Amazon Launches Glacier, Puts Data on Ice

Aug 28, 2012 | Amazon has just announced a new storage service called Glacier. The cloud giant describes its new offering as a secure, extremely low-cost storage technology for data archiving and backup. Like the name implies, the service is slow, cold and remote.
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OpenStack, VMware, Red Hat - Will the Real 'Linux of the Cloud' Please Stand Up?

Aug 21, 2012 | A search for "Linux of the Cloud" will turn up several candidates with claims staked to this honorific, among them OpenStack, VMware and Red Hat. In the race to open source cloud dominance, achieving a kind of Linux parity is the ultimate stamp of approval, but are any of these plays worthy of the bestowal?
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Red Hat Debuts Enterprise OpenStack Preview

Aug 14, 2012 | Red Hat on Monday announced its intention to provide an enterprise-grade version of the popular open source cloud framework, OpenStack. The company rolled out a preview release of its OpenStack distribution, which runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and allows companies or service providers to create Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.
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Legal Aspects of Cloud Computing

Aug 13, 2012 | HPC and grid/cloud expert Wolfgang Gentzsch conducts an interview with Paolo Balboni, scientific director of the European Privacy Association and founding partner at ICT Legal Consulting in Milan. Dr. Balboni will be featured speaker at ISC Cloud in Mannheim, Germany, Sept. 26-27, 2012, where he will be discussing the legal aspects of cloud computing.
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It's Official - Rackspace Moves to OpenStack

Aug 07, 2012 | Rackspace is now the largest OpenStack-based public cloud in the world. After a four-month beta period, Rackspace began using the open source cloud management platform OpenStack, which it cofounded with NASA, to power its extensive public cloud infrastructure. The move occurs just weeks after OpenStack celebrated its second birthday.
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Implementing Disaster Recovery Within the Education Sector

Aug 06, 2012 | Current financial pressures have led educational institutions to look for a more sustainable and innovative way of managing their services, this includes the IT infrastructure that underpins the teaching and learning. The author proposes a cloud-based solution for implementing disaster recovery and business continuity at the college level.
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When Time Is of the Egress: Optimizing Your Transfers

Jul 31, 2012 | Traditionally running scientific workloads in AWS provides a diverse toolkit that allows researchers to easily sling data around different time zones, regions, or even globally once the data is inside of the infrastructure sandbox. However, getting data in and out of AWS has historically been more of a challenge. Cycle Computing's Andrew Kaczorek and Dan Harris offer some helpful tips on optimizing ingress and egress transfers.
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OpenNebula Project Director Discusses High-Profile Deployments

Jul 24, 2012 | They say they don't invest in marketing, but OpenNebula has not gone unnoticed. While the open source cloud management platform, based in Spain, has a low-key US profile, their European and Asian presence is strong. In addition to participating in the Helix Nebula project, OpenNebula is also the core component in China Mobile's Big Cloud infrastructure, which will soon be used to provide services to more than 600 million customers. HPC in the Cloud reached out to OpenNebula Project Director Ignacio M. Llorente to get the details on these and other developments.
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CAE in the Cloud – New Business Opportunities for Manufacturers and ISVs

Jul 19, 2012 | Most manufacturers, especially small and medium businesses (SMBs), mainly use desktop workstations for their daily R&D work. Often they do prep work during the day and production runs over-night, resulting in one simulation job per day. In this article, we will investigate how breaking the CAE jobs free from the restrictions of the workstation environment and moving them to the cloud could benefit the CAE engineers as well as the CAE software vendors.
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Helix Nebula: from Grid to Cloud and Lessons Learned So Far

Jul 17, 2012 | European cloud computing is taking off as can be seen in the progress of Helix Nebula. The major pan-European cloud project announced last week that they were moving from the initial proof of concept phase to the start of the two-year pilot phase, which involves expanded proofs of concept and perhaps some additional demand side partners. Just a few months into the project, the participants discuss the challenges of migrating science into the cloud.
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Department of Defense Lays Out Cloud Strategy

Jul 17, 2012 | The Department of Defense has announced a cloud computing strategy that aligns the agency with Federal efficiency standards. It details the transition from traditional IT services, including methods to promote adoption, establish an enterprise cloud infrastructure and consolidate datacenter resources. Beyond technical details, the program also aims to overcome any cultural challenges associated with migration to cloud technology.
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Madrid Workshop Explores the Business Case for Clouds

Jul 16, 2012 | Cloud, as an abstraction, represents a flexible, ubiquitous and consistent platform accessible from anywhere at any time. Last week, the International Workshop on Clouds for Business and Business for Clouds provided the perfect meeting point for both industry and academia to explore the truth of this statement and further discuss how organizations can benefit from the myriad of available cloud models.
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Cloud APIs – Is Amazon the de Facto Standard?

Jul 10, 2012 | The availability of cloud management platforms means that pretty much anyone can create cloud infrastructure. Service providers can use these IaaS-building frameworks to make public clouds and enterprises can use them to construct their very own private clouds. On the proprietary side, the most popular such cloud OS is VMware's vCloud product – but the real action lately is on the open source side. And as the space heats up, we're seeing a resurrection of the incendiary API debate.
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In the Wake of the Higgs Boson: Helix Nebula – The Science Cloud

Jul 09, 2012 | Announced earlier this year, the pan-European cloud computing project, Helix Nebula - the Science Cloud, brings together select IT service providers with leading research institutions, CERN, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Representatives from all three centers will take part in a joint keynote session at the ISC Cloud conference, taking place this September in Mannheim, Germany. In this brief Q&A, they share their perspectives on the initiative and provide an outline of what's to come.
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Google Enters IaaS Cloud Race

Jul 03, 2012 | Google is officially in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business. Last week at the Google I/O Developers Conference in San Francisco, the search giant unveiled Google Compute Engine, a utility computing service that lets users run their workloads inside the company's vast datacenters. While the public cloud can be used for a range of workloads, Google has suggested several primary use cases, including video rendering, data analysis and high performance computing.
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Highlights from HPC 2012: Twenty Years of HPC at Cetraro

Jul 02, 2012 | The International Advanced Workshop on High Performance Computing, Grids and Clouds (HPC 2012) took place in Cetraro, Italy, serving again as a meeting point for ideas pertaining to HPC, distributed computing, and beyond. This year's event, held from June 25-29, was particularly significant because HPC 2012 was celebrating its 20th anniversary.
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Latency in the Cloud - How Low Can We Go?

Jun 26, 2012 | At the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2012 in Hamburg, in conjunction with the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC'12), VMware's HPC guru Josh Simons delivered a presentation of particular interest to followers of the HPC cloud space. The session tackled the million dollar HPC cloud question: "Are cloud computing and virtualization only useful for running throughput workloads or can latency-sensitive applications be run as well?"
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Pocket Sized Shots of Techila

Jun 26, 2012 | Cloud computing offers highly flexible and available compute capacity for a variety of applications. However, the act of provisioning those resources can be rather complicated, requiring a certain level of expertise and consequently reducing cloud adoption. In 2005, Techila was created to simplify the act of using the cloud, developing middleware to bridge applications to external compute resources.
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NASA CIO Talks Cloud Strategy

Jun 26, 2012 | Earlier this month NASA CIO Linda Cureton detailed several changes to the agency's cloud strategy. The organization migrated a number of enterprise applications to Amazon Web Services as well as deploying their "Be a Martian Project" on Windows Azure in what seemed to be a departure from OpenStack. HPC in the Cloud spoke with Cureton about the new direction and NASA’s standing with the cloud platform they co-founded.
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Introducing Software Engineering-as-a-Service

Jun 19, 2012 | The software application lifecycle broadly consists of two key phases, application development and application deployment. The various cloud models support application deployment, but application engineering and maintenance activities continue to take place on traditional dedicated infrastructure. That's where the proposed Engineering-as-a-Service (EaaS) platform comes in – to support the entire spectrum of software development lifecycle activities in the cloud.
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NYC Gets Its Cloud On

Jun 12, 2012 | One of the largest cloud events in the world, Cloud Expo is taking place this week in New York City. The four-day affair marks the 10th iteration of the bi-coastal conference, which just expanded its agenda to include the wildly-popular big data topic. With this dual- and often overlapping focus, there really is something for everyone. Partner events include the ODCA Forecast 2012, Deploycon 2012, and the RightScale conference, among others.
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Lockheed Martin Helps Define Cloud Usage Models

Jun 12, 2012 | In an interview at ODCA's Forecast 2012 in New York City, Curt Aubley, the VP & CTO of Cyber Security & NexGen Innovation at Lockheed Martin, as well as the Open Data Center Alliance president, explained that moving the market forward with open solutions enables Lockheed to have more options, avoid lock-in and get the benefits of new technologies so that they can move faster in a more affordable fashion.
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Mirantis, iSuperGrid Partner on HPC Cloud Network

Jun 04, 2012 | The possibility of resource-constrained HPC workloads being able to tap into virtually limitless cloud-based resources is enticing to say the least, but in practice, they haven't been a perfect match. Where HPC workloads run best on a customer-tailored infrastructure, most clouds are general-purpose. A partnership from iSuperGrid and Mirantis aims to address this challenge by marrying the flexibility of cloud computing with the complexities of HPC.
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NIST Guide Helps Dispel Cloud Mysteries

May 31, 2012 | Cloud services have increased accessibility to high power resources that were typically available only to large enterprises and government facilities. While the financial and technological advantages may be obvious, underlying structures that form cloud services can be mystifying to the end user. The confusion has prompted the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to publish a synopsis defining cloud technologies, including recommendations.
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Dell Enters Hyperscale ARM Race

May 29, 2012 | On Tuesday, Dell announced a prototype low-power server built with ARM processors, code-named "Copper," aimed at the hyperscale datacenter space. Enterprises running large Web, cloud and big data environments are looking to custom-built servers as a means of lowering the cost of computing. Dell will not be selling the ARM server outright, but will provide units to select customers and partners for application development and benchmarking.
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