As IT organizations move forward with their virtualization initiatives,
consolidating operations and shrinking provisioning times, the cloud has come
along as an even more compelling option. In the cloud, companies can build
capacity on-demand without having to own or manage the computing
infrastructure. As companies review their application portfolios, they’ve
started to realize that many of their not-yet-virtualized apps could easily
be run in the cloud. In particular, applications that are characterized by
spikey, cyclical, or seasonal usage could benefit the most from the cloud’s
economics and scalability — but a significant percentage aren’t even
getting the benefits of virtualization.
So what’s the delay in going “P2V” (physical to virtual)? As with the
cloud, virtualization has typically percolated from the bottom up. In many
cases it crept into organization... (more)
When Rackspace first started talking with me about open sourcing their cloud
software, I was truly intrigued. The idea of releasing the software behind
their cloud was unexpected given that most cloud providers treat their
infrastructure, and particularly their control software, as a
differentiator. One of the things that make the software so valuable is the
hard earned lessons from building, scaling, and maintaining a cloud. An
infrastructure that has actually been deployed and scaled to cloud size has
real value to everyone trying to build a cloud. So when a company that ha... (more)
The Structure 2010 show was memorable for CloudSwitch, highlighted by the
launch of the commercial version of our CloudSwitch Enterprise software that
lets companies easily use multiple cloud providers to run their enterprise
applications. With a few clicks, users run their applications where they best
fit, based on their specific business and technical criteria.
So it certainly got our attention when at the Hybrid Clouds panel, Marten
Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, made a claim that Amazon’s API should be
the basis for an industry standard. Marten added that the industry shou... (more)
Corporate computing is going through a fundamental shift — moving to a
world that’s largely cloud-based, self-service, and highly virtual with
shared resources. Rather than go through their IT departments like they have
for decades, users will simply specify how many cloud servers they need and
for how long, and provision their own resources with a few mouse clicks. I
recently read an interesting post by Rodrigo Flores, observing that the
growing acceptance of public clouds is also changing the role of corporate IT
departments, and they’ll have to either adapt or die. I’d like to... (more)
Web apps were born to run in the cloud. With endless flexibility, on-demand
scaling and great pricing, the cloud meets the business and technical needs
of many enterprises’ web-based applications for e-commerce, collaboration,
marketing, CRM and dozens of other functions. With their ‘spikey’ needs
for compute resources around peak periods, web apps are often corporate data
center hogs and/or hosted at colos and MSPs at high cost.
As we work with many enterprise customers, we consistently hear the desire to
host web apps in the cloud to reduce data center costs, footprints and
he... (more)