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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 …
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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."
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