In July 2009 I wrote an article entitled Cloud Computing Providers — are they content providers or carriers? and in January of 2011 Chuck Hollis wrote an article Verizon To Acquire Terremark — You Shouldn’t Be Surprised. Now with the Terremark acquisition almost complete and RSA Conference 2011 also over, at which I talked to Terremark about the benefits of belonging to Verizon, a picture is starting to emerge. Yes, my predictions in 2009 make sense and still hold forth today, but is there more of an impact than we realize?
TVP Tag Archives
WikiLeaks – War in the Clouds
WikiLeaks is the most serious social and political event of the emerging Cloud. It has remained alive through a “do-it-yourself” approach as the commercial Cloud was denied to it. When the dust settles, the Cloud may well emerge different, with the rights/obligations of Cloud Services providers clarified.
MokaFive Suite 3.0
MokeFive Suite is an enterprise desktop management platform that is used to create and administer layered virtual desktop images called ‘LivePCs’ which execute as guests on a type II hypervisor. LivePC images are authored using the MokaFive Creator which also serves as a test platform to simulate and end-users experience. LivePC images can be stored on centralized or distributed file stores. MokaFive also provides support for Amazon S3 storage, which can be of significant value in managing highly distributed environments, or run directly off USB flash drives. MokaFive LivePCs are effectively hypervisor agnostic; support is currently available for VMware’s free Player and the open source Virtual Box. Beta support for Parallels Workstation is new in MokaFive Suite 3.0, and MokaFive’s own bare metal platform will be shipping in Q1 2011.
Red Hat Acquires PaaS Cloud vendor Makara to help compete with VMware’s vFabric
Red Hat today announced the acquisition of startup PaaS vendor, Makara, which provides a deployment platform for most of the Open Source application stacks onto most of the IaaS cloud infrastructures. Red Hat intends to use the purchased technology rather than the product itelf. It gains additional application-level management, monitoring and configuration functionality for an emerging stand-alone PaaS offering to drive its customers towards a fully RHEL-cloud.
ZT Systems launch commercial ARM-based cloud server
If you are a hyperscale (such as for the Cloud) data center manager, one of your top concerns is always how to get the maximum amount of computing work done per Watt of power consumed. With that in concern at the forefront Cloud Providers like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have strong incentives to explore new solutions to delivering compute cycles. Rumors coming out of Facebook suggest that it is looking to move away from its current X86 architecture platform in favor of servers based on ARM Holdings Cortex processor range. Porting an entire service to a new processor platform may not appear to be a sensible direction to take but porting to a new architecture is more a financial consideration than a technical one. If the cost per unit of performance justifies it , it is cheaper to pay a few programmers to rework the apps for a new architecture than it is to buy more servers.
Rationalizing the NRE Cloud Alliance – newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus
newScale, rPath and Eucalyptus have partnered to provide an elastic infrastructure (Eucalyptus), automated software deployment and management (rPath), and a service catalog (newScale). This provides an interesting alternative to the monolithic stack offered by VMware with vSphere and vCloud Director.