With cloud computing gaining acceptance in the business world, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if cloud computing can also meet the needs of the scientific computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has launched

Click here to read more

In a new survey (which is still accepting responses for the rest of today) Citrix is asking its IT customers to characterize their support for iPad in their businesses. Currently , over 80% of respondents expect to purchase the iPad for their company. Even more respondents are saying they will support personal iPads for their employees. Sponsor Survey Results The Citrix team has shared an overview of the preliminary results. While 84% of organizations will support personal iPads, 50% expect their organization to purchase the device for them. 80% will purchase and use the iPad for business. The high level of adoption of the mobile device illustrates the confidence IT has that they can provide secure, safe access to company data and virtual desktops. Support, according to respondents, for the use of personal iPads for work will open the door for more Bring Your Own Computer programs The largest perceived benefits include the mobility to work remotely without interruption, greatly improving productivity for even the most remote workers. Considerations Realizing that the audience being surveyed is more likely to be interested in iPad due to self selection, it is still interesting the high level of support within business for the new device. Here are a few additional thoughts about iPad’s momentum in the enteprise. Cost is a factor of volume. One of the big surprises of the iPad launch was the price offered by Apple for the device. For the functionality offered (especially as it gets closer to parity), it’s a revolution in IT budgeting to consider this low-cost option for a hardware solution. The big win for Apple in the enterprise is going to be made on volume. If the company is successful, as it seems it will be, in continuing to have a “low SKU” approach to the market, it will continue to gain advantage through volume alone. “Bring your own computer.” In a way, this phenomenon is a big change. If Apple makes it acceptable, “Bring your own phone” may be close behind. This may break the logjam we see now where enterprises hand out corporate phones, yet consumers buy their own and carry them with them in the office (and then negotiate with IT for access to apps, for example). Mobility as the killer enterprise app. The iPad with 3G has an unlimited data plan option that may be too good to pass up for IT managers who want to deploy mobile solutions or support the mobile workforce. iTunes for corporate assets. The opportunity to deliver corporate content as subscriptions, podcasts, and video libraries could be a new wrapper on corporate assets. The ability to easily catalog resources is one thing that big intranets and internal corporate networks have been challenged with in the past. Perhaps the structure of a library approach will also target enterprise employees and reduce the friction in content distribution. It’s amazing to see the growth of momentum for iPad in business computing. This survey suggests the dynamics of iPad seem to be trending in Apple’s favor. It’s still a long way off before we see it create a large dent in enterprise laptop or desktop sales, but this movement is creating a new set of opportunities – and problems – in the enterprise. Discuss

Click here to read more

Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter . Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it develops. In this discussion, we found less need for discussing private vs. public cloud. Instead, we found more focus on performance and speed-to-market as key drivers for moving a virtualization strategy into personal cloud infrastructure reality. Sponsor The story of Aprimo starts with virtualization – and has led to the company defining the boundaries of its cloud offering and product architecture around the benefits of scaling resources on demand. Aprimo uses a Microsoft .Net three-tier architecture with MSSQL in the back-end. All of the three tiers (front-end, business logic, database) run in virtual containers that are monitored with vCenter. Performance is the question that Aprimo studied when bringing vendors on board. The company has relationships with 3Com, Cisco, and HP for the three key parts of the technology stack. vCenter joins these offerings together and offers the company quick response to new customer requests. Like many business, marketing can come in waves and this architecture is designed to scale around the unknown and to be agile enough to support the marketing calendar. Here is a diagram showing the core services VMware vCenter is focused on: We had the chance to explore the customer experience of build-your-own-cloud with John Gilmartin, Director of Product Marketing at VMware. We asked him if VMware sells clouds, or if instead its tool build clouds. What we found is that it is a bit of both. Like a data center itself, or a complex application, building your own cloud can be a multi-faceted event. Customers are using vCenter as a building block to manage the resources and enabling automation around business processes. By thinking of automation as the line in the sand between virtualization and cloud, we can easily see how connecting business processes focuses on the best place in harnessing on-demand resources for business benefit. Some of the areas of focus we the Aprimo team took on as the company to optimize its virtual resources into its cloud. Design and optimization of resource pools Database tier optimization and support new dynamic customer scaling Designing for performance with vendor evaluations Leveraging best practices from VMware on tuning and finding bottlenecks Processes for spinning up new users automatically across all resources Out of these focus areas, we found database scaling the most interesting to consider. It seems clear that as build-your-own-clouds grow, database performance, concurrency, and process integration are ripe for further optimization. What we learned from Aprimo and VMware vCenter is that launching a cloud infrastructure is a combination of virtualizing computing resources and designing the automation of the right business and technical processes. Reaching the stage of an effective cloud depends on how the team thinks about connecting software, sales, and infrastructure together as a process. Making a commitment to your own cloud can bring a company together – from sales manager to developer. This join can position an organization to win customers and grow the business due to an increase in the end to end agility of the organization. Is your business ready to cook up a cloud recipe of your own? Discuss

Click here to read more

Back in February, John Treadway , director of cloud computing portfolio at Boston-based Unisys, wrote that, “I think we might be at the very beginning of an interesting new phase in the evolution of cloud computing — regional and local clouds.” Treadway rightly points out that local and regional hosting is hardly new, as smaller players have been “operating in the shadows of the big hosting companies” for many years. Such firms often simply resell the data center capacity of large players, he notes, but some of them have their own facilities. North Carolina’s Hosted Solutions and Massachusetts’ InetServices are two examples. Another is Minnesota-based VISI.com ’s recently launched Reliacloud . Sponsor Guest author Graeme Thickins is a technology writer, analyst, blogger and startup advisor. He began writing about cloud long before it was even called that. He blogs at www.tech-surf-blog.com , is a contributor at www.minnov8.com , and has guest posted several times at ReadWriteWeb. Disclosure: He has had a consulting relationship with VISI/Reliacloud. According to Treadway, it’s only natural for some local hosters to start new cloud initiatives to keep their customers from ending up at Amazon, Rackspace or the like. “Some will be successful, while others will fail,” he maintains. But he predicts that a market segment will develop for regional cloud providers. Building a Regional Cloud The challenge of putting together such a service is not as daunting as some might assume given the tools available today, says Jason Baker, CTO VISI.com and ReliaCloud. “Our service was built using technology from VMOps, a venture-backed cloud stack provider based in Cupertino, California,” he says. He said other tools his company evaluated included VMware, Xen Cloud from Citrix, Eucalyptus, and others. He noted that Reliacloud is based on Xen this release, but that the firm is planning for other hypervisors in version 2. “We built our own front end for self-service on top of VMOps’ APIs, though we later realized what VMOps had out of the box would have saved us considerable time,” said Baker. “We use the Tucows Platypus billing system, monitor our cloud with Nagios, and our storage is based on OpenSolaris ZFS managing Dell storage shelves.” He noted that VMOps will be adding more enterprise storage options. Part of ReliaCloud’s early success was due to an existing customer base. “[It] was in beta for about three months,” said Johnny Hatch, product manager. “During the beta period, the service was free, and nearly 100 customers signed up,” he said, noting about half of them were existing VISI customers. Why Go Regional? Here are some of the things Baker said his firm learned during the process of planning and launching the Reliacloud service: “We found customers want to keep tabs on where their applications are running. They also want to be able to audit their cloud service provider, they need custom configurations, and they like the extra comfort of knowing the people who are running the cloud. These companies find a regional/local cloud to be attractive.” Examples of those customers include tech startups and interactive marketing agencies. “In some cases, regulatory issues favor the regional/local cloud as well,” Baker said. “In healthcare and financial services, the fact that a company can know for sure where its data is located at all times – meaning, in which legal jurisdictions – is more than comforting.” The Future Baker admits ReliaCloud is still early in its cloud journey, but so far he is pleased. “Our success to date has been heartening.” VISI had a busy first quarter. After launching the Reliacloud service in February, the firm announced in late March it had been acquired by TDS Telecommunications Corp. TDS, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, markets communications services to business and residential customers in 30 states, including Minnesota. Treadway positions the regional cloud trend this way: “An analogy comes to mind. Think of the big hosting companies as giant boulders. They take up a lot of space, but they leave a lot of space between them for rocks, stones, pebbles, and sand. Local and regional clouds are there to fill the empty spaces.” And, he says, there are a whole lot of those empty spaces. Discuss

Click here to read more

McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate “the last mile” of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it’s a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting, and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of IT. Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon’s web service console and we see a great linkup for driving process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a look at McKesson’s journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale , an IT services catalog company. Sponsor McKesson: Let’s Start with Less Meetings and Less 5mb Spreadsheets NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement. We tracked the use case at McKesson, where the company landed at the service desk in the cloud as a means to the end in their journey to build a low-impact budget process . We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be there as budgeting and approval processes are automated. In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service catalog. One click vs. Fill Out the Form In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and policy. To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform. Information Technology Infrastructure Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and track the changes involved in building and operating systems. Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon. Carrot, vs. stick. Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon’s EC2, or VMwares offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there. All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It’s easy to see that “provision server” becomes fully automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud inflection point, where instead of there “cloud services”, we are all in one. Zen Mashup What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your IT services flow like water? Discuss

Click here to read more