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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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