Once again I’m bringing the juice on what’s occurring out there in cloud-land. This week I’m adding something new into the mix though, some personal views on the news and what it means to us.

1. Infinite storage for $10 per month. I love disruption, everyone gets all frothy around the lips and points their fingers in either excitement or disapproval. Bitcasa have come out of stealth mode with the announcement last week that their offering will be unlimited cloud storage, encrypted at source (your local machine) and available anywhere for $10 per month. They actually pitch the service as being an unlimited hard drive where you keep and access EVERYTHING and the stuff you use most get’s cached on your local machine for speedy(er) access. If you’re interested you can sign up for the beta here.. https://www.bitcasa.com/beta-signup?share=3301648560    My thoughts are that this is too good to be true AND too good to pass up on. For any group working together on stuff, the ability to dump / sync / keep files ‘out there’ and have them immediately accessible both from specific machines and from an HTML5 portal is a thing of beauty, however there’s no news on what kind of locking will be in place, or if editing in two places will break anything. I’m also interested in a purely academic way to see how the ‘streaming’ of files down to clients will be achieved and what limitations there will be in terms of access to use of those files while they are coming down the pipe. I guess we’ll see when the beta opens and some feedback starts appearing.
2. Business Intelligence for everyone. We Are Cloud is launching Bime 3.0 (I’m guessing that’s pronounced “B. I. me”, but that also sounds like some kind of dodgy solicitation!) which provides a suite of analytics on a SaaS basis with the ability to connect to almost any data source. It seems like we’ve been waiting a long time for this, there have been pseudo-cloud BI solutions but they’ve usually required some kind of local installation to be done, this is all out there. Starting at $60 per user per month for analysts (viewers of BI dashboards are free) this seems like a pretty sweet deal! There’s no issue with data security either as you can choose to use secure storage, Deja Vu (delivered on S3) or just ‘in memory’ and nothing goes up to the Bime servers. You can find Bime at http://bimeanalytics.com/    I think that this has got to be worth keeping in the back of our minds as we deal with organisation who are looking to drive more and better value from the systems they have or are considering adopting.
3. Microsoft shows how “all in” includes hybrid working too with AX 2012 launch. The AX 2012 launch address identified some Azure-based tools designed to work with AX 2012 – Rapid Start, Payments and Commerce services. OK these may be ‘small beer’ when we look at what a full-blown SaaS solution would consist of, but it’s a significant start and also shows that Microsoft is going to start leveraging the Azure Platform more and more in it’s Enterprise-grade solutions. A search on “AX 2012″ will bring up the relevant articles and http://microsoft.com/dynamics is the home for all things.. Erm Dynamics!  So why do we care too much? Easy, this is good conversation fodder. That key systems like AX (which has a pretty significant user base in Public and Private sectors) is starting to use services like Azure to support it’s delivery shows that Microsoft (and others if you look at Oracle and SAP) at making the move towards “Cloud” delivery. We’re not an AX house, but we do understand the paradigms in play.
4. Windows 8 will bring much goodness to the IaaS story. At least that’s what I’m gleaning from the information available after the unavailing of feature sets at BUILD last week. The VM handing in Hyper-V has been improved significantly – How about 63-node Hyper-V clusters that can run up to 4000 concurrent VMs simultaneously? Yes, apparently that was demonstrated live to the attendees, as was the ability to beam a running VM from one node to another over the IP network work in realtime with no shared storage. This is very significant and, along with the other enhancements such as the extensible virtual switch and the Hyper-V replica VM, answer most, if not all, of the questions which we still had about the technologies. There’s a briefing over at Microsoft: http://bit.ly/p52kS0 and an article over on ZDNet: http://zd.net/rdlWcS   This is hugely significant for us, I’m already working with Dan Spencer to see what the new features might mean to our reference architectures and how we can drive adoption at even lower price points / implementation overhead. There is a huge mountain to climb to even get close to VMware’s market share and that’s where this is going to be pitched, of that I have no doubt. I’m getting prepared for the questions and “So does this mean…?” questions already.

Catch you next time!

Here’s my pick-of-the-news…

1. Cloud Management seems to be where to money is flowing at the moment with 3 organisations popping up in my field of vision. Convirture launched it Convirt Enterprise Cloud management suite supporting Xen, KVM, OpenStack and Eucalyptus (no Hyper-V again I notice). Wanova has raised $10M in funding to continue development and delivery of it’s desktop virtualisation and management set “Mirage” and 6fusion have secured $7M in a second round of funding for it’s management solution UC6. The products all tackle “Cloud management” from different perspectives but the interesting thing is that we’re moving beyond the ‘we should use cloud’ stage and into the ‘we should use cloud better’ phase of adoption.  Details can be found at convirture.com, wanova.com and 6fusion.com respectively.
2. On the back of my piece talking about the storage of data and the implications of it’s location, Nirvanix announced that – to allay fears for it’s customers in the Node 4 datacenter in New Jersey about potential outages due to the bit of rain and wind that they had – customers could move their data to another location free of charge. Nirvanix have DC’s in the US, Germany and Tokyo and offering this ‘anticipatory staging of data around disasters’ (words of Wikibon.org Analyst David Vellante) looks like providing customer with exactly the sort of flexibility they need and have never been able to have before. This my friends is the power of “Cloud” services! Nirvanix is at nirvanix.com
3. PaaS cloud to go! VMWare announced the beta release of ‘Micro Cloud Foundry’ ahead of the VM-world event this week. I talked about Cloud foundry a few weeks ago but it’s basically a PaaS service built on the VMware virtualisation stack. Micro Cloud Foundry is a version of the solution which can be installed a run on a single developers laptop to enable applications to be developed without the need to be permanently connected. Or “combines the flexibility of local development with the ability to deploy and scale their application anywhere in the future.” Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a virtual machine image and can be found at micro.cloudfoundry.com
4. Horizon wins three Federal Cloud deals. Horizon Data Services has landed not one, but three deals for Federal  government agencies just one month after being granted an Authority To Operate (“ATO”) as a cloud services vendor to the US Government. Horizon’s vStructure IaaS platform, is available for enterprise as well as government organisations. Details can be found at horizondcs.com/

Hopefully sometime soon I can start reporting the good things happening with Microsoft’s technologies… All this VMware news is frankly getting a little bit boring! Roll on System Center 2012!

1. Sprint to launch Cloud services this year. Unlike it’s rivals Verizon who bought themselves a “Cloud Service Provider” in Terremark, Sprint intend to offer their  services from their existing datacenter capacity and will be offering collaboration software services as well as infrastructure as a service. There’s no word yet on what the software offerings will be, but Sprint’s customers are apparently crying out for this kind of thing “it’s the no 1 topic of conversation” according to Paget Alves, Sprint’s head of Business Markets. Choice and competition in the markets is always a good thing and will make sure that ALL of the providers continue to ‘up their game! http://cnet.co/oio3v0
2. Azure is to get cheaper for smaller organisations. Microsoft has announced that, as from 1st October, the price of the extra-small compute-hour will be reduced by 20%. Good news, but also announced is the new that all compute time will reported at the small compute-hour level. This does seem a little confusing but the easy way to think about this is that 1 small compute-hour will equal 3 extra-small compute hours for billing purposes and that customers will now be able to switch between the models based on their requirements. Over all this is designed to get more and smaller developers interested in using the Microsoft Platform for application delivery. http://bit.ly/pRbV1v
3. It’s the week of the Could operating Systems – or so it seems. Nimbula have launched their Nimbula Director as “the first Cloud Operating System able to run geographically distributed clouds, meanwhile Joyent believe that their CoudOS – which interestingly they’ve released into Open Source – is the “only modern OS”. Now both of these systems have adopted KVM as the underlying hypervisor which makes them attractive for migration and adoption, but I’m still reserving judgement on the viability of these in the broader market. We’ll have keep an eye on the new tech emerging though, you never know it might just work! Nimbula announcement http://zd.net/nGgx86 Joyent details: http://joyent.com
4. Amazon continues to add to it’s AWS portfolio. VPC – Virtual Private Cloud – is one, although I’m not really to happy with that choice of words.. And AWS GovCloud is another. GovCloud aims to provide US-centric services capable of being used by Federal Government agencies and departments. It’s funny but I’m sure that GovCloud is already out there somewhere…
5. An Office365 outage was caused by “a networking interruption” and scuttlebutt is saying that it was some Cisco kit which failed – although no-one is confirming or denying that! Microsoft are offering a 25% refund to customers affected but he 3-hour service outage and assure them that “the datacenter’s networking facilities have been remediated”. Now I keep saying that this is all good, solid learning experience and things can only be improved as a result, but really.. They aren’t making our lives easier are they?! http://zd.net/oL2ciu
6. And Finally! Yes I’ve another “and finally” cloud story for you.. An airport was closed this week when what was believed to be a UFO was seen overhead. The perceived threat turned out to be… well of course it was a cloud. A punch-hole cloud in fact, usually cause by aircraft transiting  a layer of trapped water vapour – over an airport! Who’d've thunk it!! http://exm.nr/pxWqKr

TTFN – Out!

It’s that time of the week again so here are my pick from the Cloud-based news:

1. Zenith Infotech are seeing continued and significant growth in adoption of their cloud services. SmartStyle is a IaaS solution offering desktop and server virtualisation and MirrorCloud is about business continuity and data restoration using the SmartCloud platform. Of interest is Zenith’s choice of virtualisation solution in that they have chosen to use Virtualbox a type 2, or hosted hypervisor instead of something like Hyper-V which sites directly on the hardware – know as a type-1 hypervisor. The benefits of using a type-2 solution are that pretty much any hardware can be used as there is no requirement for virtualisation support (Intel VT-x or AMD-V). Personally I’m sceptical of the long term use of hosted hypervisors like VirtualBox, but the ability to export the VMs in OVT format means that migrating to a type 1 solution would be relatively painless. http://www.zenithinfotech.com/
2. Training VARs – Techdata have announced a TDCloud Academy solution for Microsoft, the “Microsoft Cloud Academy”, to support resellers in gaining more Cloud business. Interestingly you have to align yourself with TechData as the distributor of choice with Microsoft to be eligible for this offering (I’m sure there is a reward back there for TD). This is the first designated and structured VAR training I’ve seen – info at http://techdata.com/content/tdcloud/support.aspx
3. Private PaaS – Cumulogic – built by former Sun folks – have released as beta their scalable cloud platform for running Java applications. The PaaS solution runs on top on cloud infrastructures including Cloud.com, Eucalyptus and VMWare and they team are working on compatibility with OpenStack too (no news on Hyper-V). Platform-as-a-Service gets less press than SaaS or IaaS at the moment, but it’s future is strong I believe. This offering from Cumulogic  demonstrates that others do to. http://cumulogic.com/
4. HTC – not a name I thought I’d be including but the mobile hardware manufacturer is extending it’s reach with he purchase of Seattle-based Dashwire who build software for cross-platform content synchronisation. This is a strategic move for HTC as it provides them with a set of patents independent from this held by the other phone system vendors, including Microsoft. It also adds to the value-add of the HTC platform for it’s customers as the Dashwire services will be added to the HTSense.com portfolio. http://bit.ly/pDLFAa
5. Inside Microsoft’s “Cloud” DCs – As we are all banging on about Office 365 at the moment I found it interesting to get – a little – background information on the Microsoft DCs and how they’ve evolved over the years. The Microsoft GFS team have some cool videos to see and they’ve got some nice reference points for us to use too! http://www.youtube.com/user/MSGFSTeam

Have a good one!

Once again it’s that time of the week.

1. Project “Daytona” bringing iterative MapReduce to Azure for Scientists. The massive data processing system has been produced by Microsoft as an alternative to Hadoop and will, so say the Microsoft Research folks, allow scientists to take advantage of the massive compute resources available without needing to learn about cloud programming. Here’s the inform from the MS site: http://bit.ly/qiYwhF
2. OpenStack turn 1 year old. The open source cloud OS has blitzed all expectations, including those of RackSpace who started the project, in terms of both interest and uptake with Cisco, Citrix and DELL now among those contributing. Outside of the “Big Brands” OpenStack is going to be of significant interest to folks over the next 12 months. http://bit.ly/oXffLi
3. A report from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) shows how organisations have saved millions of dollars through a move to Cloud services or to the technologies  underpinning those services. The report cites both real-life examples (Boeing, Novartis and Citigroup) along with some general examples for digestion and reference. Article here: http://bit.ly/n1y5fu  There are detractors from this report however, the GreenMonk http://bit.ly/nxDHqA provides an interesting perspective on the assumptions which CDP (and others) use in their CO2 emissions calculations. Although the cost savings of a move to Cloud – or at least virtualisation – solutions are made clear, the green credentials of moving to hosted platforms should still be viewed on a case- by-case basis.
4. 800 US Government datacenters to close. If reports are to be believed, the USG is to shutter around 40% of it’s 2000 datacenters in an effort to both reduce costs and improve the way technology is used. Part of those efficiencies and improvements will be the adoption of Cloud services delivered either internally as consolidated platforms or by third-party vendors. Opportunities abound! http://nyti.ms/r9tUAY
5. Cheap storage? This one gets into my list as a purely selfish ‘geeky’ interest story. BackBlaze provide cheap cloud storage and have release details – and some very cool DC pictures – of how they do it. They produce their own storage ‘pods’ each delivering 135TB of raw storage for less that $7500. Oh and they are bright red too! We spend a lot of time talking about how Cloud abstracts away from the hardware but it’s still cool to see hat hardware sometimes too! http://bit.ly/cYfIRQ
6. We don’t really talk about IBM that much, but their Federal Community Cloud is a FISMA certified solution for communication and collaboration which seems to have been designed specifically to address the “Cloud first” requirements in place and is implemented in a Private Cloud deployment model. IBM… we’ll have to watch them! http://bit.ly/nb3rjr
7. MAP 6.0 for Cloud planning. Microsoft have release v6.0 of it’s Migration and Planning toolkit (MAP). This version is of particular interest because it covers not only analysis for Azure and Hyper-V Cloud, but also includes an Office 365 client evaluation tool and analysis tools for VMware workload and Oracle database schemas. For anyone with a passing interest in moving anything to a Microsoft ‘cloud’ solution this is a must-have piece of kit. http://bit.ly/n3dn9T

I think that’ll do for now! The outlook? Cloudy with a bright future!

It’s been an interesting few days. The conference season is upon us and that typically means lots of hype about what’s been achieved and a few cheap shots at the perceived competition which tend to dominate the reportage. There are a few juicy tidbits around though…

1. Citrix acquire Cloud.com – Citrix are making significant moves, seemingly in opposition to it’s partners (we’re seeing a lot of that kind of thing lately), into becoming a ‘Cloud stack’ vendor. The Cloud.com acquisition gives them a significant platform upon which to deliver a different flavour of solution that we’re seeing from Microsoft and VMWare. With an agnostic base (Hyper-V and Systems center support has been promised by Citrix) this “brutally efficient IT” solution will be one to watch. Oh, and they got a pretty cool domain name too! http://bit.ly/qJKyim
2. Ahh… we have another group being set up to pursue “Cloud standards”. This one, the  Cloud Standards Customer Council, is being led by IBM and includes Citigroup, CostCo Wholesale and Deere & Co. in it’s membership. As this article – http://bit.ly/qugJmm – puts it “the early push for standards is beginning to resemble a NASCAR race — everyone is is driving on the same track, but are sitting in different cars.” we can only hope that they at least head in the same direction!
3. M-Files Cloudvault moves to Azure. The M-files Cloudvault document management system is moving to Azure. All new customers will be provisioned on Microsoft’s PaaS and the existing customer base will be transitioned over in the next few months. OK, that’s the story, but the nice thing about this is that M-Files already integrates with CRM Online so what we’re starting to see is the dilution of ‘who’ and ‘where’ in terms of service provision and the rise of ‘what’ in their place. The future is about the value of the service not in the technology underneath. http://bit.ly/oEhsfU
4. Federal government is moving towards cloud service adoption, but not all at the same pace. CIO’s are learning to take a good hard look at what they’re doing, what they’re planning and how they can mitigate the risks of adopting an external service. This computerworld article has quotes from a number of agency leaders, some who are taking a cautious approach and some who have made a move and are seeing benefits including cost savings as a result. http://bit.ly/plPocY
5. Ooops! Google App Engine sees availability issues. The Google App Engine took a big availability hit last week which brought down some customer applications and sites. I for one hope that this issue halts the, frankly schoolyard practice, of finger pointing between the vendors. Everyone has issues and everyone learns from them including the customers who should be considering cross service deployments for critical systems. http://bit.ly/qKXe0l
6. Cloud First, will it continue? With Vivek Kundra stepping down from his role as US Federal Government CIO, the question of whether his “Cloud First” strategy will be continued by his successor is being raised. There really seems to be no solid reason why it wouldn’t be, but it could be that elements of the detail may be re-examined. http://bit.ly/obNgxW  For a Tech Analyst view see http://bit.ly/oxsOgb

That’s it for this week.

The news!

1. eWeek have put together a top ten ways to enforce security. I’m not sure they are actually the top ten ways, but they are a useful list for discussion and to use as a basic checklist in initial discussions on the topic. http://bit.ly/qZR72z
2. Aurora is out there, but O365 integration is coming soon. The “Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials” product – I think Aurora is a little more catchy – is out there for small businesses to take on. The idea is that it’s a server core with either local of cloud-based add-ons available (think CRM, email etc online and security and local policy management locally) however the O365 add-on which will ease the complexity of integrating the environments is scheduled for a ‘fall’ release. http://zd.net/nR0Bq4
3. Canadian concerns over security are limiting cloud-services adoption. A nice infographic here with some interesting figures regarding services adoption. Although security fears are a valid concern I’m still a little frustrated by the second reason for non-adoption, “confusion about what it is”.  Still work to do there if this survey is to be believed… http://rww.to/pcCrqY
4. Many have cited a lack of relevant and portable applications for the slow uptake of Platform services link Azure. Microsoft have started to address this at the developer level with “Lightswitch” a Visual Studio product allowing rapid LOB application development for both local and Cloud deployment. http://zd.net/l699rC
5. For those with an interest in forward looking reports, the Radicati group have produced a Cloud Security 2011-2015 report covering all kind of stuff. It must be good at they are asking $2,500 for it! http://bit.ly/m3uVGa for those with deep budgets and a significant interest.
6. Security through separation. SplitSecure takes transactions and splits them into sensitive and non-sensitive elements, keeping the sensitive stuff locally and shipping the rest out for processing using cloud compute. This actually sounds like a nice idea! http://bit.ly/ktTlLj
7. FINALLY: The most non-cloud related cloud story this week. DinoDirect launches Cloud Warehouse. Actually they’ve built a new warehouse from which they ship stuff bought through their on-line store. This is cloudwashing at it’s finest! http://prn.to/kT7hjE

This week, we talk a little bit about the origins of shared hosting, why things have not really moved forward in that space so much, the rise of framework engines and virtualisation and why no-one should be building datacenters!

Next time we’ll be talking about email and related bits and pieces.