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Posts Tagged ‘cloudcomputing’

Shortly after VMworld  I posted about my experience using vCloud Express. One of the things that I expected to see but found missing from the solution was the ability to perform virtual machine (VM) uploads and downloads between my own vSphere infrastructure and the hosted VMware environment. To be able to move my workloads (running on VMware VMs) from my private data center to the cloud or visa versa was an expectation I had based on the federated and private cloud discussions I’ve listened to over the past year. I expected to be able to at least manually export or import an OVF, but unfortunately did not find that capability while testing.

Before continuing allow me the liberty to reference a common expression - Can’t see the forest for the trees:

“An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole”

VMware has created the opposite scenario described in this expression with their concept of the Cloud. That is, VMware has allowed us to visualize what the forest will be before we have the trees. Of course, they had to. Was anyone besides Amazon talking Cloud before that, and if they were, was anyone even considering allowing companies to create their own internal clouds? I’d have to say VMware put the concept in my head. All I can say for sure is that I know I wasn’t listening to Cloud discussions before VMworld 2008.

Getting back to my vCloud Express testing and expectations, I was finally looking at the trees instead of the forest. I have since found some interesting information about how these trees are growing (if you will). To complete my reference, some of the details about VM transfer between private and public clouds are revealed by a VMware project has been privately referred to as Project Redwood. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu Project, has announced via the Ubuntu Development List that Ubuntu Server 9.10, which will be available in October 2009, will allow companies to build their own open source, private clouds. Mark explains in his announcement, “Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools.” Mark states that official Ubuntu based revisions of Amazon Machine Images (AMI), the operating system and software stack currently deployed on Xen Server in the EC2 cloud, are currently in beta.

However, Mark indicates that plans for the new Ubuntu Server include more than just providing for the hosted Amazon Cloud service:

“What if you want to build an EC2-style cloud of your own? Of all the trees in the wood, a Koala’s favourite leaf is Eucalyptus. The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware.”

Ubuntu 9.10 ‘s official distribution name will be “Karmic Koala” thus explaining the mascot refrence in the previous quote. (I can’t help but think about dining at the Rainforest Cafe when considering all of the Ubuntu distro names and mascots!) Eucalyptus is a cloud management interface in development by Ubuntu which will enable private EC2 style clouds. Eucalyptus is actually an acronym for Read the rest of this entry »

The Change.gov group has published a video on YouTube titled Inside the Transition: Technology, Innovation and Government. In this 4 minute video the Technology Innovation and Reform Team (TIGR) discusses how the U.S. Government has fallen behind in technology and how the new administration will implement and explore modern web applications to provide services, lower costs of operations, and provide better transparency to the people. At about 2:50 into the video, cloud computing is recognized as a way to drastically reduce the cost of Information Technology compared to traditional server infrastructure, and the shift to cloud computing will be one of the most important transformations the Federal Government will go through.

Earlier this week I posted about Obama’s Citizen Briefing Book and the need to vote up virtualization ideas for the new administration. The virtualization idea is obviously related to this video, and it’s great to see the TIGR team and the new administration focused on advancing cloud computing technology in our Government.

I found out about the video from Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of blogs and web sites are predicting that Cloud Computing will be big in 2009. Instead of offering another prediction I am asking VM /ETC readers to take the following poll about their Cloud Computing interest, expectations, and plans. The poll will run until 11:59 pm EST January 15. Hopefully the response will help put a “from the trenches” perspective on a topic that seems to be everywhere you look right now.

[poll id="4"]

Happy New Year and Best wishes in 2009!

For some additional reading here’s some links to other’s predictions for 2009. Most contain cloud computing as a topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cloud Computing in Plain English is a 4:51 long video from rPath that gives a great overview of Cloud Computing and how virtualization plays a  key role enabling all size businesses to take advantage of utility computing and software as a service (SaaS). The video is lite and humorous, and does a good job comparing traditional software to a luxury car, SaaS as a leased vehicle, and then Cloud Computing as a taxi.

Watch the video to hear how virtualization is the engine of the Cloud Computing taxi, and virtual appliances are the fuel for that engine.

I first heard about the video from Benard Golden’s CIO.com article titled after the video.

rPath is self described on their web site as

“the company that is pioneering the virtual appliance approach for application distribution and management.”

rPath also provides more information about their product offerings that help enable the Cloud Computing strategy.

“rBuilder and the rPath Lifecycle Management Platform automate the creation, configuration, management and maintenance of application images for virtualized and cloud computing environments. By producing application images that are optimized for any hypervisor, rPath frees the application from the underlying hardware, and enables a better model for development, deployment and support.”