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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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