Ellen Rubin

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)

OpenStack - Advancing Cloud Computing in the Open

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)

Is Amazon the Official Cloud Standard?

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)

What IT Managers Should Learn from Public Clouds

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)

Three Ways To Do Apps In The Cloud

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)