The 10 Biggest Cloud Computing Stories Of 2010

CRN.com

Year Of The Cloud?

Many agree that 2010 was the year that cloud computing went from concept to reality. As Michael Cohn, founder of Atlanta-based solution provider Cloud Sherpas told CRN earlier this year: In 2010 the conversation changed from what the cloud is to what it can do for businesses.

And there was no shortage of cloud news throughout the year. Here, CRN takes a look at 10 stories that shaped cloud computing in 2010.

1. CA’s Billion-Dollar Cloud Buy In

Perhaps no vendor stormed the cloud computing market with more force or more capital than CA Technologies. In 2010, CA made five cloud-focused acquisitions, which brought its total spend on six cloud computing companies to the $1 billion mark over a 14 month stretch.

In 2010, Islandia, NY-based CA bought cloud authentication player Arcot Systems for $200 million; 3Tera a platform for building and deploying cloud services; Oblicore, which offers service-level management applications; Nimsoft, which has a line of cloud application performance and monitoring tools; and 4Base Technologies, a cloud consulting and integration firm. Those five buys followed 2009′s acquisition of data center and cloud utility software player Cassatt.

Add to CA’s cloud spending spree its appointment of CA and channel veteran Adam Famularo as its managing director of cloud computing in September, and it’s obvious that CA saw 2010 as the year of the cloud, too.

2. Larry Comes Around To The Cloud

After being an outspoken opponent to cloud computing, or at least to calling it cloud computing, throughout most of 2009, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison changed his tune at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in 2010.

At the show, Ellison unveiled Oracle’s “cloud-in-a-box” offering that Ellison himself called “one big honkin’ cloud.” The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server combines 64-bit x86 hardware, a total of 30 compute servers with 360 cores, with Oracle middleware such as the WebLogic server, Oracle Coherence data grid software, JRockit Java runtime software and Oracle VM virtualization software.

The system can handle 1.8 million messages per second or 1 million HTTP requests per second and uses Infiniband technology (capable of handling 40 gigabits per second) to link its internal components, has 2.8 TB of DRAM, 4 TB of read cache and 960 GB of solid-state disk storage.

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Salesforce ups ante against Oracle with Database.com launch

2011 launch might miff Ellison

TechEYE.net | Dean Wilson | Dec 7, 2010

Salesforce is to announce a new database hosting service today called Database.com at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, escalating its rivalry with database supplier Oracle.

The database offering is described by Salesforce as “open” and will allow the use of any programming language on any platform or device. This means the database can run on a personal data centre or from cloud services run by the likes of Amazon and Google, along with PCs, Blackberry, Apple and Android devices.

The service is the same database that Salesforce.com itself runs on. Various drivers for it have been developed by Progress Software, while NoSQL, VoltDB and Memcached are also supported. It already contains over 20 billion records, delivers over 25 billion transactions per quarter and has a response time of less than 300 miliseconds on average, making it a strong contender to other database offerings.

The service will operate a “freemium” price package, allowing initial setups to be made for free, with additional hosting requiring a monthly payment. The free service will allow up to three users, 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month.

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The Advent of the Cloud

Cloud Computing Journal | Jonathan Ginter | Dec 8, 2010

The Internet is going through a major transformation, shifting from the “Internet as application” to the “Internet as data provisioning system,” and from fixed to mobile platforms like smart phones and tablets. It’s nothing short of a revolution. Traditional forms of web analytics and web performance monitoring are being rendered obsolete. The concepts of “page load” or “visit” or “visitor” are quickly disappearing. Sites are rapidly becoming service-oriented providers of data to hungry mobile applications and it is already throwing a monkey wrench into management tools, transforming the way that the industry will need to think about user behavior and service levels.

The current over-emphasis on cloud technology has obscured an even larger and more important shift – the shift away from “Internet as application” to “Internet as data provisioning system.”

The tech industry has always suffered from pendulum swings and this is no different. In the ’80s, people used thin-client terminals to access centralized applications hosted on mainframes or mini-frames. In the ’90s, the industry shifted to fat clients in the form of desktop applications that offered a richer and more compelling user experience. This most recent decade saw a swing back to thin clients as browser-based interfaces took over. This allowed applications to move back onto centralized servers for easier maintenance and management. That same desire has driven the current rise in virtualization and clouds, which have allowed for the explosion of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS providers such as Salesforce, Amazon, Rackspace and Terremark.

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10 tips for managing storage for virtual servers and virtual desktops

Storage.com | Eric Siebert | Oct 2010

Server virtualization and virtual desktops can make configuring and managing storage systems a lot tougher. These 10 tips can help ease some of the stress caused by managing storage in a virtual environment.

Server and desktop virtualization have provided relatively easy ways to consolidate and conserve, allowing a reduction in physical systems. But these technologies have also introduced problems for data storage managers who need to effectively configure their storage resources to meet the needs of a consolidated infrastructure.

Server virtualization typically concentrates the workloads of many servers onto a few shared storage devices, often creating bottlenecks as many virtual machines (VMs) compete for storage resources. With desktop virtualization this concentration becomes even denser as many more desktops are typically running on a single host. As a result, managing storage in a virtual environment is an ongoing challenge that usually requires the combined efforts of desktop, server, virtualization and storage administrators to ensure that virtualized servers and desktops perform well.  Here are 10 tips to help you better manager your storage in virtual environments:

#1 Know your storage workloads. Virtual desktop workloads are very different from virtual server workloads, and the workloads imposed by individual desktops and servers can also vary dramatically. Blindly placing VMs on hosts without regard for their disk I/O usage can create instant resource bottlenecks.

You should have a general idea of how much disk I/O a VM will generate based on the applications and workloads it will host. Therefore, you should try to balance high disk I/O VMs among both physical hosts and data resources. If you have too many VMs with high disk I/O on a single host it can overwhelm the host’s storage controller; likewise, having too many high disk I/O VMs accessing a single storage system or LUN may also create a performance bottleneck. Even if you have a good idea of your virtual machine’s disk I/O workloads, it’s still a good idea to use performance monitoring tools to get detailed statistics such as average and peak usage.

And don’t forget that VMs are usually mobile and may not always be on the same host; they may be moved to another physical host using technologies like VMware VMotion. Having a group of busy Exchange servers ending up on the same host could bring the disk subsystem to its knees. If you’re using VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) to balance workloads among hosts, keep in mind that it doesn’t take VM disk I/O usage into account, it only balances based on CPU and memory usage. To compensate for that, use DRS rules that will always keep specific virtual machines on different hosts.

 

The 10 Big Stories Of 2010

CRN.com | Dec 7, 2010

The Biggest Of The Big

IT vendors continued to keep the channel on its toes in 2010 with surprise moves, hot new technology and new channel strategies (some greeted warmly by partners, others not so much). Here’s a look back at the 10 big stories that kept CRN readers intrigued.

1. HP Gives Hurd The Heave-Ho

The biggest story of the year centered on the biggest IT company in the world, Hewlett-Packard. HP took the channel by surprise on what was turning out to be a lazy summer afternoon when it disclosed on August 6 that chairman, president and CEO Mark Hurd had resigned in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal. Even more surprising was that HP’s internal investigation had actually cleared Hurd (shown) of the harassment claims, yet the company still pushed him out after finding he had violated HP’s code of conduct. Channel partners were by-and-large disappointed by the move since Hurd had made a point of supporting the channel and personally meeting with as many solution providers as he could. Their disappointment turned to puzzlement a few weeks later when HP named a relative unknown — Leo Apotheker, former CEO of SAP — to replace him as president and CEO. And then turned to a bit of jealousy when Hurd landed safely at Oracle.

2. Cisco Supply Chain Breakdown

Networking market leader Cisco Systems kicked off its annual Partner Summit in April with an apology to solution providers for year-long product shortages that resulted in a lot of frustrated customers and partners. A variety of factors contributed to Cisco’s supply chain woes, but the channel didn’t care as much about the ‘why’ as it did the ‘what now?’ Partners blamed Cisco for being too tight-lipped about details that would have helped in project planning with their customers. The lack of information, solution providers said, jeopardized their role as a trusted advisor to their customers, leaving many partners to grapple with frustration and lost sales, and leaving Cisco with some channel fences to mend.

3. Cloud Computing Impossible To Ignore

Vendor after vendor rolled out cloud computing products, strategies and partner programs in 2010, making it nearly impossible for any solution provider to avoid its implications. In one of the most visible cloud grabs, CA made six cloud-focused acquisitions throughout a 14-month stretch for a total spend of $1 billion. Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com also bet big on the cloud. Solution providers were left to wade through the buzz and try to figure out how to adapt their business models to make way for cloud. CRN spotlighted the ‘30 Cloud VARs That Get It’ to shine a spotlight on some in the channel that had figured it all out.

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Salesforce.com’s new (and free) social networking tool

Fortune Tech | Michal Lev-Ram | Dec 8, 2010

At Dreamforce, cloud-guru Marc Benioff converts Salesforce.com’s most successful product — social collaboration tool Chatter — from paid to free.

Marc Benioff wants to make enterprise software more like Facebook—social, viral and mobile. It’s all part of the Salesforce.com CEO’s master plan to extend beyond his core customer base, sales professionals.

That’s why Salesforce.com (CRM) is launching a free version of Chatter, its social collaboration tool for enterprises. Benioff announced the new product at the company’s annual user and developer lovefest in San Francisco on Tuesday morning, where he worked the crowd with his usual showmanship. (Highlights included pulling an iPad out of his pants and asking performer will.i.am what he thought of the cloud. The Black Eyed Peas vocalist said he’s waiting for the day the cloud enables him to share music with his fans in real time, as he’s creating it).

According to Benioff, the paid version of Chatter is already its most successful product to date. Salesforce.com’s biggest Chatter customer is computer maker Dell (DELL), which has more than 100,000 employees connected, though it’s not clear how many of them are active users.

The new Chatter does look and feel a bit like Facebook. It lets users create profiles, update their status and share files. It’s also free, of course, and developed to be viral—employees can send their colleagues Chatter invites. Still, the paid version of Chatter (which costs $15 a month) comes with some extra bells and whistles, like allowing users to track business data.

To be sure, enterprise-focused social networks are nothing new. From large companies like Cisco Systems (CSCO) to small startups like Socialtext, everyone and their brother is trying to embed social tools into business applications.

What’s more, social networking may be sexy, but Salesforce.com’s flagship, cloud-based customer relationship management software is still the real moneymaker. Even Microsoft (MSFT) is gunning for Salesforce.com customers. Its latest move is promising a $200 rebate to customers who switch from Salesforce.com (or Oracle) to Microsoft’s cloud-based customer relationship management software. It’s also got a new ad slogan that aims directly at Salesforce.com: “Don’t get forced. Get what fits.”

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EMC To Certify Architects For Cloud, Data Center Expertise

CRN.com | By Joseph F. Kovar | Dec. 6, 2010

EMC on Monday unveiled two new programs to train and certify customers and solution provider partners as virtualization and cloud computing architects.

The aim of the program is to help customers and solution providers, even those who do not work directly with EMC products, get the skills they need to move from virtualized environments into cloud computing, said Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC educational services.

“We believe that, no matter what type of cloud you implement, whether you do it yourself or with a partner, that the virtual infrastructure is critical,” Clancy said. “We are trying to provide those skills to the difference audiences we have.”

EMC is introducing two new certification programs for cloud architect and data center architects as part of its EMC Proven Professional Program.

Clancy said EMC is offering two types of certifications to cloud architects, the people who deliver virtualization and cloud designs in all cloud domains. “Customers are talking about the journey to the cloud,” he said. “These will be the key people leading that journey.”

The first cloud architect, the EMC CA, builds the virtualized infrastructure that leads to virtual data centers and eventually to cloud infrastructure, Clancy said. “Virtualization design will be critical to building the cloud,” he said.

The second cloud architect, the EMC CAe, is for people focusing on IT as a service, Clancy said. “The CAe will take a company’s business requirements and place them into the virtualized architectures designed by the EMC CA,” he said.

EMC is also offering a number of new data center architect certifications for users and solution providers who work with specific technologies within a virtualized data center.

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Microsoft Talks Desktop Virtualization Strategy

November 15, 2010 By Stuart J. Johnston | Datamation

As more PC managers begin, or follow through on, migrating from Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to Windows 7, they are encountering one of the downsides of staying on an aging platform for too long.

It’s no surprise that some custom applications for IE6 won’t run on Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) new operating system. What may be surprising, however, is the scale of the problem, and the impacts of dealing with it.

In a blog post Thursday, a Microsoft manager published recommendations for how customers should deal with virtualizing the environments for those applications that are mission critical.

In its first year on the market, Microsoft sold 240 million licenses for Windows 7. While many, if not most, of those copies went to consumers, a lot of them went to corporate early adopters as well.

As adoption of Windows 7 by enterprise customers gets into full swing, though, there are inevitably bumps in the road — but virtualization solutions to aid in the migration are not without at least a bit of controversy.

In fact, researchers at Gartner recently registered their views on how much impact compatibility problems with IE6 apps are having on costs and time required to make the switch.

The Gartner study predicts that by 2014, “IE6 compatibility problems will cause at least 20 percent of organizations to run overtime or over budget on their Windows 7 migration projects.” That report made several suggestions, including that Microsoft should make some virtualization products available for free to help customers make the transition.

While not directly addressing Gartner analysts’ recommendations regarding free software licenses for virtualization products, a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an e-mail, that the company is working hard to ease the migration for customers.

“To help customers take advantage of the modern desktop Microsoft makes available a significant number of resources to help organizations with their migrations to Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, including webcasts, prescriptive guidance, whitepapers, tools and temporary virtualization solutions,” the spokesperson added.

Meanwhile, on Microsoft’s Windows Team Blog, Karri Alexion-Tiernan, director of product management for Microsoft desktop virtualization, Thursday discussed three “layers” of virtualization, and some guidance as to when to use each one.

The simplest form is called “user state virtualization” and it separates a user’s data and settings from the device and instead saves that information centrally.

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EMC Breaks Q3 Revenue Record

Kevin Komiega | Storage Blog & Editor of InfoStor

EMC has reported record revenue for the third consecutive quarter as rumors swirl around the company’s potential $2 billion acquisition of Isilon Systems.

EMC (NYSE: EMC) today announced all-time record Q3 revenue, 58 percent profit growth, record year-to-date operating and free cash flow, and substantial margin expansion. As a result, EMC increased its earnings expectations for 2010 as it now expects consolidated revenues of $16.9 billion.

All in all, EMC met analyst estimates. For the third quarter, consolidated revenue was $4.21 billion, an increase of 20 percent compared with the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP net income attributable to EMC for Q3 was $649.4 million, an increase of 35 percent a year ago and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share were $0.30, a 30 percent increase year over year.

EMC’s execs point to the cloud as the main driver of its growth. In a statement, David Goulden, EMC’s executive vice president and CFO, said, “For the third consecutive quarter EMC achieved our ‘triple play’ – we gained market share, invested aggressively to capitalize on the shift to cloud computing, and increased profitability. Cloud computing is driving a fundamental change in the way IT is designed and managed, represents a massive opportunity, and is happening now in various phases across the globe.”

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Understanding cloud services: Public vs. private

26 Oct 2010 | SearchCloudComputing.com

This is part one of a four-part cloud computing roundtable featuring Technology Writer Carl Brooks and representatives from Novell, Forrester Research, ACS and Paragon Development Systems.

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