In one of the more interesting posts, Ken Fischer asks a very thought provoking question on his web 2.0 blog, his question is simple yet far reaching, "What would be the economic impact of Google mail going down?"

The question of cloud interoperability does open an interesting point when looking at the concepts of neutrality, in particular to those in the position to influence its outcome. At the heart of this debate was my question of whether anyone or anything can be be truly neutral? Or is th...

The excitement around virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is being tempered by the concern that VDI can’t be cost-justified if it doesn’t completely transform traditional desktop management – and by the belief that the only way to achieve this is with stateless desktops. The bad news ...

In an effort to encourage standards and interoperability, the cloud computing community is currently discussing architectural ontologies. Core to most approaches is an assumption of open access, public Internet connectivity and security provisioning by the cloud service provider. Solut...

Often when those who say the cloud is too early or not ready for wide scale enterprise usage they point to "security" as being a key concern. Although they are quick to point out the security of a third-party provider is an obvious point of weakness, they typically lack any specific ex...

We all take for granted that our online applications at home will perform the instant we need them. Whether it's Voice over IP, video on-demand, gaming, or other applications, we have instantaneous, high-speed access, anytime. In this environment, IT managers are now facing the questio...

For a long time we have known that corporate use of PCs is inefficient and overly expensive: analysts estimate that a typical PC costs around three times as much as its purchase price to manage over the PC’s lifetime. But, until recently, there has been little that organizations could ...

A few weeks ago I talked about the coming cloud computing war by discussing the formation of multi-vendor cloud-driven alliances and their implications for the IT industry. Now that Cisco has announced its unified computing initiative which includes Nehalem blade servers and IBM is no...

Cloud computing refers to the practice of leveraging third-party computing resources, such as network grids and server farms, to extend IT capabilities and reduce the cost of ownership. This practice offers numerous potential benefits to organizations that want to centralize software a...

A mid-sized on-premise ERP software company has used Salesforce.com to manage its sales process for two years. As a rapidly growing, recently public company, the manual processes used to manage sales and fulfillment that were originally more than adequate showed signs of strain: Accoun...

Software-as-a-Service brings together many of the best characteristics of corporate IT systems and the Internet to form a new method of software delivery that is reliable, flexible and cost effective; however, this model is not without its challenges, particularly with regard to profit...

I had the opportunity to attend Cloud Computing Conference and Expo last week in the Big Apple. I had a very specific objective: To determine what Cloud Computing really was and, more important, what the future of block storage in the cloud was. I was looking to have a one-on-one with ...

One of the key concepts to consider when talking about services and cloud computing is the notion of coupling. We need to focus on this since, in many instances, coupling is not a good architectural choice considering that the services are not only hosted within separate data centers, ...

There is a lot going on in the cloud computing space, and SOA is clearly along for the ride. Indeed, there are many things that cloud computing providers (and that’s a rather big category these days) and those building SOAs can learn from each other. I’m just scratching the surface her...

We've discussed some best practices that can be used as the foundation to a cloud computing strategy. To ensure the success of cloud computing initiatives, it's important to discriminate between the hype and the reality but also realize the barrier to entry is low. Don't worry about mi...

Arguably the biggest buzz word so far in 2009 isn't cloud computing, but instead the term "unified". As some of you may have seen earlier this week Cisco announced a new server centric strategy which is underpinned by the use of a methodology. Cisco's new computing mantra is being appl...

What’s all the buzz about? Cloud computing is one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic technology trends for 2009 – #2, right behind virtualization. Analysts say the economics of cloud for customers are truly compelling, with expected savings for business applications of 3-5x. That’s not chum...

I'm also realistic, most users who have deployed to the cloud have written their applications specifically for the Amazon Web Service API, making it currently the De facto standard. So it occurred to me, that a potentially big opportunity might be to create an open universal EC2 API ad...

It is quickly becoming apparent that new weapon of choice for modern conflicts is not in the traditional battle field. Instead many nation-states are increasingly employing cyber warfare to attack other states or entities in an effort to disrupt or disable critical technological infras...

VMware continues to make noise around its forthcoming vCloud API initiative. According to an announcement last week VMware has developed a new API aimed at offering service providers with the ability to easily migrate between public and private VMware-based clouds.

Before we get to carried away with the cloud computing dream lets talk about the fundamental challenges in the network (manual labor and kludge) that may have a substantial impact on the shape of cloud computing, at least in the enterprise.

"Cloud computing is here to stay as a major IT wave that will take its place in the data center alongside mainframes, client-server and 3-tier web, says Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal. "The recession is driving IT to consi...

Ruben S. Montero has published a series of posts in the DSA-research blog on the benefits of virtualizing a distributed infrastructure with the OpenNebula Virtual Infrastructure Engine: In "The Private Clouds", Ruben discusses the motivations for building a private cloud using open-sou...

This is the title of the new GridBriefing just released by GridTalk to introduce Grids and Clouds as complementary computing paradigms. A clear understanding of their relationship will help the development and efficient use of existing academia and commercial e-infrastructures. It is e...

In a follow up to my October 23rd post on Arista Networks attempting to copyright / trademark the term "Cloud Networking" The companies CEO Jayshree Ullal has stated that they will no longer be attempting to trademark the term. (Mission accomplished). In a recent post she shed some lig...

Bridging the interoperability gap between on and off premise cloud computing is emerging as a key requirement for enterprise adoption. In this session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, VMware VP, Preeti Somal, revealed how VMware and others are addressing this challenge to make sea...

It is the infrastructural paradigm shift that is sweeping across the Enterprise IT world, but how is it best defined? I refer of course to 'Cloud Computing' - the phenomenon that has as many definitions as there are squares on a chess-board. To try and narrow it down we bring here a ro...

When choosing any storage solution it's important to consider the workload and data usage patterns. This even goes beyond storage – application workloads drive server, network and all IT infrastructure decisions. Sure, most vendors will tell you that their product is the best solution ...

Storage within the cloud is meaningless without a measurable level of performance that it can be compared against. Since there are no established benchmarks that determine performance of storage within a cloud infrastructure, it is reasonable to apply tiering metrics to storage based o...

As new offerings like Amazon's CloudFront, Microsoft's Azure, and VMware's vCloud are rolled out, the worldwide cloud computing momentum continues to grow. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal surveys a globe-girdling network of leading infrastructure experts, IT industry executives...

As cloud computing emerges there is a lot of discussion about how to define cloud computing as a computing model. Maturity models have been published and debated, and providers clearly have a model for their own products. In attempting to define this better to my clients, I came up wit...

"We are in an ideal position to accelerate our business to continue our leadership in this rapidly advancing cloud market," says RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in this Exclusive Q&A with the editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, Alan Williamson. "We decided the timing...

Cloudcenters provide the same kinds of tools that all datacenter and server operators are already accustomed to, but with all the traditional advantages of cloud (i.e. self-service, pay-as-you-go, and scalability). Instead of creating completely new paradigms, cloudcenters are a method...

While the debate on the actual definition of cloud computing rages on, it seems that a whole new cloud computing vocabulary is rapidly emerging. I thought I'd list some of the new terms I'm seeing with brief definitions, examples of usage and references to discussions related to these ...

In part one of this series, we discussed the nature of content within the cloud. After determining the nature of the content being stored, it is important to understand how this unstructured and structured content will be stored. The mechanism for storage has significant impact on a pr...

In the next few years the a key opportunity for the emerging cloud industry will be on defining a federated cloud ecosystem by connecting multiple cloud computing providers using an agreeing upon standard or interface. There are a number of organizations looking into solving the proble...

Cloud computing utilizes computing resources, network bandwidth, storage, applications, and services available in the Internet “cloud” to deliver scalable Web functionalities to end users anywhere in the world. Drawing on the cloud for computing resources is similar to tapping into the...

What will cloud computing bring to your bottom line? That's what we will determine in this step. In essence, this is the process of calculating the ROI for the formations of clouds around your enterprise. However, keep in mind that not all systems make sense to outsource, and you have ...

Comparisons between Scale-Out and Enterprise clouds, while sometimes tempting (especially in the Google vs. Microsoft case), are rather useless. They serve different purposes, often for completely different audiences, and enterprise IT organizations would do better to focus their effor...

For over two weeks now, I’ve been running a service in the Azure cloud that aggregates calendar events from Eventful.com and from a diverse set of iCalendar feeds. My aim is to recreate and then extend my experimental elmcity.info community information hub, while exploring and document...