business demands more flexibly; manage data more simply and efficiently; and mitigate the risk of lost data with a storage area network (SAN) that pools, shares and centrally manages storage resources. Approach: Virtualize SAN-attached storage, which is available with the new HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services [...]

Securing the Physical, Virtual, Cloud Continuum

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:03:29 +0000

Securing the Physical, Virtual, Cloud Continuum The data center is undergoing a radical shift, from virtualization towards internal cloud environments where workloads dynamically move, start and stop driven by real-time performance needs. At the same time, IT practitioners are interested in exploring external cloud computing options—but security and compliance concerns are squelching adoption. A key concern [...]

Cloud computing competition heats up

Mike Dolan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:26:14 +0000

As business computing gets more advanced and cloud computing moves beyond email, competitors are flooding in to challenge incumbents. GigaOm takes a look at some of these and sizes up the market. Article

Google Buzz Is New Black – Solving A Problem That Google Wave Could Not

Chirag Mehta — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:03:00 +0000

Today Google announced Google Buzz. Watch the video:

The chart below shows the spectacular adoption failure of Google Wave as a standalone product. This was predicted by a lot of people including myself. As Anil Dash puts it Google Wave does not help solve a "weekend-sized problem".

Besides the obvious complex technical challenges there are three distinct adoption barriers with Google Wave and Google Buzz has capability to overcome those:

Inseparable container, content, and collaboration: Changing people's behavior is much more difficult than inventing or innovating a killer technology. Most of the people still prefer to keep the collaboration persisted separately from the content or not persisted at all. Single task systems such as email, Wiki, and instant messaging are very effective because they do one and only thing really well without any confusion. Google Wave is a strong container on which Google or others can build collaboration capability but not giving an option to users to keep the content separate from the collaboration leads to confusion and becomes an adoption barrier.

Google Buzz certainly seems to solve this problem by piggybacking on existing system that people are already familiar with - email. Google Buzz is an opt-in system where the users can extend and enrich their experience against using a completely different tool.

Missing clear value proposition: Google Wave is clearly a swiss knife with the open APIs for the developers to create killer applications. So far the applications that leverages Google Wave components are niche and solve very specific expert system problems. This dilutes the overall value proposition of a standalone tool.

Google Buzz is designed to solve a problem in a well-defined "social" category. People are already using other social tools and Google Buzz needs to highlight the value proposition by integrating the social experience in a tool that has very clear value proposition unlike Google Wave which tried to re-create the value proposition. Google Buzz assists users automatically by finding and showing pictures, videos, status updates etc. and does not expect users to go through a lengthy set up process.

Lack of a killer native mobile application: This is an obvious one. Google Wave does work on iPhone and on some other phones but it is not native and the experience is clunky at best. When you develop a new tool how about actually leveraging a mobile platform rather than simple porting it. A phone gives you a lot more beyond a simple operating system to run your application on.

Google recognized this and Google Buzz is going to be mobile-enabled from day one that leverages location-awareness amongst other things. I hope that the mobile experience is not same as the web experience and actually makes people want to use it on the phone.

You could argue that why Google Buzz is going to be different since Google did have a chocolate box variety tools before Google Buzz - Latitude, Profile, Gmail, Wave and so on. I believe that it is all about the right experience that matches the consumers' needs in their preferred environment and not a piece of technology that solves a standalone problem. If done right Google Buzz does have potential to give Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Gowalla run for money.

IBM Perspective on Cloud Computing

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:50:25 +0000

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 [...]

Why Virtualization Matters to the Enterprise Today

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:28:20 +0000

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 [...]

Seeding the Clouds: Key Infrastructure Elements for Cloud Computing

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:28:19 +0000

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 [...]

Real World Disaster Recovery

admin — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:00:17 +0000

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 [...]

Startup unveils ‘cloud storage gateway’

Paul Mah — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:47:21 +0000

Storage startup Nasuni has unveiled a NAS file server that runs on VMware as a virtual machine. The VM essentially facilitates the connection of local clients to cloud platforms such as Amazon or Iron Mountain for data storage. The company touts the end product as a "cloud storage gateway," adding encryption as well as other features to improve network performance.

Nasuni founder and CEO Andres Rodriguez says that he is targeting mid-sized companies interested in cloud storage, but are held back by the prospect of exposing confidential data or by latency issues. The company's NAS file server is currently in beta and available for free. The final product is expected to be generally available in spring, and Nasuni expects to be charging about $250 per month.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network World

One on One with Aaron Levie of Box.net

Ron Miller — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:40:50 +0000

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, which he originally created with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. He is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with the most effective elements of social business software. We asked him about his company's strategy and how well it incorporates into existing enterprise software.

FCM: Box.net started small as an online storage company, if I'm not mistaken. You have expanded your scope to include collaboration and formed many strategic partnerships. Was that a planned growth path or a strategy that developed over time?

AL: We launched in 2005 as a consumer-oriented online storage service, before "cloud" was even a buzzword. Initially our core mission was--and still is--to make it easy for people to access, collaborate and share all their content on the web. But our customers' usage of Box prompted our shift from online storage for consumers to a Cloud Content Management platform for business. Frustrated with the sharing limitations imposed by traditional enterprise software, people began using Box.net as a collaboration tool at work and spreading the service organically. Adoption began with individuals, growing to departments and finally full company deployment. So we've grown alongside our customers, retooling the Box platform into a sophisticated Cloud Content Management solution. Now we're focused on taking Box to the next level--continuing to add new features (we recently launched the ability for people to view all types of content from within any Box folder without needing to download), partnering with best-of-breed cloud services like Salesforce and Google Apps, and making the platform enterprise-ready with SAS70 certification.

FCM: How is online collaboration software like yours changing the way companies have traditionally worked (i.e., using a tool like Microsoft Office)?

AL: Traditional enterprise software is still rooted in the old desktop-centric paradigm, where users are limited by desktop software and discouraged from sharing 'beyond the firewall.' With Cloud Content Management, we're bringing the seamless content delivery experience of the web to the workplace, making it as easy to share documents and media with colleagues or business partners as it is to share a YouTube video or photo on Flickr. When traditional Enterprise Content Management software--such as Microsoft's Sharepoint--makes collaboration too difficult, users will simply go around the system. With Box, we're empowering users to collaborate, but also giving IT departments unprecedented visibility into how content moves within and beyond their organization. The Box platform enhances productivity and collaboration with flexible workflow, organic content discovery and trackable sharing, and also connects users to other best-of-breed cloud solutions through its OpenBox platform.

FCM: Your website lists some big corporate customers. How do you answer objections about security and reliability, especially from larger organizations?

AL: Security and downtime are serious concerns whether you’re dealing with the cloud or on-site services. But like all cloud vendors, our very existence hinges on our ability to protect companies' data and have as little server downtime as possible. Maintaining servers is just one of the many responsibilities of a typical IT department, but at Box.net, it is absolutely integral to our business and we take it very seriously. Transparency is essential and we're working toward SAS70 certification, which includes regular auditing by third parties on all aspects of security--from network firewalls to authentication policies to procedures for employee termination.

Storing business data in the cloud requires rethinking security, and we’re seeing a lot of innovative IT professionals begin to embrace this new approach, which in turn frees them up to focus on more strategic and business-critical technology initiatives. As you noted, we have customers who range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, all of whom see view Cloud Content Management as a more valuable, productive and secure way to manage their content.

FCM: Does your product work with existing content management solutions? If not, how can companies using your solution provide access to content in the cloud to other employees across the organization?

AL: Because of the low price-point and open, easy sharing, companies that implement Box can easily include any employee as well as external contractors and partners as needed within the Box environment. As the need to share grows, any individual can share content with additional people in the organization. If a company needs to integrate from existing server-based solutions, they can rely on the OpenBox platform for company specific integrations or enhancements to Box. Currently we are building additional integrations with cloud-solutions such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but the same process can be used with whatever existing systems are necessary.

FCM: Your website lists search as a key component to your solution, but can an existing enterprise search solution access Box content in an enterprise search product? How would this work?

AL: Currently, we don't open up Box content to outside enterprise search solutions. However, we will release our search API shortly so that others can build search applications around our content, or integrate search into certain workflows. While we understand the usefulness of an enterprise search solution that extends across many different applications within an enterprise, we also see the major benefits of integrated search that can build increasingly efficient algorithms that includes the metadata around the files as well as the text within.