A Network Manager's Utility Belt

Dec 11, 2008 | The vigilant network manager, like Batman looking down on Gotham, knows that somewhere out there, something bad probably is happening -- something that’s making an application go astray. ExtraHop Networks’ Application Delivery Assurance Appliance doesn’t come with batwings, but it does provide tools to hook the kind of data and insight needed to identify the perpetrators of slowdowns and other snafus clogging up the system.
Read more...

Has Cloud Computing Found its 'Killer App?'

Dec 09, 2008 | Most people talk about putting their applications in the cloud, but SOASTA has a different take. The company’s CloudTest offering brings the power of cloud computing to your application. For a fraction of what it would cost with traditional solutions, SOASTA uses VMs across public clouds to simulate hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.
Read more...

Storage Virtualization: Everybody in the Pool

Dec 05, 2008 | Relatively speaking, storage virtualization is a simple concept offering low risk and high reward. Studies say that within the next year or two, 47 percent of U.S. companies (and 61 percent in Europe) will have adopted the technology. If only it were that easy ...
Read more...

Cloud-Powered SaaS Needs No-Nonsense Backend

Dec 01, 2008 | With its infrastructure-as-a-service model, BlueLock gives its SaaS-provider customers all the IT and management they need to host their applications in the cloud. Fortunately for all involved, BlueLock found F5 Networks to manage traffic, balance load and optimize application delivery.
Read more...

VKernel Keeps Hershey 'In the Know' on Virtualization

Nov 26, 2008 | The IT team at Hershey Entertainment and Resorts adopted VKernel’s Capacity Analyzer to monitor shared CPU, memory, network, storage and disk I/O utilization trends across its VMware environment, and Chargeback, which provides details about who is using which resources and the associated costs.
Read more...

Scalpel or Cleaver: CIOs Can Show CFOs the Light

Nov 23, 2008 | Unless you secure passage to an alternate, idyllic IT universe, you’ll be hearing frequently about cutting costs in the coming quarters. Apptio brings a few twists that should be appealing in these financially interesting times, including offering its tools on a SaaS platform.
Read more...

10 Companies Spurring Enterprise Cloud Computing (Pt. II)

Nov 21, 2008 | While their customers numbers range from dozens to hundreds of thousands, the one thing these companies all have in common is innovation. From enabling computing in the cloud to encouraging hybrid cloud computing to providing an end-to-end set of cloud products, these companies' technologies strive to make cloud computing as flexible and non-threatening as possible.
Read more...

10 Companies Spurring Enterprise Cloud Computing (Pt. I)

Nov 18, 2008 | There are those who doubt cloud computing will ever permeate large enterprise in any meaningful way. Don't tell that to this group of vendors and providers, who have been supplying IT to the world's largest enterprises for decades. If their robust cloud technology portfolios are paired with determined sales and marketing efforts, these companies could play a big part in making "the big switch" a reality.
Read more...

Virtual Labs Migrate into the Cloud

Nov 14, 2008 | Almost everybody seems to agree that the cloud is not ready to house enterprise applications. But that does not mean enterprises cannot leverage the cloud’s myriad benefits. With increasing pressures to lower costs and increase efficiency, the practice of building virtual test labs in the cloud has companies drooling.
Read more...

Do-It-Yourself Web App Acceleration

Nov 12, 2008 | Step 1: Deliver application via the Web; increase flexibility and access. Step 2: Optimize performance over the Internet. Step 3 (optional): Do it all yourself, in a foolproof manner. Or so says Akamai, which yesterday announced its Configuration Manager product -- a do-it-yourself tool to port applications to the Akamai network via the company’s Web Application Accelerator (WAP) product.
Read more...

Sun's Cloud Computing Wheels in Motion

Nov 12, 2008 | So, I had a conversation with a “cloud evangelist” at Sun Microsystems, during which I noted his reference to Network.com in the past tense. That’s right, the service is no longer available (except for existing customers). Oh, and did I mention the cloud imagery in the background? Hmm …
Read more...

Rapid, Granular, Global Network Management

Nov 10, 2008 | With its distributed peer-to-peer architecture, SevOne can provide real-time performance monitoring across tens of thousands of devices all over the globe. And although it lacks the personal touch of delivering information via a messenger on horseback, that doesn't mean it's not personalized.
Read more...

Five Steps to Cloud Computing Nirvana

Nov 07, 2008 | Once you’ve started down the path of virtualization, you’re on the road to nirvana. Or at least cloud computing nirvana. At least according to rPath. According to the “cloud computing adoption model” the company recently made public, virtualization is the first step for organizations seeking to one day take advantage of cloud computing.
Read more...

10 Reasons Why Telcos Will Dominate Enterprise Cloud Computing

Nov 03, 2008 | Cloud conference regular and AT&T cloud evangelist Joe Weinman lays out 10 reasons why large, "global integrated service providers" (read: telcos) are better equipped than their Web-centric counterparts to power enterprise cloud computing and cloud services initiatives.
Read more...

The Five-Cloud Future Is Now

Oct 31, 2008 | A conversation with Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov reveals a world defined by five types of computing clouds, hypervisor- and contained-based virtualization in one product, and just about every aspect of IT being automated. But this is no distant prognostication -- Beloussov says it already has begun.
Read more...

Building a Cloud? Don't Forget Datacenter Automation

Oct 27, 2008 | As the IT world continues its march toward a service-oriented future (read: cloud computing), the spotlight continues to shine on aspects like virtualization, computing and billing models -- and rightfully so. Lost in the mix, though, or perhaps taken for granted, are automation technologies, which some believe are the foundation for any legitimate cloud computing infrastructure.
Read more...

Rackspace Gives Cloud Elite Some Competition

Oct 24, 2008 | Rackspace Hosting took to a stage in Austin, Texas, earlier this week to announce its new cloud computing initiative. The stage normally is used for “Austin City Limits” concerts -- a good fit if you consider that Rackspace wants to do for cloud computing what “Austin City Limits” did for certain types of Texas music: make it accessible to a much bigger audience.
Read more...

Is D.C. Ready for Cloud Computing?

Oct 22, 2008 | Federal systems integrator Apptis is working on a model that would allow government agencies to take advantage of public cloud computing offerings. The offering will ease datacenter pressures by allowing agencies to operate in a hybrid computing model, offloading less-security-sensitive applications and workloads to the cloud.
Read more...

DISA CIO: Cloud Computing 'Something We Absolutely Have to Do'

Oct 20, 2008 | John Garing, CIO of the Defense Information Systems Agency, believes cloud computing will be a driving force in the IT strategy within the Department of Defense. In fact, he refers to cloud computing as "something we absolutely have to do."
Read more...

At the Nexus of Grid, Cloud and HPC

Oct 17, 2008 | Taking advantage of unused datacenter capacity with its partner institutions and providers, Parabon gives customers access to high-performance grid computing resources on demand. Its offerings combine elements of both cloud computing and traditional utility computing, but the company says it really offers grid software as a service.
Read more...

IBM's Cloud Strategy: A Little Bit of Everything

Oct 14, 2008 | Following the greater trend toward hybrid delivery models combining in-house and outsourced resources, IBM has once again expanded its cloud computing strategy. Cloud users choosing IBM will have myriad solutions ranging from SaaS to global cloud computing centers to money for building a new datacenter.
Read more...

The Grid-Cloud Connection (Pt. II): Spare the Hype

Oct 10, 2008 | The advent of cloud computing has drastically affected the product offerings and solutions by grid computing veterans. Everything is about flexibility, mobility, virtualization and, overall, being on-demand. However, after seeing how quickly a nebulous term can lose favor among the user community, vendors are betting on the delivery model but not necessarily the terminology.
Read more...

The Grid-Cloud Connection (Pt. I): Compare and Contrast

Oct 08, 2008 | Burned to some degree by the confusion surrounding grid computing, many vendors have drastically cut the term from their marketing strategies. As a result, these vendors are not so quick to latch onto cloud computing. However, many of their new directions could easily fall under the cloud umbrella, and those in the know readily acknowledge that grid technologies underlie the cloud. So, what's a middleware vendor to do? How can a user tell the difference?
Read more...

Network-Attached Memory: Virtualization for Java Environments

Oct 06, 2008 | Network-attached memory is analogous to network-attached storage (NAS) in that it provides a service to thousands of connected clients transparently. As NAS is transparent underneath the file system, network-attached memory is transparent underneath the Java language. But in Terracotta's network-attached memory pool, everything can be massively scaled out.
Read more...

Oracle Shifts Grid Focus to the Application

Oct 01, 2008 | Oracle's newest candidate to solve some of IT Nation's biggest problems has now officially hit the campaign trail, and its name is WebLogic Application Grid. This new assemblage of software is meant to put grid capabilities at the foundation of an organization's computing operations by pooling IT resources and allocating them to workloads as needed. But this is one solution Oracle is not labeling "cloud computing."
Read more...

Cloud Computing and the Financial Crisis

Sep 29, 2008 | A somewhat neglected aspect of the current financial crisis is the huge spike in trading volumes in recent days. In some cases, they have raised to more than double the average of the months (and years) that preceded the crisis. Systems, of course, don't care if stocks are going up or down; they just need to handle the transactions. Cloud computing can help ensure they meet this task.
Read more...

Wall Street IT Gets the Message: More Speed, Fewer Dollars

Sep 25, 2008 | Do more with less and do it faster. That’s a pretty familiar order to anybody running an IT operation these days. At the High Performance on Wall Street conference, hundreds of financial services IT practitioners came looking to find ways to meet the demands of business that moves at the speed of microseconds.
Read more...

Banks and Outsourcing: Just Say 'Latency'

Sep 24, 2008 | A common critique of external cloud computing services is that big-time IT users, like major corporations and financial institutions, are nowhere near getting on board. That might be true for the new breed of "cloud" services, but for the financial services sector, at least, outsourcing is far from a dirty word.
Read more...

Bad News on Wall Street Doesn't Diminish the Need for Speed

Sep 22, 2008 | On the scene at Monday's High Performance on Wall Street conference, Dennis Barker reports that last week's turmoil was on everyone's mind, but the mood could have been a lot worse. Instead, the topic du jour was speed: faster transactions, faster data feeds, faster analysis, faster reporting and faster applications.
Read more...

VMware Makes Computing New Again

Sep 19, 2008 | As you no doubt are aware, VMware made news this week by announcing its Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS) and vCloud initiatives. While these “cloudy” concepts might seem like science-fiction for old-school IT types, they are just a natural evolution for the crew on the cutting edge.
Read more...

Data Integration Goes Dynamic

Sep 17, 2008 | Like death and taxes, the perplexities of data integration are unavoidable. The never-ending data explosion is just one factor. Mergers and acquisitions, globalization, outsourcing, partnerships, and regulations all contribute to the massive pile-up of data. Giving people a single, cohesive view into what would otherwise be a massive quagmire is not easy.
Read more...

Have You Heard? There's a Lot of Cloud at VMworld

Sep 17, 2008 | My Tuesday included more VMware than anticipated and less hosting than I hoped for, but that's alright. What I found out at the first day of VMworld is that VMware and its partners, like Cisco, are serious about the cloud, but that there are issues that must be addressed before VMware can offer the global, completely reliable cloud about which we've heard so much.
Read more...

Xen in the Clouds

Sep 15, 2008 | Not content with XenServer just being the underappreciated hypervisor layer of some of the world’s largest cloud infrastructures, Citrix is taking matters into its own hands. Today, the application delivery specialist launched its own cloud computing product line: Citrix Cloud Center (C3).
Read more...

Database Automation for the DBA Shortage

Sep 12, 2008 | As the amount of data continues to grow, the need for experienced database administrators is exploding. The DBA has a very specific, technical set of skills that makes the position one of the most difficult to fill in the datacenter. With only a handful of skilled database administrators, many companies will struggle to meet this demand. Database automation is going to play a much greater role for future success.
Read more...

NEC Revamps HYDRAstor for Speed, Scale

Sep 09, 2008 | NEC is ratcheting up its grid storage platform with new nodes designed to put more data in less space faster. Relatively speaking, the new HYDRAstor HS8-2000, officially announced today, beats the heck out of the HS8-1000, introduced about a year ago. NEC says the second generation boosts performance by about 300 percent and improves disk capacity by 400 percent, while also consuming less power.
Read more...

Telcos Reap Rewards of Xeround's Intelligent Data Grid

Sep 05, 2008 | Stop me if you've heard these terms before: data grid ... database virtualization ... data management ... you get the point. Well, it turns out there are different ways to tackle the same problems, and the telecommunications space currently is reaping the benefits of Xeround's federated approach to managing siloed stores of distributed subscriber data.
Read more...

SQL + MapReduce: Leave No Data Behind

Sep 02, 2008 | Greenplum, a developer of massively parallel database technology, is bringing Web-scale tools to the data warehouse. By incorporating MapReduce within its database engine, the company is giving enterprises more ways than SQL to manipulate and analyze extremely large amounts of data.
Read more...

Benefiting from Cloud Computing Technology Trends

Aug 28, 2008 | This article focuses on how Web-scale and commercial enterprises can benefit from current cloud computing technology trends to build a new class of datacenters that are more autonomous and dynamic than traditional implementations. Specifically, it explores how the change in application workloads is driving a need for accelerated file services to maintain optimized performance.
Read more...

Grid-Scale Monitoring, Open-Source Price

Aug 26, 2008 | GroundWork Open Source has been doing open source network monitoring since 2004, and probably has the most extensive system out there for large networks, on par capability-wise with the packages from the large, commercial companies. It's largest installation has more the 10,000 nodes, and the company has teamed with Ganglia to target clusters and grids specifically.
Read more...

Bring Cloud Computing Inside

Aug 25, 2008 | What if you could construct your own internal cloud within your own four walls, to maximize the benefits of the concept without being held up by its limitations? And what if you didn’t have to change your current applications or data while still being able to leverage external cloud resources where they best fit your needs? For many of us, this is, in fact, the ideal application of cloud computing.
Read more...

Database Virtualization: A Stepping Stone to Virtualization 2.0

Aug 21, 2008 | In this interview with On-Demand Enteprise, Xkoto Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder Albert Lee discusses the ins and outs of the database virtualization market, as well as the future direction of Xkoto's one-of-a-kind Gridscale solution. Currently supporting only IBM's DB2 database, Gridscale will support SQL Server within the next 30 days.
Read more...

Hyperic Focuses X-Ray Vision on Google

Aug 20, 2008 | In June, Hyperic introduced CloudStatus, a free hosted service that provides an independent, graphical dashboard view into the "general health" of Amazon Web Services. Today, just a couple weeks after a problem at the Google server farm left some users scratching their heads, Hyperic is announcing CloudStatus monitoring of Google App Engine.
Read more...

How the Other Half Does Online Bookselling

Aug 18, 2008 | As shocking as it might seem, there is more than one place to go for your online book-buying needs. AbeBooks.com, an online marketplace for new and used books, including rare and collector's editions, is utilizing Oracle's Coherence data grid solution in order to improve the online shopping experience, as well as to ease backend operations.
Read more...

Your Datacenter Makeover: Have Someone Else Do It

Aug 17, 2008 | A rethinking and overhauling of infrastructure is the kind of massive task where someone else doing it makes the most sense, especially with the cost of building, powering, and cooling datacenters rising at record rates. DataSynapse and Adaptivity propose they can do it better than most.
Read more...

Adios, App Servers?

Aug 11, 2008 | Unless you're in the business of selling servers or electricity, Pivot3's Serverless Computing probably is good news. If the technology delivers as promised, users will benefit from lower hardware costs, less energy consumption, and less rack space than a traditional approach would require. The technology creates virtual servers on the storage array, so the storage node also is a compute node.
Read more...

Cloud Computing, Virtualization 2.0 Among NGDC Highlights

Aug 11, 2008 | Not surprisingly, cloud computing was a hot topic at last week's Next Generation Data Center conference, with sessions and keynotes alike focusing on the up-and-coming paradigm (note: Merrill Lynch already is doing it). However, virtualization -- in all its glory -- was an equally hot topic, including in a panel discussion contemplating what its second generation will look like.
Read more...

IBM Spends $400M on New Cloud Computing Centers

Aug 04, 2008 | IBM | IBM massively expanded its cloud computing capabilities, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create two ultra-sophisticated delivery centers in North Carolina and Tokyo that will power the cloud-like computing model that the next era of computing will demand.
Read more...

Citrix Says Kensho Tools Mean Hypervisor Liberation

Aug 04, 2008 | Virtual appliances that can run in any virtual environment. It sounds almost like a campaign promise. But Citrix says its Project Kensho will deliver tools that ISVs and in-house IT staff can use to create application machines that will run in any of the virtual environments, be it VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.
Read more...

We've Come a Long Way Since 'Star Wars'

Aug 04, 2008 | GRIDtoday spoke with Kevin Clark, director of IT operations at Lucasfilm, to get the lowdown the IT infrastructure behind one of the world's leading movie studios. Clark tells just how critical grid technologies and high-performance networking are to Lucasfilm's work, how everyday development tasks like have been made far more efficient through virtualization, and how creative advancements continue to drive technology decisions.
Read more...

A Sandbox for Cloud Researchers

Aug 04, 2008 | The HP, Intel and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed is meant to promote open, collaborative research in cloud computing by providing large-scale environments where hardware and software designers can try out their large-scale ideas. The giants funding the program are banking on smart people in academia, government and industry to help come up with the best practices for leveraging the cloud's promise.
Read more...

The Answer to Your Backup Needs is Grid-Based

Jul 28, 2008 | Combining grid technology, de-duplication and multi-site capabilities, ExaGrid designed its disk-based backup system makes short order of data retention headaches -- even as the terabyte count keeps on growing.
Read more...

A Man, an iPhone, and the Cloud

Jul 28, 2008 | When Douglas and Brooke Porter launched Apple iPhone School to collect and share tips and tricks to help get the most of the world's hottest cellular device, they had no idea it would become a haven for hundreds of thousands of iPhone users worldwide. When they needed to scale to meet this type of demand, as well as the support requirements that accompany it, the Porters turned to Mosso.
Read more...

Credit Suisse Lineage Makes DynamicOps a Contender

Jul 21, 2008 | Impressed by the future potential of virtualization, Credit Suisse took upon an initiative to make its management as simple and dynamic as possible. The resulting technology, Virtual Resource Manager, spawned demand from competitors and led to the formation of DynamicOps. DynamicOps has plans to take virtualization to the next level, leveraging Credit Suisse's extensive experience managing massive virtualization environments and enterprise grid platforms.
Read more...

Datacenter Expansion in a Can

Jul 21, 2008 | With its new Performance Optimized Data Center, or POD, HP wants to make adding scores of high-density, highly efficient and high-performance servers as effortless as possible. The HP container can support as many as 3,500 compute nodes, or 12,000 hard drives.
Read more...

The State of Cloud Security (Pt. 2): It Starts with a Conversation

Jul 21, 2008 | Although cloud computing presents new risk of security fiascos, there are many things providers and customers can do to take advantage of on-demand resources in a safe, reliable way. These range from providers utilizing hardware firewalls to customers demanding transparency from cloud providers.
Read more...

VMware Names New CEO

Jul 14, 2008 | VMware Inc. | Diane Greene is out as president and CEO of VMware. The company's board of directors has appointed Paul Maritz as president and CEO of VMware effective immediately.
Read more...

It Takes More than Virtualization to Build a Cloud

Jul 14, 2008 | With an increase in managed hosting services taking advantage of virtualization to offer rapid provisioning and multi-node grids, drawing a line between managed hosting and cloud computing can be difficult. According to those in the know, the big differences often revolve around billing, real-time capabilities, self-service functionality and the ability -- or inability -- to handle big-time enterprise applications.
Read more...

The State of Cloud Security (Pt. 1): Fundamental Risks

Jul 14, 2008 | This first article in a two-part look at cloud computing security concerns addresses various fundamental risks, including the potential pitfalls of a shared environment, compliance issues, the weaknesses of virtualization and, of course, hacker attacks.
Read more...

Department of Defense Building a Cloud

Jul 14, 2008 | HP | HP will be supplying the U.S. Department of Defense with scalable technology to enable its Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to deploy a cloud computing infrastructure. The shared, flexible infrastructure will allow DISA to remotely provision its test and development systems through a single, secure interface.
Read more...

You Need 3,500 Servers by When?!

Jul 07, 2008 | Lest you think no one would be foolish enough to host its entire infrastructure on Amazon's EC2, we present to you Animoto. Hosted entirely on EC2, Animoto's application allows individual and corporate users to create custom slideshows, complete with photo-specific music, by just pointing and clicking. When its popularity surged thanks to a Facebook interface, Animoto was seeing 20,000 new visitors per hour, and it relied on Amazon to scale just as fast.
Read more...

Q-layer Makes Cloud-Building Child's Play

Jul 07, 2008 | The first significant thing about Delegation Manager is that, working with other Q-layer technologies, it essentially converts a virtual datacenter into an on-demand compute utility, or cloud. Second, it can give the power to build virtual datacenters to even "non-technical end-users."
Read more...

IBM Opens Cloud Computing Centers in Africa, China

Jun 30, 2008 | IBM | The new centers are designed to help clients in Africa and China tackle issues they would otherwise not be able to address. For example, using IBM's new centers, a university could access the computational power of a supercomputer to analyze data and determine how diseases might spread in a region or how climate changes will affect natural resources.
Read more...

Shining a Light into Amazon's Darkness

Jun 30, 2008 | Hyperic's new CloudStatus.com gives users an independent, graphical dashboard view into the "general health" of AWS's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and other elements of the big utility. The idea, the company says, is to provide a comprehensive, overall measure of availability, throughput and latency.
Read more...

Yahoo Realigns, Focuses on Cloud Computing

Jun 30, 2008 | Yahoo Inc. | Yahoo announced changes to its organization aimed at improving its products, technologies and execution. Among the moves is the formation of a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability and cost effectiveness.
Read more...

IBM to Open Dutch Cloud Computing Center

Jun 23, 2008 | IBM | IBM and utility-based services provider iTricity announced that iTricity will open a brand new Cloud Computing Hosting Center for Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg. Based on IBM "Blue Cloud" technology, iTricity will use the center to host computing services for its customers.
Read more...

Servers Get Multiple Personalities

Jun 23, 2008 | Scalent's V/OE allows any machine, or an entire farm of servers, to be repurposed on the fly, including all associated network and storage access topologies. With version 2.5, users can run a server as virtual or physical and go back and forth depending on their needs.
Read more...

Interface to the World Wide Cloud?

Jun 23, 2008 | If "the cloud" is going to shape up the same way the Web did, it will need a shared set of interfaces, the cloud's equivalents of HTTP, TCP and HTML. 3Tera's Cloudware architecture is about defining that first set of interfaces and creating an open framework that incorporates the basic elements -- from computing to storage to software catalogs -- and the ways in which they all work together.
Read more...

Grids are Dead! Or are they?

Jun 16, 2008 | Grid computing veteran Wolfgang Gentzsch shares his thoughts on the death of grid computing -- at least as originally envisioned. In order to survive and accomplish their lofty goals, grid projects will have to learn from the value propositions of cloud computing, and even will have to learn to incorporate clouds into grid infrastructures.
Read more...

Mission-Critical Cloud Computing? Check Back in Five Years

Jun 16, 2008 | GigaSpaces is making reliable extreme transaction processing (XTP) available on Amazon EC2, but it will take much testing and trust-building before major enterprises move their critical data to the cloud. According to one analyst, forging this level of trust takes about five years.
Read more...

HP Scales Up for the Scale-Out Datacenter

Jun 09, 2008 | Sure, the race for the White House gets most of the coverage, but HP made its own campaign announcement recently, pledging to reinforce its commitment to constituents in datacenters everywhere. As part of its new "scalable computing initiative," the company has formed a business unit to serve high-performance, high-demand computing operations, and has unveiled a blade packing two independent servers.
Read more...

Lacking 'Big Bucks,' Artists Render Movie on Sun's Grid

Jun 09, 2008 | Putting the professional finish on digital animations and composing the final product requires powerful software running on serious hardware for many, many CPU cycles. But what if you could use someone else's grid? The Blender Foundation used Sun Microsystems' Network.com service to generate the final rendering of its comic cartoon "Big Buck Bunny."
Read more...

KISS: Keep It Simple, Scientist

Jun 02, 2008 | Complexity deters many scientists from tapping into the compute power that's very often just sitting there. It's like learning how to master Excel, but on a cosmic scale: you know you could do a lot with it, but would prefer someone else do it for you. eXludus is trying to change this with its new SimpliGrid software.
Read more...

Does B-hive Acquisition Make VMware a Cloud Vendor?

Jun 02, 2008 | While its acquisition of B-hive Networks doesn't change VMware's status as the server virtualization leader, it should widen the gap between VMware and the rest of the virtualization pack, as B-hive's Conductor technology will allow VMware to target higher-end, more mission-critical applications, as well as users looking to seriously step up service levels.
Read more...

Less is More when Tackling Datacenter Woes

May 26, 2008 | The problems: low server utilization and labor- and cost-intensive support of applications. The solution: virtualization ... or grid computing ... or maybe datacenter automation. Well, it's time to throw another approach into the mix -- one that could carve out a large following if it proves as effective as it is unique.
Read more...

Hardly Terminal: Citrix Gives Web Apps a Boost

May 26, 2008 | If someone called you right now from the early 1990s and offered you a chance to invest in a little company with this novel idea -- delivering OS/2 and DOS text-based applications to multiple users over the network -- you'd probably think, "Dumb terminals, how quaint." You'd then wonder what ever happened to that little company. But here's the thing: that little company managed to stick around.
Read more...

Catching Up on Cloud: An Interview with IBM

May 19, 2008 | If there's one company trying to scatter cloud computing across the planet -- like some kind of big, blue cloud, you might say -- it's IBM. In this Q&A with GRIDtoday, Dennis Quan, chief technology officer for High-Performance On-Demand Solutions, gave us 29 minutes to recap some of the high points of IBM's busy past six months or so in cloud computing. Then he had to catch a plane.
Read more...

In Time of Need, Banks Look to Smarter Computing

May 19, 2008 | According to Platform Computing CEO Songnian Zhou, increased pressures around competitiveness, corporate responsibility, cost savings and energy consumption have the beleaguered financial services market actually increasing adoption of grid computing, as well as looking to the clouds, to compute more intelligently.
Read more...

Making Web 2.0 File Storage Cheap and Easy

May 12, 2008 | HP believes its StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage System is a stepping stone into the future of file storage, especially for the Web, differentiating itself in terms of scalability, manageability and affordability. The solution integrates storage and performance capacity in a BladeSystem chassis, and is managed by HP's PolyServe clustered file management software.
Read more...

Vietnamese Collaboration Portal Goes Live on IBM Cloud

May 12, 2008 | IBM | The Vietnam Information for Science and Technology Advance Innovation Portal will be used by Vietnamese government institutions and universities to develop education programs for service science management and engineering (SSME), an emerging academic discipline and research area that integrates aspects of computer science, engineering, management science, business strategy and social science.
Read more...

Mosso Testing S3 Alternative

May 12, 2008 | Mosso, the cloud division of Rackspace, last week rolled out a new cloud storage service that one observer says "leapfrogs" Amazon's Simple Storage Service. CloudFS is a hosted scalable system that Mosso says developers can use to securely store nearly unlimited amounts of data on the Web, and pay for it on an as-used basis.
Read more...

The Do-it-Yourself Datacenter

May 05, 2008 | Several providers are taking advantage of technology developed by 3Tera to offer customers whatever level of grid computing power they need, on a pay-as-they-go basis, but allowing a level of flexibility you don?t get with the more traditional or gigantic hosts. 3Tera also is attempting to open up the world of cloud computing with its Cloudware architecture.
Read more...

Coming Soon: Virtualized Everything

May 05, 2008 | Silicon Valley startup 3Leaf Systems has a simple vision: to take a pool of x86 servers and decompose them into I/O, compute and memory, and make each available on demand. 3Leaf has a two-phase Virtual Compute Environment approach, starting with I/O virtualization and culminating with compute and memory virtualization spanning across physical machines.
Read more...

IBM Advances 'Blue Cloud' with iDataPlex Server

Apr 28, 2008 | IBM | IBM iDataPlex is a new rack system featuring design innovations in cooling and efficiency that can help replace the inefficient "white-box" servers commonly used by Internet companies. As consumers demand richer content and more immediate access to Web-based applications, iDataPlex can allow online gaming, social network, Search and Internet companies to scale rapidly to meet this need.
Read more...

Scaling Internet Datacenters for Web 2.0 Applications

Apr 28, 2008 | Today's Web applications require continual, real-time interactions among multiple client-facing and backend servers. The entire Internet datacenter must now operate more seamlessly to facilitate Web 2.0 applications. The biggest challenge faced in today's biggest datacenters is making such seamless networking both scalable and affordable.
Read more...

Need Some Help with that Cloud?

Apr 28, 2008 | Companies deciding to use Amazon Web Services and EC2 environment don't have to get there on their own. They have a choice of providers who can help them get their online businesses up and running -- and stay up. And that's good, because even though Amazon has brought the cloud closer to the ground, there are solid reasons to let someone else launch you into it.
Read more...

Out of the Fire, into the PAN

Apr 21, 2008 | Egenera's approach to redesigning the datacenter starts with its concept of the processing area network (PAN). By turning servers and the glue that connects them into software, Egenera's approach gives customers a pool of stateless processing nodes that users can allocate to applications as needed, all under software control.
Read more...

Grid Platform Enables On-Demand e-Commerce

Apr 21, 2008 | Demandware offers an on-demand e-commerce application that online major retailers use to service their consumer-facing needs. The company's platform is like licensed enterprise software that customers can customize, extend and integrate as they wish, but without the burdens of development or delivery via computing resources.
Read more...

Google Joins Infrastructure-as-a-Service Fray

Apr 14, 2008 | Google Inc. | Google announced a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable Web apps on top of Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for Web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.
Read more...

A Bench of Power Hitters for Your Datacenter

Apr 14, 2008 | Based on a fabric computing architecture, Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ system combines processing, networking and I/O modules in a single chassis. Like having a roster full of ringers on call for the bottom of the ninth, LiquidIQ provides flexible logical pools of computing, networking and I/O that an organization can shape to meet its needs on demand.
Read more...

Clustered Databases, Meet 'The Cloud'

Apr 07, 2008 | Elastra recently released details about its Cloud Server, a server-side design and run-time application intended to help develop and launch clustered databases in a cloud environment -- currently Amazon EC2 -- with a lot less pain and cost than generally is involved.
Read more...

Oracle's XTP Sage Shares his Wisdom

Apr 07, 2008 | In this interview, Cameron Purdy, Oracle's vice president of Fusion Middleware development, discusses how customer demands for extreme transaction processing are evolving, as well as how use cases for Coherence (the data grid solution Purdy developed as founder of Tangosol) have evolved since becoming part of the Oracle software family.
Read more...

Building a Computing Resources Exchange from the Ground Up

Mar 31, 2008 | Digital Ribbon CEO Erik Weaver discusses his company's vision to create a pure exchange for computing resources, as well as the fine points of monetizing computing resources, turning a profit in the utility computing space, and what consumer applications might become the next killer apps.
Read more...

IBM, Unis Combine Autonomic, Cloud Computing

Mar 31, 2008 | IBM | IBM will collaborate with the Georgia Institute of Technology and The Ohio State University on an initiative to develop new autonomic technology for cloud computing. The effort is aimed at developing future technologies and training IT professionals required to enhance the performance and energy usage of computing applications while increasing productivity in the workplace.
Read more...

Stemming the Tide in Out-of-Control Datacenters

Mar 31, 2008 | In this executive Q&A, Tideway Systems Founder and CEO Richard Muirhead discusses how complexity is spiraling out of control in today's datacenters and explains how his company's solutions help to map datacenter interdependencies, automate processes and, generally, reduce the costs of datacenter management.
Read more...

The Virtual Evolution of Managed Services

Mar 24, 2008 | There is no doubt that managed hosting has been undergoing an on-demand transformation thanks to advances in virtualization and grid technologies, but although the underlying technologies might be similar, the available services are increasingly unique -- targeted at doing a few things and doing them well.
Read more...

IBM Announces European Cloud Computing Hub

Mar 24, 2008 | IBM | Located in Dublin, Ireland, the new facility will serve as a hub that will deliver cloud computing research and services to a number of satellite facilities to be built in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. IBM experts from these centers will work directly with clients in the region, helping them adopt cloud computing solutions that spur technology research and business development.
Read more...

Live by Excel, Die by Excel

Mar 17, 2008 | Although Wall Street firms are widely regarded as among the biggest, most cutting-edge spenders in the world of enterprise IT, operations on the trading floor are suffering from drastically limited performance and efficiency levels because of a reliance on Excel on the desktop. GigaSpaces has worked with Microsoft to develop a solution offering users an Excel frontend powered by a GigaSpaces backend.
Read more...

Virtual Management, Virtual Mess

Mar 10, 2008 | The value proposition of virtualization provides an unprecedented flexibility for capacity, but this flexibility does not come without risk. However, that risk can be mitigated so long as virtualization implementations are managed from a service perspective that incorporates an accurate end-to-end model of the IT infrastructure.
Read more...

Making Storage Access Application-Centric

Mar 03, 2008 | With its Axiom family of hardware and software products, Pillar Data Systems is allowing users to dynamically provision storage to meet the service levels required by specific applications -- something Pillar calls "application-aware storage."
Read more...

OGF22 to Answer Tough Question about Grids

Feb 25, 2008 | OGF Executive Director Steve Crumb addresses how OGF22, which begins Feb. 25 in Cambridge, Mass., will answer questions about grid technology, about OGF?s relevance, and about the future of grids.
Read more...