The International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency found and reported on Monday that a total of 568 hours of downtime at 13 cloud service biggies had since 2007 caused an economic impact of more than $71.7 million, reports said today.

The big takeaway from the report: With the cloud’s average cloud outages of 7.5 hours per year, the availability rate is 99.9% — a far cry from the oft-championed five-9s. “It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999%). As a comparison, the service average unavailability for electricity in a modern capital is less than 15 minutes per year,” the working group researchers noted in their paper (See PDF document.)

One big caveat with this finding: This first report by the group, formed in March of this year by Telecom ParisTech and Paris 13 University, is based on press reports of cloud outages. IDG News’ Loek Essers writes:

While the researchers noted that their methodology is imperfect because their information-gathering process was far from exhaustive, they said that the preliminary figures are most likely underestimated. Many outages are not published in the press, leaving a lot of room for missed outages, they said.

Essers notes “other caveats in the methodology used, including not having the precise value of the economic cost for each failure or an average hourly cost for each cloud service provider, the researchers said. Besides that, the group noted that its data was not based on the number of users a service has, which would be preferable.”

How did they get to their numbers?

The costs for an hour-long outage can vary from $89,000 at a travel service provider such as Amadeus, to $225 an hour for a service like Paypal, according to the research paper. The figures are based on hourly costs accepted by the industry, the researchers said. Outages at companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon amount to an estimated $200 an hour, according to the group.

Have your say: While the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency promised to improve its research methods, have they lost credibility by publishing such information?

Get your ringside seats, says Jonathan Feldman, a contributing editor at InformationWeek and director of IT services in a North Carolina city. “OpenStack versus CloudStack is a battle akin to the one around Linux distros,” he writes.

In one corner: CloudStack, “an open source project that was acquired by Citrix (with the Apache license and governance by the Apache Foundation), sporting community and enterprise editions. Variations on the theme of ‘what will Citrix do with CloudStack’ and ‘will CloudStack community edition get diluted’ tend to be the points of angst, even though Apache ostensibly has say over the base code.”

In the other: OpenStack, “an open source product influenced by hosting provider Rackspace and the Nebula project. The angst about OpenStack has something to do with Rackspace’s large and fixed presence on the governance board, and something to do with the fact that there’s fragmentation in the code base. There’s no distro that you can grab, just repositories of various versions, some of which will be supported by your management software, some of which won’t.” (See recent news: With NASA on Amazon, Will OpenStack Get Liftoff?)

Weigh in: “Currently, it looks like the choice is between CloudStack and ongoing licensing and support, versus OpenStack and professional services (Rackspace is happy to sell ongoing support to you as well).”

Winners/losers:

As one of my staffers pointed out, the eventual victor of this smackdown doesn’t really matter. If you choose wrong but have chosen a good management and abstraction layer, you can always move your private cloud, since ‘servers are software’ and can be destroyed and re-created with the right management, automation, and orchestration. With competition comes lower overall pricing, good news indeed for enterprise private cloud shops.

Read the full story at InformationWeek and weigh in: Is staying vendor/service/tech-independent — and out of the the ring — key to your cloud plans?

When people talk about cloud computing, what comes to mind?  First people think about the value they want out of clouds, like speedy deployment, self-service, elastic resources and pay-as-you-go cost models.

Second, people start to think about the technology of cloud, like virtualization, image libraries, storage and network configuration. But when you step back, what people really want to do is run their applications on the cloud. They want those applications to run well. They want the cloud to make it easier to deploy and manage their applications.

For this to happen you need technology that goes beyond basic virtualization and images. You need technology that allows you to express the components of your application and the relationship between those components. I call this description a virtual application pattern. Using a pattern, the cloud can automate the deployment and management of the application more fully. Let’s look at an example.

Read the rest of this entry →

The cloud is more green than traditional on-premises setups, according to a recent Carbon Disclosure Project survey. But that survey, which Cloudline put to a question in March, did not sit well with readers (see the comments section.)

Now Google is championing the Carbon Disclosure Project, and touting its cloud apps’ energy efficiency as well as their green cred (notably, too, the post was lifted from the Google Green blog).

Read the rest of this entry →

While IT vendors and the private cloud folks are sure to seize upon Amazon’s cloud outage late Thursday, it’s important to remember that power outages — like massive snowstorms and hurricanes — happen, so smart cloud adopters should take this as a lesson to spread workloads across data center locations.

But that lesson will not take away from the cloud of doubt cast over such services, especially when the one on a roll — and recently looking to build its enterprise cred with free basic support and improved premium support — takes a lump.

GigaOm’s Barb Darrow, in her post Will Amazon outage ding cloud confidence?, writes:

Outages like this, which first showed up on the Amazon Web Service dashboard at 8:50 p.m. Pacific time and was declared resolved at 3:26 a.m. Pacific time, draw lots of headlines and posturing — cloud competitors leaped onto Twitter to state that their sites were up and running — but cloud experts warned against over reaction.

This is a tempest in a teapot, said Carl Brooks, analyst at Tier1 Research. “AWS outages are still magnified out of proportion to their severity. It doesn’t help their credibility with the paleoconservative enterprise paranoid who will use this as an excuse to buy more absurdly overpriced IT from the usual suspects.”

In other words, take a deep breath. And make sure you design your AWS workloads to run across geographies.

Have your say: The message here is, don’t blame on the cloud what you could have avoided — it’s pilot error. But is the location of data centers something you should have to plan around, or is it something Amazon should do as part of its service?

JR Raphael has posted his take over at Computerworld on the new Chrome OS and Chromebooks after spending the last two weeks with his head in Google’s cloud.

His personal perspective on the Chromebook’s evolution:

After two weeks of using Google’s evolved Chrome OS on the new Chromebook and Chromebox, personally, I’m sold.  I have no doubt that I’ll replace my old first-gen Samsung Chromebook with the new model and use it heavily for portable computing, both around the house and out and about…

What about Android tablets? I still have one — and use it — but to be honest, I find myself reaching for the Chromebook more often lately…

And Raphael is even considering Chrome OS for a desktop replacement:

Based on my experiences with the new setup, I’m actually tempted to move even further and embrace Chrome OS as my primary desktop platform, too, by way of the Chromebox.

How could he be so sold? One biggie, which I think could herald the dawn of personal clouds replacing PCs:

Startup speed aside, the Chrome OS systems make a lot of things about traditional computing environments feel outdated: the cumbersome setup and installation procedures; the annoying and time-consuming OS upgrades; the need to manually update applications over time; the need to use antivirus software (and the accompanying likelihood and potential consequences of infection); the reliance on complicated drivers; and the inevitable bogged-down, slowed-down effect that always seems to happen to PCs after you’ve had ‘em for a few months.

Chrome OS doesn’t have any of those hassles. It’s just about getting online and getting stuff done, plain and simple. Most of the annoyances that have long accompanied computer use are nowhere to be found.

Raphael’s final take:

So, in summary: It’s been an interesting two weeks living in the cloud — enough so that I’m thinking about turning my vacation into a permanent residence.

Read JR Raphael’s full adventure with Chrome OS at Computerworld and have your say: Will you ditch your Mac or PC for Google’s cloudy OS? Will your kids be using a cloud-based PC?

Aiming to build on its enterprise cred, Amazon on Thursday rolled out free basic support for all Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers, and improved its premium support services — while also cutting prices. Read the rest of this entry →

Last month the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) picked winners of its annual CODiE awards from the main categories of business software, digital content and education. Nearing their 50^th anniversary the CODiE’s are the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program where live demos and trail access are mandatory. This year, 119 finalists were selected from 25 sub-categories, with the highest number of nominations shooting for Best Cloud Application/Service.  A three-way tie was announced for Best Cloud App, going to Google Apps for Government, Keynote System’s Cloud Application Perspective, and Scribe Software’s Scribe Online.

Google Apps for Government offers your standard suite of Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites, and Video, but with government-level security.

Keynote Cloud Application Perspective provides SaaS-based performance monitoring for an enterprise’s cloud apps. This application monitoring stores terabytes of application performance monitoring data in the cloud and delivers real-time application analytics on demand.

Scribe Software boasts 12,000 users of their CRM and ERP data and application integration platform.

Another judging body is The Cloud Awards, which honored StrikeIron of Cary, North Carolina with “Cloud Computing Company of the year 2012.” Strikelron struck gold, since it also won in the best infrastructure category and was a runner-up for “Web services excellence.”

The Cloud Awards (entry free $295) don’t appear to be affiliated with any trade association, service provider, vendor or publication, and its judges and judging process were not made public. This didn’t stop 200 vendors from applying. A request for more information was not answered. Read the rest of this entry →

In just the last 12 months, SSDs have turned the corner, reports Wired Enterprise‘s Cade Metz. They’re appearing in high-profile laptops such as Google’s Chromebooks and Apple’s brand-new MacBook Pros — and in the data center, many companies are realizing SSDs make economic sense even with their higher price tags.

Artur Bergman, the founder of Fastly, a San Francisco outfit that uses SSDs exclusively in providing a service that helps other businesses speed their delivery of pages over the net, says one SSD can handle about 40,000 reads or writes a second, whereas the average hardware gives you about 180. And it runs at about one watt as opposed to 15 watts, which means you spend far less on power. “Do the math on how much you can save,” he said. In short, you need fewer servers to do the same amount of work.

“Though some people still have a hard time grasping it, these drives save a tremendous amount of money. They look more expensive, but when you need higher performance, you need way less of them,” Bergman said.

Dropbox is another prime example of a web outfit that has made the leap to solid state drives. Colin Corbett, who oversaw YouTube’s internal network and data centers before taking a similar role at Dropbox, said: “A lot of folks are moving to SSDs in some part of the database tier, while continuing to use hard drives in the rest of their infrastructure.” But he does stress that Dropbox still uses hard drives in some servers, and that many outfits are still waiting for prices to come down even further before moving to SSDs entirely.

Facebook is another using flash storage in its database machine, although in a different set-up.

And cloud-based SSD storage is at the ready as well, Metz reports. Calligo — a cloud service meant specifically for off-shore companies — has already setup this sort of collective flash storage pool inside its new data centers in the U.K.’s Channel Islands, using hardware from a Colorado startup called SolidFire. “I can give oodles of performance to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines, without having to worry about the physical limitations of other storage,” says Calligo founder and CEO Julian Box.

Read the full report at Wired Enterprise and have your say: Is flash storage the way forward in the cloud?

First NASA said it was grounding its work on OpenStack, the open source cloud rival to Amazon it co-founded. And now it seems the space agency is all-in on Amazon, with NASA’s CIO recently touting (and Amazon echoing) that using Amazon Web Services could save the agency $1 million a year.

And if breakups were not already hard enough, reports note that OpenStack was not even mentioned when NASA was talking up its new cloud partner. Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” might sum up how most are reporting it:

But you didn’t have to cut me off
Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing
And I don’t even need your love
But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough…

However, when NASA said it would no longer be working with OpenStack, it was also getting a lot of big IT-attention. As Cloudline reported at the time: “OpenStack has come into its own, IBM’s Dr. Angel Luis Diaz wrote for us in April. So with Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Rackspace, and Red Hat on board, the time has come to scale back involvement, NASA says. Karen Petraska, from NASA’s CIO office, said the agency is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a “smart consumer” of commercial cloud services, reports Web Host Industry News.”

As Wired Enterprise reports this week, all that private sector love had a little help from NASA folks. NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, and many of the key contributors have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to found Nebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty founded Piston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASA’s OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

Have your  say: If a space agency can get what it needs from Amazon’s cloud, is OpenStack going to have a hard time getting off the ground?