CERN Goes Hybrid

CERN goes Hybrid: Have you heard the news that CERN is going to the cloud? The term CERN is used to refer to the European laboratory located in the northwest suburbs of Geneva snug on the Switzerland border. The main function is to provide the particle accelerators, as well the other part of the laboratory infrastructure needed to perform high energy physics research. CERN was originally established in 1954 as The European Organization for Nuclear Research. The research at the facility has moved past nuclear research and has fully expanded into one of the largest laboratories for particle physics research using the Large Hadron Collider. On an interesting side note, the main site at CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web and, historically before that, these facilities were a major wide area networking hub for sharing the scientists research with different scientists located elsewhere.

Public Cloud Reality: Support Responsibility

The Public Cloud Reality around support responsibility is not something often considered, instead we are looking at SLAs, legal documents, compliance documents, and many other items. Do we consider who is ultimately responsible when something goes wrong within the cloud? Is your Cloud provider a full partner or do they limit themselves to a small subset of the implementation? Do they have 24/7 support will be covered by the SLA, but what type of support? How qualified are the clouds support teams to help you with your application’s problems? Who is responsible?

Azure and Service Providers

We recently wrote about Microsoft’s Three Pronged Windows Azure Strategy – particularly with reference to the Service Provider offering. I’ve now had a certain amount of time to reflect on the announcement and try and work out what is going on and it doesn’t seem to constitute a wholehearted strategy to put resellers on a level playing field with Microsoft.

OpenShift — Pricing and Comparison to AWS

On June 26th,Red Hat announced a new version of OpenShift, and pricing for a future production offering (some time this year). You still can’t buy it but if you were able to buy it you’d know exactly how much it could cost – at least if you could work out what a “gear” is. Pricing allows us to start to compare it more meaningfully with other offerings. However rather than comparing with another PaaS offering, we think most people will be actually considering IaaS as an alternative, so we are going to do that comparison instead.

Enter the FrankenCloud: Or Do we really care about the Hypervisor?

There has been quite a lot of twitter traffic about the FrankenCloud recently: A cloud with more than one type of hypervisor underneath it. One example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V three and vSphere, both managed through Microsoft System Center. Another example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V, KVM, and vSphere all managed through HotLink. But is this a desired cloud topology?