VMware this week revealed it will launch a public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), a move it said doesn't deviate from its commitment to its partners.
Nevertheless, the launch of its vCloud Hybrid Cloud Service IaaS is a shift in strategy for VMware, which until recently had indicated it had no plans to roll out a public cloud offering. Although many had predicted that VMware ultimately would do so, rumors of its plans only began to surface a few months ago. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 23, 20130 comments
Dell this week said it is abandoning plans to push forward with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud offerings and will deliver cloud hardware and software through partners. The move came on the eve of VMware's announcement that it will launch an IaaS.
The company is discontinuing its VMware-focused cloud IaaS, while putting the breaks on plans to deliver services based on the open source OpenStack platform. Instead, Dell said it will equip and support its partners to build and host such services on various cloud platforms. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 23, 20130 comments
Dell recently announced its acquisition of Enstratius in a move that extends its push into the multi-cloud management space.
Enstratius (which until last year was known as EnStratus) is regarded as a leading supplier of premises- and Software as a Service (SaaS)-based cloud management platforms. The 5-year-old company competes with RightScale. Both offer cloud management systems that let IT administrators monitor and control various public cloud services, including those offered by Amazon Web Services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 08, 20130 comments
Amazon recently launched the Amazon Web Services Certification Program to give partners and customers access to training and validation for implementing systems and apps in Amazon's cloud.
While AWS offers a robust portfolio of cloud offerings and, rightfully, claims it operates some of the largest cloud implementations, until now it has lacked a meaningful way of ensuring its partners were certified to implement its services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 02, 20130 comments
At its fourth annual Pulse conference last month in Las Vegas, IBM announced that all of its cloud services and software will be based on open standards, with OpenStack -- the open source effort initiated by Rackspace and NASA nearly three years ago -- at the Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) layer, the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) for Platform as a Service (PaaS) application portability, and HTML 5 for Software as a Service (SaaS).
While Big Blue was an earlier participant in the project and now a platinum sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, it waited until last year to publicly acknowledge its involvement in the OpenStack initiative. Now, IBM is throwing all of its weight behind the project. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 13, 20131 comments
One of cloud computing's biggest promises is that it will reduce infrastructure costs while providing compute and storage capacity on demand. But as a pair of recent surveys show, that promise of cost savings isn't necessarily a guarantee.
In a Rackspace survey of 1,300 businesses in the United States and United Kingdom, 66 percent of respondents found cloud computing has reduced their IT costs, while 17 percent said it failed to do so. The remainder had no opinion. Yet another survey commissioned by Internap, which runs 12 datacenters throughout the United States, primarily for colocation but also for its cloud computing business, suggests that of the 65 percent of respondents who said they are considering the use of cloud services, 41 percent expect them to reduce their costs. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 07, 20130 comments
VMware's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, urged VMware partners this week to do whatever it takes to steer customers away from Amazon's public cloud.
"[If] a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever," Gelsinger told top VMware partners on Wednesday during the company's Partner Exchange Conference in Las Vegas, according to CRN's account of the event. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 01, 20132 comments
Given last week's study that found Windows Azure storage to have the fastest response times out of five large cloud networks -- beating those operated by Amazon Web Services, Google, HP and Rackspace -- this weekend's Windows Azure outage came at a particularly bad time for Microsoft.
Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud storage service went down worldwide late Friday afternoon. An expired SSL certificate was the cause of the outage, Microsoft eventually confirmed. Good thing for Microsoft that Nasuni, the vendor that ran last week's cloud storage study, wasn't testing Windows Azure this weekend. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 26, 20132 comments
In aim to make it easier for developers to automate the process of modeling, deploying and scaling their apps, Amazon Web Services this week launched an application management service called AWS OpsWorks.
AWS OpsWorks, takes management templates developed from Opscode called Chef Recipes, designed to provide flexible capacity provisioning, configuration management and deployment, while allowing administrators to manage access control and to monitor the app, the company said Tuesday. Administrators can use AWS OpsWorks from the AWS Management Console. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 20, 20130 comments
In Nasuni's second annual comparison of leading providers of public cloud infrastructure services, Microsoft's Windows Azure BLOB storage performed significantly better than last year's runaway winner, Amazon Web Services.
Nasuni is a closely-held supplier of turnkey data protection appliances that use public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers' object storage repositories as backup and recovery targets. While Nasuni officials said they conducted more exhaustive tests for the shootout, such as by benchmarking a wider range of file sizes (from 1KB to 1GB), the company only compared five preferred IaaS providers -- Amazon, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Rackspace -- compared with 16 last year. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 19, 20135 comments
Dell's 2010 acquisition of cloud integration upstart Boomi was driven by its goal to become a leading provider of connectivity from private to public cloud application services.
The acquisition seems to be paying dividends: Dell this week said its tools are used for 1 million integrations per day. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 12, 20130 comments
Lately, it seems like every day there's a software supplier or service provider offering new options to use the public cloud for storage and data protection.
The latest is Veeam Software, which this week released a connector that will let users of its backup and recovery software use any of 15 public cloud Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) as backup targets. Among them are Microsoft's Windows Azure, Rackspace's Cloud Files, HP Cloud and Amazon Web Services' S3 storage and Glacier archiving services. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 12, 20130 comments