cloud computing Archive

IBM has published an announcement of a new partnership with Chinese city Dongying. IBM notes that they are bringing cloud computing the Dongying in the hopes of making the city “smarter”. From the announcement, “Dongying will use IBM cloud technology to build a common platform to promote e-government, and support the city’s transition from an industrial to services-based economy.”

Additionally IBM noted, “IBM is helping the Dongying government build a cloud that will provide software development and test resources for software startup companies via the web through a self-service user interface.”

Dongying will create The Yellow River Delta Cloud Computing Center which will be used to foster growth in the city and help its petroleum industry develop more innovative application services.

NY-based CA has announced the acquisition of NetQoS today for $200 million in an all-cash transaction.  CA trades on the NASDAQ under the symbol CA. NetQoS had annual revenue of $56 million in 2008 and has over 1,000 active customers worldwide.

The release talks about the combined technologies of both companies and the strengths for their customers. The combined companies, “will further strengthen its ability to help enterprise IT organizations and service providers deliver reliable, flexible and cost-effective IT and business services.”

They also discuss cloud computing and note, “As enterprises and service providers become increasingly reliant on the shared infrastructure of private and public computing clouds, CA and NetQoS will provide a robust level of network and systems traffic management that will be critical to successfully delivering cloud-based services.”

From the release, “At the close of the transaction, Joel Trammell will join CA as senior vice president and general manager, and Dr. Cathy Fulton, NetQoS chief technology officer and executive vice president of Products, will join CA as senior vice president, Software Engineering. Initially, NetQoS will operate as an independent entity within CA’s Infrastructure Management and Automation business unit”. The release also notes that a “majority” of NetQoS’ 250 employees will remain on with CA.

The deal is expected to close by December 31.

Hosting company Rackspace has announced that they will be launching a Chicago datacenter in late 2009. From the announcement, “Rackspace will lease approximately 36,700 square feet of raised floor space, consisting of 5.633 megawatts of available critical load, from a subsidiary of DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc.”

Rackspace notes that their “cloud” business is what’s driving the expansion. Formerly known as Mosso, the Rackspace cloud computing division is known as the “Rackspace Cloud”. I am not sure if the entire space will be used for the cloud computing division or if other Rackspace customers will be serviced in Chicago (it looks like the latter). We currently host the CN network of sites on Rackspace.

Additional techy notes from the announcement:

• Rackspace believes that this lease with DuPont Fabros will enable it to serve customer demand more quickly and cost effectively than if Rackspace built its own facility.
• The Chicago facility maximizes operating efficiency through an enhanced power capacity and flexible design with N+2 redundancy on all major systems including heat rejection systems, generators and UPS systems.

Assembla describes their service as, “portal for software development, collaboration, and code management.” We first posted about Assembla in January 2008 when we interviewed Assembla president Andy Singleton. Earlier this year Assembla partnered with oDesk.

Today Assembla has announced the launch of their “private install” model. Private Assembla is a dedicated server that contains the same software that runs the main Assembla service.  From what I can tell, it looks like a white label plus additional features offering.

There are three options with Private Assembla: download, run in the Amazon EC2 cloud, managed option where Assembla manages the private install.

Pricing for the download option starts at $3,000 for a perpetual license and a year of support. The Amazon option starts at $1/hour and the managed option starts at $2,000/month. There are also additional options for support and installation.

This morning I attended Amazon’s Executive Cloud Computing Workshop. I was able to snap some photos and jot down some notes I’d like to share. The presenters included Werner Vogels – VP & CTO at Amazon.com and Marten Mickos – Sun SVP. I very much enjoyed Werner’s discussion – he basically took us on a tour of the history of AWS (ec2, s3, etc) and some examples of how customers are utilizing their cloud infrastructure services.

Werner explained that using Amazon web services (AWS) helps companies move from capital expenses to variable costs. The basic idea is that instead of buying enough hardware to make sure you can handle spikes, AWS can grow and shrink as needed.

Here you can see how fast AWS is growing and how in mid-2007, AWS bandwidth passed the bandwidth used by Amazon itself. Werner said if they showed 2008 on the chart, the Amazon line would be gone as the growth has been that big. In fact, he said that Amazon’s ecommerce sites combined is only a moderate customer of AWS.

On a typical product page on Amazon (say for a book), Amazon pulls 200-300 services to generate the page. Each service is managed by an Amazon employee and Amazon gives them the flexibility to build in the language and tools that best fit the needs of the service.

Here you can see the growth in registered developers for AWS. At least count it was 500,000 (I am one of the 500,000).

One of the interesting examples Werner provided came from the New York Times. They wanted to put all of their old editions online but didn’t want to utilize their current TIFF files as they were very large in size per page. They wanted to use PDF files instead. They had to convert 4TB of data and internally they looked at using 6 servers and a lot of hours of development. By using AWS, they got the project fully completed in a weekend and it cost $25 in EC2 processing and S3 storage.

Check out all of my event photos on Flickr.

Found via MadLid, Amazon Web Services is holding an Executive Cloud Computing Seminar on March 3rd. Looks like it’s worth checking out. It will be held at the Nasdaq building in Times Square. Looks like it will be half-sales, half-status updates.

Amazon describes the half-day seminar as, "this half-day event is designed to provide insight into the state of cloud computing technology today, guide you on assessing which projects are ideally suited for cloud computing, and illustrate best practices for managing cloud deployments."

The speakers include:

• Werner Vogels - VP & CTO at Amazon.com
• Marten Mickos – Sun SVP
• Michael Crandell - CEO and Founder of RightScale

If enough CN’ers attend, we could do a group lunch afterwards.

Mosso, Rackspace’s cloud hosting division has announced a new partnership with Limelight Networks today that allows Mosso customers to use Limelight’s content delivery network (CDN). Mosso notes that, "this union brings unlimited online storage, scalable content delivery, and application acceleration services, thereby allowing businesses to more easily and affordably distribute content to millions of end users around the world."

If you are new to CDN services, the simple concept is that servers are placed around the world and depending on where you are located, you get served via the closest or most appropriate server. CDNs cut down on the hops back and forth to handle a request.

Mosso’s pricing for Cloud Files with CDN starts at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 22 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth from any edge location around the globe. Stored files can be up to 5gb in size. Apparently you can activate the CDN service on any file by accessing it via the Mosso admin control panel. It makes sense for large video and audio files along with large volume sites.

As many of you know, we are hosted on Mosso. Mosso has continued to improve reliability and customer service since we joined back in March. However, when I see deals like this I get excited for the possibilities but wish that they would spend more time making Mosso work like a normal webhost. There are several items including IP addresses referrals (every user looks the same) that just don’t work right and cause big issues when trying to process users appropriately.

Last month Mosso/Rackspace announced their cloud computing strategy.