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Upcoming Webinar
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Webinar
Thinking about making the cloud a powerful extension of your enterprise IT infrastructure, but not sure how to get started?
Join us for this free live webinar to learn how to make the cloud work for you. CloudSwitch and LTech are working with market-leading enterprises who want to run their applications simply and securely in the cloud. LTech delivers a suite of services and tools for enterprise cloud deployments. CloudSwitch’s award-winning software bridges the enterprise data center with cloud computing services, extending enterprise security and control into the cloud. With CloudSwitch, existing applications can be moved to the cloud with point-and-click simplicity and no modifications, remaining tightly integrated with enterprise data center tools and policies.
Together, CloudSwitch and LTech will showcase a joint solution that enables enterprises to get started in the cloud in 4 easy steps:
1. Select multi-tier applications and workloads best suited to the cloud
2. Address critical security concerns to meet the requirements of CSOs and risk management
3. Point-and-click your selected applications to the right cloud
4. Plan for ongoing management, scaling and orchestration using existing enterprise tools & processes
The presentation will include a live demo of CloudSwitch software and real customer use cases highlighting best practices in cloud architecture and deployment.
Presenters:
Michael DeSilver, SVP, Cloud Services, LTech
Ellen Rubin, Founder & VP Products, CloudSwitch
Damon Miller, Director of Technical Field Operations, CloudSwitch
Find More Events >>
New Content
- Article: The Next Generation of Cloud Computing Platforms
Ignacio M Llorente - Full Professor & Head of Research at the Complutense University of Madrid
Cloud Computing is transforming the way we use the web but there's still a long way to go before we make full use of the promise it offers. Professor Ignacio M Llorente looks ahead to a more flexible and agile future of internet-enabled service provision in a virtual computing environment.
- Article: The Future Cloud Should Fend for Itself
James Urquhart - Manager, Cloud Computing & Virtualized Data Center Marketing at Cisco Systems
It is fascinating the ways in which the world of computing can be made easier, thus creating opportunity for new complexities - usually in the form of new computing technologies. It's happened with programming languages, software architectures, computer networks, data center design, and systems virtualization. However, nothing has raised the bar on that concept like IT automation.
- Article: Geospatial Cloud Computing in Support of National Policy
Kevin Jackson - Engineering Fellow at NJVC, LLC
The Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, feels the need to infuse geospatial information into the national policy decision making process. To demonstrate this point, he highlighted that even though high rates of healthcare fraud can be linked to specific locations, there is a lack of a national geodata standard that could potentially hamper the consistent enforcement of a national policy in this area.
- Paper: Cloud Storage ROI: A Business Model for the Enterprise
Steve Lesem - President & CEO at Mezeo Software
This paper identifies the key enterprise business drivers for cloud storage, and provides a model that helps organizations quantitatively evaluate if implementing a private storage cloud is the best option for them.
- Article: Many Roads to the Cloud
By Doug Bartholomew
While some CIOs are in the express lane, most are taking a slower approach to cloud computing. Two cloud computing factions are forming among large-enterprise CIOs today – those in the fast lane, and those proceeding more cautiously. Taser International, which sells handheld electronic protection devices to more than 15,000 police agencies around the globe, clearly represents those moving full steam ahead.
- Article: Information Governance in the Cloud: What to Consider
By Reed Irvin, VP Product Management, CA Inc
Detailed service agreements can identify and reduce compliance gaps later on.
IT innovation is becoming a key business strategy in the global economy. Among these innovations, cloud computing is emerging as perhaps one of the most pervasive and strategic IT practices.
- Article: OpenStack: Will it Prevent the Cloud Mono Culture?
Kamesh Pemmaraju - Leading Research on Cloud Computing at SandHill
This article provides insights into evolution of cloud standards and how OpenStack can position itself to be the open source, open standards based alternative for proprietary stacks like Amazon, Microsoft etc. Randy Bias of CloudScaling.com shared his perspectives on where OpenStack is going.
- Article: Channel Strategies for the Cloud
Kamesh Pemmaraju - Leading Research on Cloud Computing at SandHill
Cloud companies have gained successes on the back of the cost savings, rapid innovation, and easy to use value propositions compared to their on-premise predecessors. But for them to really create a massive exodus of companies towards the cloud, they have to engage with the Channel. Because the opportunities for large implementations/upgrades might be dwindling, the pure-play SI vendors need to re-focus on subject matter expertise, high touch value-added services that still need to be delivered. Channel partners now have an opportunity to go up the value chain instead of low-end activities like hardware upgrades, helpdesk, maintenance and so on.
- Article: Do You Need a Cloud Strategy?
Kamesh Pemmaraju - Leading Research on Cloud Computing at SandHill
Recently, a client I was helping with a cloud effort asked me the question, "Do I need a cloud strategy?" That prompted me to share in this blog post series what I have learnt about cloud strategies from my work with my clients and from the insights gathered interviewing forty CIOs and tech executives (see our recently completed cloud research report for details). What I'm generally finding is that individual business units and departments in mid-tier and large enterprises are using cloud services in isolated pockets to solve specific and tactical problems and for the most part they are getting quick and successful results.
- Article: The Evolution of Platform-as-a-Service and Microsoft Azure
Kamesh Pemmaraju - Leading Research on Cloud Computing at SandHill
I spoke with Microsoft's Matt Thompson about the evolution of Platform-as-a-Service and Microsoft's cloud strategy. Matt explained what is exactly meant by Microsoft's "Services plus Software" and Steve Ballmer's "We are all the in cloud" messages. He shared valuable information about current and future product-line strategies and roadmaps and how they align with Microsoft's overall cloud vision.
- Report: Leaders in the Cloud Research Study Survey Findings
Kamesh Pemmaraju - Leading Research on Cloud Computing at SandHill
The Sand Hill Group’s new study “Leaders in the Cloud” conducted in-depth interviews with forty CIOs and tech leaders and surveyed more than 500 IT executives. The combination of these two research efforts provides unparalleled insight into customer perceptions of cloud computing, current and planned cloud initiatives, adoption drivers, business and technological benefits. The following pages contain a summary of selected findings from the survey of IT executives.
The “Leaders in the Cloud” report also contains more than a dozen use cases from a diverse group of industries which demonstrate the real business value being achieved, as well as the latest best practices and lessons learned from real-world cloud projects.
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Featured Stories
The architecture chosen by first-generation cloud providers borrows heavily from the server consolidation and virtualization era. The major difference is that the pools of compute cores are now being deployed as public-facing services, versus running the previous generation of siloed applications. Unfortunately, the resulting inefficiencies prevent full realization of the Cloud promise of truly low-cost, high-performing, elastic computing. In response, Joyent has emerged as a second generation provider, rethinking fundamental cloud architecture, and ushering in the era of what they call “Smart Computing.”
Read More >>
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Cloudbook Magazine - August 2010
Social networking has grown to dominate not only online marketing but all of consumer marketing. The 800 pound, strike that, the 8,000 pound gorilla known as Facebook has created a new means for brands to weave into people’s daily lives, 24/7. Delivering a successful, always-on, viral campaign that scales at Facebook scale can be ominous, unless you become a social network insider.
Read More >>
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Cloudbook Magazine - July 2010
Seems like every great battle has a good guy, a bad guy, and perhaps an even uglier monster of a thing to contend with. Volumes of unstructured data are metaphorically rusting in places like behind enterprise firewalls, not being used to their full potential. In fact, some estimates put it at 80 - 85% of all potentially usable business information originates in unstructured form.1 And whether this data represents patient health-care records, vital customer interactions, potentially fraudulent insurance claims, or comments regarding your company circling around social networks, all forms of businesses and consumers might benefit greatly from the development of new applications that unlock this data’s full potential.
Read More >>
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Cloudbook Magazine - August 2010
“Today, enterprises and service providers that are interested in launching cloud computing services face the difficult task of integrating complex software and hardware components from multiple vendors. The resulting system could end up being expensive to build and hard to operate, minimizing the original motives and benefits of moving to this new model,” said Sheng Liang, founder and CEO of Cloud.com, a provider of open-source cloud computing software.
Read More >>
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Cloudbook Magazine - August 2010
Few topics have dominated the political news cycle over the past year more than healthcare reform. Aside from political debates in Washington, the technology industry continues to buzz about cloud computing. It may seem, at first glance, that health care reform and cloud computing are unrelated, but TripleTree’s research and investment banking advisory work across the healthcare landscape are proving otherwise; the linkage with cloud is actually quite significant.
Read More >>
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Cloudbook Magazine - June 2010
It’s important to realize that the underlying architecture chosen by these first-generation cloud providers borrowed heavily from the server consolidation and virtualization era. The major difference was that the pools of compute cores were now being deployed as public-facing services, versus running the previous generation of siloed applications. Unfortunately, the resulting inefficiencies prevent full realization of the Cloud promise of truly low-cost, high-performing, elastic computing. In response, Joyent has emerged as a second generation provider, rethinking fundamental cloud architecture, and ushering in the era of what they call “Smart Computing.”
Read More >> |
New Content
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The Cloudbook Magazine: August 2010
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Build Your Own Cloud?
With the emergence of cloud computing, the community of writers, suppliers and consumers needed a monthly magazine that reflects both what’s happening and allows contributors to tell us why.
We invite you to take a look at the August edition of the Cloudbook Magazine. Links are included for all article summaries so you can easily get to the original content.
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New Contributors
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New Cloudbook Content
- Article: Facilitating Brand Ambassadors at Facebook Scale
Cloudbook Magazine – August 2010
By David Macias and Vince Vasquez
Social networking has grown to dominate not only online marketing but all of consumer marketing. The 800 pound, strike that, the 8,000 pound gorilla known as Facebook has created a new means for brands to weave into people’s daily lives, 24/7. Delivering a successful, always-on, viral campaign that scales at Facebook scale can be ominous, unless you become a social network insider. Rafi Jacoby, Director of R&D at Context Optional, discusses how Context Optional assists brands to become social network insiders.
- Video: Brands Get Social
Rafi Jacoby - Director of R&D at Context Optional
Rafi Jacoby, Director of R&D at Context Optional, discusses how Context Optional assists brands to become social network insiders.
- Video: Context Optional Runs on Joyent
Rafi Jacoby - Director of R&D at Context Optional
Rafi Jacoby shares his experience running Context Optional’s infrastructure on Joyent’s cloud.
New Content
- Article: The Promise and Reality of the Cloud
Rafi Jacoby - Director of R&D at Context Optional
A Recap of Rafi Jacoby’s talk at GigaOm Structure 2010
The Director of R&D at Context Optional had the opportunity to speak at GigaOm Structure 2010 on a panel titled “The Promise…and Reality…of the Cloud” a workshop hosted by their cloud hosting provider, Joyent. The panel included representatives from Dell, AKQA, and Fwix. Each company’s spokesperson represented a different perspective of the cloud: selling private clouds. Launching on the cloud, or moving projects into the cloud to avoid being a hosting business.
- Video: Insights on the Future of Cloud Computing
Lew Moorman - Director of R&D at Context Optional
Rackspace Hosting's Lew Moorman reviews the rise of cloud computing and offers insights on the future of the Cloud at Ingram Micro's Cloud Summit conference.
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Content Highlights
This series of videos gives a complete overview of the Joyent Smart Computing Platform. It starts with an introduction by David Young the CEO and Co-Founder of Joyent. Then moves on to Adrian Ludwig, the VP of Marketing, as he discusses how Joyent improved upon traditional and virtual architectures with their SmartMachines, SmartDataCenters and SmartPlatforms. Adrian then gives a detailed view of the Joyent Smart Computing Architecture with the use of a chalk talk format.
Also included is the supporting webinar: Is Cloud Computing as we know it broken?
Where David Young challenges the status quo in cloud computing, asking whether customers really want to put the same old OS in the cloud, or whether they'd prefer not to worry about the OS at all and simply focus on making their applications more performant and scalable. David illustrates how Joyent's Smart Computing fixes what's broken in cloud computing and exceeds customers' needs for performance, scalability, security and economy.
You can also read the follow up article from the June issue of the Cloudbook Magazine: A Look At How The Second Generation Cloud Provider Offers A Solution.
Watch the Complete Story Now >>
- Video: CloudSwitch Enterprise
For enterprise IT organizations that want to run Windows and Linux applications in the cloud simply and securely, without re-architecting the application or changing management tools and policies.
- Video: CloudSwitch Explorer
Explore the cloud now with our FREE version. Move up to five VMware virtual machines to the Amazon EC2 cloud simply and securely with no modifications. Supports Windows and Linux apps.
New Content
- Article: A Challenge to Enterprise Architects: Think Innovation
Melvin Greer - SOA and Cloud Computing Chief Architect & Sr Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin
When someone mentions enterprise architecture, innovation is not one of the first thoughts that come to mind. Enterprise architecture conjures images of blueprints and schematic charts that show relationships among business processes and information technology systems. But Melvin Greer is trying to get the message to government that enterprise architecture can indeed be a catalyst for innovation, especially in areas of cloud computing and cybersecurity. Greer talks about enterprise architecture and innovation, cloud computing, and service-oriented architectures.
- Article: Shopping the Cloud: Performance Benchmarks
Geva Perry - Founder & Blogger at Thinking Out Cloud
As cloud computing matures - meaning it is being used by increasingly larger companies for mission critical applications - companies are shopping around for cloud providers with requirements that are more sophisticated than merely price and ease-of-use. One of these criteria is performance.
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Upcoming Webinar
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Webinar
Thinking about making the cloud a powerful extension of your enterprise IT infrastructure, but not sure how to get started?
Join us for this free live webinar to learn how to make the cloud work for you. CloudSwitch and LTech are working with market-leading enterprises who want to run their applications simply and securely in the cloud. LTech delivers a suite of services and tools for enterprise cloud deployments. CloudSwitch’s award-winning software bridges the enterprise data center with cloud computing services, extending enterprise security and control into the cloud. With CloudSwitch, existing applications can be moved to the cloud with point-and-click simplicity and no modifications, remaining tightly integrated with enterprise data center tools and policies.
Together, CloudSwitch and LTech will showcase a joint solution that enables enterprises to get started in the cloud in 4 easy steps:
1. Select multi-tier applications and workloads best suited to the cloud
2. Address critical security concerns to meet the requirements of CSOs and risk management
3. Point-and-click your selected applications to the right cloud
4. Plan for ongoing management, scaling and orchestration using existing enterprise tools & processes
The presentation will include a live demo of CloudSwitch software and real customer use cases highlighting best practices in cloud architecture and deployment.
Presenters:
Michael DeSilver, SVP, Cloud Services, LTech
Ellen Rubin, Founder & VP Products, CloudSwitch
Damon Miller, Director of Technical Field Operations, CloudSwitch
Find More Events >>
New Content
- Article: Do VMs Still Matter in the Cloud?
John Considine - Founder & CTO at CloudSwitch, Inc
There's a long running debate about the true role of Virtual Machines (VMs) in cloud computing. In talking with CTOs at the large vendors as well as the "Clouderati" over the last two years, there seems to be the desire to eliminate the VM from cloud computing. While the argument is appealing, and there is growing support for the idea, there are compelling reasons to keep the Virtual Machine as the core of cloud computing.
- Article: Hedge Your Bets in Cloud Computing
James Urquhart - Manager, Cloud Computing & Virtualized Data Centers Marketing at Cisco Systems
Debates flare up all the time about what is the "right" way to consume cloud computing. Public cloud providers push for ditching your data center in favor of pay-per-use services delivered over the network. Many hardware vendors claim that the enterprise's road to cloud computing is through the operation of private clouds. Which argument do you buy? How should you plan to deploy and operate your IT resources over the next 3, 5, even 10 years? Possibly you should consider not choosing at all. There are so many variables that no one can predict how the transition to cloud computing will take place.
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