Cloudsourced

HP BladeSystem Matrix: Building the Cloud

Gmail Motion - The Future of Email is Here!

Google has done it again. When Gmail was originally introduced few years ago, it was a revelation of sorts in terms of services and space it offered, for free. Gmail Motion Beta is Google's yet another attempt at re inventing Email technology. Gmail Motion lets you control Gmail with different body gestures, simple as that. And the best part is, this is not some concept that might be implemented sometime in the future, Gmail Motion is here and you can take the technology for a spin right now!

Gmail Motion - How it Works

Gmail Motion uses your computer's built-in webcam and Google's patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.

Familiarize yourself with some of the basic functionalities of Gmail Motion using this very neat printable guide of sample gestures. With it, you'll be able to start writing and responding to emails - with your body - in no time.
Safety Precautions

The technology is still in beta and hence Google does recommend some important safety precautions. First, make sure to clear the area around you. Second, try to take short breaks every 30-40 minutes, just as you would if you were typing. And finally, take time to stretch after each session to give the muscles you'll be using some relief.
Gmail Motion Beta

Go ahead and get a feel of the whole new Gmail Motion Beta "experience". All you need is a Computer running Linux(any flavor) and a webcam. Unfortunately, Windows and iOS based machines are currently not supported owing to its several major security flaws and some other stability related issues.

On a related note, you might also want to check out some of my favorite XKCD comics for a 'dose of sanity'. Hope you enjoyed the article ;-)

April Fools Musings

Steve Duplessie

If EMC bought NetApp, would the department of Justice allow it? It would be hard to claim the combination a monopoly, but wow, it essentially would create a caste system difficult for any other to overcome.

For all you “cloudites” out there, the single MOST important thing that is going on over the next year is Intel’s Hybrid Cloud. It is pure, unadulterated, genius. Intel has found a way to reach the SMB (really the S) in every far reaching nook and cranny on the planet–via MSPs selling cloud services. They seem to have packaged up a server, installed a bunch of VMs (that sure don’t appear to be VMware, which is interesting in and of itself), and are RENTING it to MSPs, who in turn are RENTING virtual machines and services (aka software) to businesses. You click on Windows Small Biz Server, or Windows Server, and pay a few dollars (very few, I’m told) a month to rent them. You can pick a firewall, back up to the cloud (this I find stunningly interesting–who are they using????), DR to the cloud (again, who?), and remote management and VOIP services. I’m sure there will be a pile of others–sort of like the “App Store” fromApple. Intel will take a chunk, vendor will get huge volumes.

The biggest reason this is so brilliant is that Intel not only figured out the top impediment to the “S”MB space is cost (thus, they are effectively financing the whole deal), but that by doing said financing they can build an enormous annuity stream–and ultimately sell “servers” to an entirely new segment of the market where they had limited exposure previously. Microsoft “rents” software to that same market–where previously, they got little to no revenue. Whoever the other software providers are will get huge installation volumes, and depending on the biz deal they cut, possibly huge dough. I continue to poke around but Intel is being very tight lipped. I’m told we’ll hear things later this spring. This is one important industry thing to keep your eyes on. Intel can change the world IT landscape in short order.

I wonder if MS did a deal to give away Hyper-V to Intel to use. Would be smart if they did. I doubt VMware would do so, as they have no need and would cannibalize the spectacular margins they are currently commanding. Could be Xen as well. Who knows. The DR and Backup ones are enormously intriguing. Since it’s a pure MSP/Cloud play all around (or so it seems), it leads me to believe Asigra should be in the pole position on backup–which would give the already market-leading MSP provider outrageous new volume into the lower end of the market. I can’t figure out in the Intel story what they mean by “DR”, so I really can’t guess who is in play here. Fascinating stuff.

Speaking of cloud stuff, how long do you think it will take IBM global services to come out with some IaaS cloud offerings? Why on earth don’t they offer storage and compute already? If they do, they aren’t telling anyone, and Amazon is kicking butt everywhere. Guys like Dell, IBM, and HP have trusted brands and customer bases they can absolutely leverage, so why is this taking so long? Dell is well down the path, I know for a fact, but I’m surprised I haven’t seen more from HP or IBM. Has to be a matter of time. Too much money and risk to sit around waiting. Once a customer makes a move to a “spill over” cloud provider, it’s not likely they will switch any time soon.

Mark Peters and I are talking about a paper discussing the economic upheaval that technologies like dedupe/compression will provide to parts of the data lifecycle that haven’t yet been affected (clearly the end of the wire has been a nice play, with Data Domain taking 90% of the market). When you can create an order of magnitude better economic story, markets happen. First guy to satisfy the market need (note: NOT THE GUY WITH THE BEST STUFF!) takes 80-90% of the value created from that market. Happens all the time. So, I’m frankly stunned that the old school infrastructure/storage dudes are waiting all this time to get their act together when it comes to doing this for Tier-0, -1, and -2 storage. If you make an SSD 10X less expensive, people will probably buy more. If you make primary storage 10X less expensive, people will probably buy more. And so on. No one moves as fast as my brain tells them they should, but sooner or later one of the major players is going to figure all this out and the world will change.

Big Data is going to have to be “refined” as a term. To most, it means analytics. Not to me. Big Data is just that–big heaping piles of COPIED data (non transactional, non changing–copies of data). You perform functions upon said big data. You house said big data on “Big Data Infrastructure” or Big Data Storage, etc. You do Big Data Analytics, or Big Data Backup/Recovery, or Big Data Warehousing. The term won’t work if it means everything–because then it means nothing. Be specific.

I still love the concept of Big Data Cloud Services. Why should I house all that crap in house?

Amazon is really cheap to store stuff on. It’s pretty damned expensive to actually “use” the stuff you store there, however.

There are still a few seats left for ESG’s Ahead of the Curve Summit Series on Virtualization for IT pros on April 14th in Waltham, MA. Vendors, please stop trying to crash, I love you but this is an end-user only gig. You wouldn’t understand it anyhow! www.esg-ahead.com

Link: http://www.thebiggertruth.com/2011/04/april-fools-musings/

VMware now will run EMC's Mozy's cloud-based data protection service

Today it is my pleasure to announce that VMware has hired the team and acquired assets behind EMC’s Mozy cloud-based data protection service. VMware will operate the Mozy service on behalf of EMC without interruption. However, the strategic relevance of today’s news is what this group brings to VMware. Over the past 5 years, Mozy has built one of the best examples of a globally distributed, large-scale cloud offering. We believe that, by being directly engaged with the delivery of such a service, VMware will further ramp our own cloud-related learning and accelerate new IP, scale, and capabilities into the products that we provide to our customers and public cloud partners.

The scale of the Mozy service is impressive. Let’s talk some numbers… today they have more than 1 million users, 70,000 business customers, and a worldwide network of datacenters storing more than 70 petabytes of data. 70 petabytes! That’s enough to store the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history… in all languages... with 20 petabytes to spare. But it’s about more than simple backup of all of this data. Mozy has taken the base technology that keeps you from losing your data and turned it into a scalable, fail-safe way of building out a collection of highly-automated datacenters with strong security and 24/7 operations fronted by elegant, user interfaces across many client types. This is the foundational architecture for the many cloud-based services being delivered today.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with many of the Mozy team members over the last year. The individuals responsible for building, operating and maintaining this service at a global scale clearly possess the experience and knowledge essential to running such an operation, and we’ll be leveraging that to improve our own products and help customers and partners to best leverage them.

The Mozy team will also help VMware continue to serve the burgeoning SMB community as they move forward on their own path to cloud computing. In the past year, our customer base grew by more than 50,000 customers, the majority of which came from the SMB community (many through our “VMware Go” offering). It’s clear that organizations of this size (with little or no IT staff) are moving even more rapidly to adopt IT services via the public cloud. We’ll make sure that these customers have easy access to the Mozy back-up service as well as other related data services to come.

I’m also excited about some of the core data-handling technologies developed by the Mozy team. The Mozy future roadmap is going to excite consumers and businesses alike, and we also see the opportunity to leverage Mozy’s data compression, synchronization, client integration, and analytic tools to extend several existing and not-yet-announced VMware products.

It truly is an exciting time to be here at VMware and working with such great talent to bring the enterprise hybrid cloud to our customers and partners as they continue the journey to IT-as-a-Service. Also, check out what Mozy’s COO Charlotte Yarkoni had to say about today’s announcement.

Implementing the HP Cloud Map for VMware vCloud Director

The Top 100 Bloggers on Cloud Computing

Here goes with an expanded roster, listed as before in alphabetical order

By Jeremy Geelan

Ever since I first published here my tentative list of Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing it became clear that an expansion would be needed before too long. Thanks to community feedback via my Twitter account (http://twitter.com/jg21) here goes with an expanded roster, listed as before in alphabetical order since I am making no attempt at this stage to rank the various blogs, merely to map - and celebrate - their existence.

Dustin Amrhein | "A View from the Clouds"
Randy Bias | "Cloudscaling"

Tony Bishop | blueprint4IT.ulitzer.com
Rick Blaisdell | "Rickscloud"
Rene Buest | www.CloudUser.org
Larry Carvalho | "Robust Cloud"
Sam Charrington | "Cloud Pulse"

Colin Clark | "Cloud Event Processing"
Peter Coffee | cloudblog.salesforce.com
Reuven Cohen | "Elastic Vapor"
Adrian Cole | jclouds.tumblr.com
Tim Crawford | "Cloud Computing & IT Optimization"
Ray DePena | innovation.ulitzer.com
James Downey | "Cloud of Innovation"
Paul Fallon | Paul Fallon's Blog

William Fellows | blogs.the451group.com
Stephen Foskett | "GestaltIT"
Tim Freeman | www.timfreeman.org
Jay Fry | "Data Center Dialog"
Dana Gardner | "Briefings Direct"

Bernard Golden | "The Open Source"
Brian Gracely | Clouds of Change

George Hadjiyanis, | "The Cloud Blog"
James Hamilton | "Perspectives"
Christofer Hoff | "Rational Survivability"
Olafur Ingthorsson | CloudComputingTopics.com
Kevin L. Jackson | "Cloud Musings"
Steve Jin | www.DoubleCloud.org

Sam Johnston | www.samj.net
Jeff Kaplan | "THINK IT Services"

Ben Kepes | "The Diversity Blog"

Markus Klems | "Cloudy Times"

Kent Langley | "Cloud Computing, Scalability, and Operations"

Walt Lapinsky | wrLapinsk's Blog

Steve Lesem | "Cloud Storage Strategy"

source: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1777875

Fact Sheet: IBM CloudBurst

Fact Sheet: IBM CloudBurst

IBM has been engaging, listening and working with many customers to implement their desired usage scenarios around data centers and cloud. We are now taking these learnings, and the market demand and have built IBM CloudBurst, a family of pre-integrated service delivery platforms that include the hardware, storage, networking, virtualization and service management software to create a private cloud environment, transform data centers, and build dynamic infrastructures that deliver new levels of service at reduced cost.

It’s a Purpose-Built Infrastructure that is…

· Built on proven technologies already deployed at customer sites

· Secret sauce: Newly embedded service management software baked in, providing IT executives with visibility, control and automation of service delivery

· Single product, single delivery, single installation, single invoice, single support structure

· Self-service: Zero touch administration

· “Lights-out” automated operation

· Reusable image library for rapid deployment

· “Fit for purpose” based on the specific architectural requirements of unique workloads

· QuickStart Implementation services to get platform up and running in days

IBM CloudBurst V1.1

IBM CloudBurst is specifically designed to address one of the biggest activities happening today in the enterprise -- development and test.

· Price: Approximately $220K, before discounts

· Shipping: June 19, 2009

· While 30 to 50 percent of a company’s overall technology infrastructure is devoted to development and test, developers must frequently wait weeks to get access to resources they need to create and test applications due to manual processes that allocate these resources.

· Deploying IBM CloudBurst V1.1, developers can help themselves to the technology they need to run projects within minutes, rather than weeks

· A private developer and test cloud also enhances security, since developers won’t need to look outside the firewall for faster development alternatives

· IBM CloudBurst will join the recently announced WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in the CloudBurst family, an integrated appliance to manage WebSphere images in the cloud

IBM CloudBurst V1.1 Features

Self-Service Portal – allows Developers self-service access to IT infrastructure
Service Catalog – provides list of pre-engineered services that Developers can chose from
Automation – automatically provisions required server, storage and software when needed by Developers; without human intervention. Automatically de-provisions unused capacity, making it available for other users and increasing efficiency of data center assets
Built-in Virtualization – leverages the full capacity of server technology up to hundreds of virtual machines
Single Product – services included so can be deployed from single installation. No need to spend hours of IT operations staff time architecting, configuring, assembling and building from many servers, storage and software products

IBM CloudBurst Family – Direction

Clouds are defined by the work they do. As such, future additions to the CloudBurst family will all be architected by workload and leverage the full spectrum of IBM server technology from x-86, Power to the Mainframe. More will be released in 2009.
Upcoming additions to IBM CloudBurst family of products will all be prepackaged and pre-configured, with single-priced hardware, software and networking cloud stack.
Connection from internal private cloud implementations to ‘burst” to access public clouds for short terms needs for additional resource

IBM CloudBurst and WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance

IBM CloudBurst will join the recently announced WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance in the CloudBurst family, an integrated appliance to manage WebSphere images in the cloud

Enhancing IBM CloudBurst with the IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance provides a ready-to-go, cloud computing platform with specialized images for creating and deploying application environments based on IBM WebSphere software. The combination of the two offerings leverages the strengths of each to accelerate the delivery of new WebSphere based applications. IBM CloudBurst is a complete cloud computing package that can deliver any type of virtual machine in support of multiple types of cloud workloads. The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance stores and secures application environments consisting of patterns of IBM-supported WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition virtual images. These environments can be dispensed into, managed and maintained in a private cloud. So a customer can deploy IBM CloudBurst to quickly deliver a cloud computing infrastructure and use the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance to deliver the WebSphere based application environment into the IBM CloudBurst cloud.

IBM CloudBurst Configuration Summary

-- Base Hardware Configuration:

· 1 42U rack

· 1 BladeCenter Chassis

· 1 3650M2 Management Server, 8 cores, 24GB Ram

· 1 HS22 CloudBurst Management Blade, 8 cores, 48GB RAM

· 3 managed HS22 blades, 8 cores, 48GB RAM

· DS3400 FC attached storage

-- Cloud Software Configuration:

IBM CloudBurst service management pack
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager v7.1
IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6.2.1
IBM Systems Director 6.1.1 with Active Energy Manager; IBM ToolsCenter 1.0; IBM DS Storage Manager for DS4000 v10.36; LSI SMI-S provider for DS3400
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 U4; VMware ESXi 3.5 U4 hypervisor

The IBM Cloudburst QuickStart services consist of the following major activities:

Integrate and deploy BladeCenter hardware in customer data center
Configure user and security profiles
Setup and discovery of virtualized compute, network and storage resources
Configure self- service portal
Platform verification
Overview and hands-on training

Additionally, IBM Smart Business Test Cloud services has been enhanced to support IBM CloudBurst. With this new enhancement, IBM can help you rapidly set up an cloud platform with CloudBurst, then provide full customization and integration for a comprehensive, on-premise test environment based on a private cloud computing model. Smart Business Test Cloud also provides an option to leverage existing systems and storage for a complete cloud solution.

IBM Global Financing provides complete end to end support to help clients acquire IBM Cloud solutions

Obtain access to capital so they can conserve cash and better manage cash flow with predictable monthly payments
Smooth out upfront costs and accelerate ROI
Lower TCO using a technology lifecycle management approach
Expand purchasing power to obtain more within budget
Simplify multi-component purchases into a single monthly invoice
Obtain what they need vs. what they can afford

Example: Financing helps accelerate return on investment and acquire more within budget, turns large upfront costs into a single month payment

· $207,387 upfront to… à $5,750 per month

* Hypothetical example using list prices; Monthly IBM Global Financing rate based on 36 month term with “Best” credit rating and Value Plan lease. Actual financing rates based on client’s credit rating, financing terms, offering type, equipment type and options. Other restrictions may apply.

For more information please visit www.ibm.com/financing/cloud