I recently spoke with a couple VPs that head up the cloud initiatives at Dell. I have been watching Dell closely, because I think they have one of the best platforms and bundle of products and services in which to launch a full-scale cloud solution. But I have to wonder if it will pan out for them. I recently spoke with a lot of solution providers that did not have some good things to say about Dell.

So I am anxious though to see if they will work with solution providers and give them a profit margin that will make working with Dell a viable solution. Dell is being pretty smart about their cloud offering, and as with many of their products, they are approaching it methodically until they have it just right. There are four main attributes that they are focusing on in the development of their cloud solution. Read the rest of this entry →

While folks like to talk about Google’s many failed properties, one that stands out for Apple is MobileMe. Well, Apple’s troubled child is no more as of Monday — Apple’s new golden boy, iCloud, is all things cloud at Apple now, and includes many of MobileMe’s features.

Gadget Lab’s Christina Bonnington writes of MobileMe’s checkered past:

MobileMe has been one of Apple’s least successful product endeavors. The 2008 launch of the service was marked by numerous bugs, as well as an e-mail blackout for thousands of subscribers. The release went so poorly, in fact, that critics started calling it “MobileMess.” Perhaps the worst criticism came from former CEO Steve Jobs himself. According to Fortune, Jobs reportedly gathered the MobileMe team together shortly after the product launch, asking “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” When he got a reply, he said, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Ouch. But the transition to iCloud — including the 20GB free teaser to get them over earlier rather than later — has also not been without bumps in the road:

The transition from MobileMe to iCloud has also been rough for many users. iCloud, whose purpose is largely to unify and sync storage across iOS and Mac devices, is actually the fourth incarnation of web-based storage clients for Apple. In 2000, iTools was a free option for Mac users, which was replaced by subscription-only .Mac in mid 2002. .Mac gave way to MobileMe in 2008, which has since been replaced by iCloud.

At WWDC 2012 — remember that? — Apple laid out some more details on Monday at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference of how Apple’s iCloud will integrate with its next desktop OS, OS X Mountain lion, as well as the iPhone and iPad.

Will iCloud deliver cloud nirvana for Apple customers, and make them forget the troubled past? With Google going big on cloud on the back- and front-ends at I/O and before that with Google Drive, is 2012 shaping up to be the year the cloud defined computing?

By Jon Walsh

Several weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a Cloud Computing Redbooks Residency at IBM in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the office with the longest corridors I have ever seen. IBMers in Raleigh must be the fittest on the planet because it is a mile walk for a coffee.As part of the experience we were invited to contribute to the IBM cloud blog, Thoughts on Cloud. My interest in cloud has been forming over the past three years.  I am not technical but I have an interest in cloud as a concept and I have long thought that infrastructure for the enterprise is too complex and could be simplified, from a delivery perspective, to help realize benefits much more quickly.

When I discuss cloud with clients, certain questions arise. One of the main questions is; why would a large organization with a fully functioning IT infrastructure, that delivers services, and enables that business to compete in its chosen sector choose to introduce a disruptive technology like cloud? Read the rest of this entry →

Can Amazon handle its fast-growing cloud? That the questionWired Enterprise‘s Robert McMillan asked Saturday.

Hurricane-like storms knocked an Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, offline last night, and a chunk of the internet felt it. The six-hour incident temporarily cut off a number of popular internet services, including Netflix, Pinterest, Heroku, and Instagram.

The outage was the second for this particular Amazon data center in the past month. It’s bad news for a cloud computing platform that’s sold as a more reliable alternative to traditional data centers.

In theory, big outages like this aren’t supposed to happen. Amazon is supposed to keep the data centers up and running — something it has become very good at — and customers like Netflix, freed from that drudgery, are supposed to be free to cook up compelling new web application like video streaming.

In reality, though, Amazon data centers have outages all the time. In fact, Amazon tells its customers to plan for this to happen, and to be ready to roll over to a new data center whenever there’s an outage.

That’s what was supposed to happen at Netflix Friday night. But it didn’t work out that way. According toTwitter messages from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage. Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pinterest services hosted by Amazon crashed.

…

So on Saturday, there are two big questions that need to be answered. First, why did Amazon’s Ashburn data center fail? A storm shouldn’t have taken out Amazon’s backup generators. Second, Why were companies like Netflix so drastically affected by a single data center outage?

Read Wired Enterprise‘s full report here.

Cloudline has been emailed by a number of vendors and experts on Monday wanting to weigh in. Guys, please share what you have to say on the matter below in comments, an open forum for discussion.

 

It ought not surprise anyone that Google has entered the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business. GigaOm’s Derrick Harris broke news of the plans in mid-May, but among knowledgeable cloud circles, it was a foregone conclusion that the search giant would enter into rentable infrastructure.

It was a natural move for Google to join the fray. HP entered the cloud game in April. Microsoft hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Platform as a Service (PaaS) in early June and brought it back as an IaaS. Google couldn’t afford to sit idle and hand over the future of an eleventy billion dollar industry to an online book store.

And Google needs new things to talk about. New tablets, new glasses, new media players, etc. “New” is the gas that keeps Google going, what gives it that sheen of innovation that makes it seem like more than an advertising company. More product launches mean more bonuses too, so it’s critical to keep putting products out the door. That’s the incentive plan that brought us Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Answers and GoogleFlooFlaFlippidittyFloop.

But beyond something new and shiny for the tech press to cover, the move has left many scratching their heads. Read the rest of this entry →

As we colonize the cloud we’ll want to mix and match web services in order to meet our needs. To do that, it’s helpful to analyze what the current crop of services actually do. In many cases, if you stop to think about it, they conflate several different services in ways that are not easy to separate or recombine. Consider, for example, your use of Facebook or Flickr.

Read the rest of this entry →

Day One of Google I/O 2012 was big day for big G with the launch of a new 7-inch tablet, a streaming media device for the home and Android 4.1 Jellybean all out of the bag.

But for cloud watchers, Day Two is also moving the needle. High on the Richter scale, “Google Plugs GDrive Into Chrome OS, iPhones, iPads”, reports Wired Enterprise:

Google has plugged its Google Drive online storage service into its Chrome OS operating system as well as Apple’s iOS, the operating system that runs the iPhone and the iPad.

This means that you can synchronize files stored on your Chrome OS and iOS devices with GDrive and across various other devices, including Windows machines and Macs.

Starting on Thursday, the company will offer local software applications that run on Chrome OS and iOS and connect back to Google Drive in the proverbial cloud. Such software is already available for Windows machines and Macs.

And on the big shift going on with how computing is delivered (thanks for being there, Wired E): “Google Mimics Amazon Cloud With ‘Google Compute Engine’”:

Google has unveiled a service akin to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, letting developers and businesses hoist applications atop virtual machines running its same sweeping infrastructure that underpins Google’s own applications and web services.

Unveiled on Thursday morning by Urs Hölzle — the man who oversees Google’s infrastructure — at the company’s annual developer conference, the new service is known as Google Compute Engine. The company already offers a service for building and running applications atop its infrastructure — Google App Engine — but this service does not offer access to raw virtual machines. With App Engine, you must code applications for specific APIs, or application programming interfaces, that place certain restrictions on what programming languages, libraries, and frameworks can be used.

With raw virtual machines, developers can pretty much run whatever software they want, just as they can with Amazon EC2, the undisputed king of the cloud computing game.

(See also: As Mystery Cloud Looms, Google Revs App Engine)

Last but not least (as the future of tech seems a Apple vs. Google world, at least this week), “Google Announces Chrome Browser for iOS”, reports Gadget Lab:

The Chrome browser won’t be limited to Android devices and desktop computers anymore. At its annual I/O conference Thursday, Google announced that Chrome is headed to iOS, and will be available on the iPhone later today, in fact.

The Chrome app will provide much of what you would expect from the browser, such as its incognito mode for browsing without leaving a digital trail in your history or cookie buckets. The mobile browser will also offer synchronization across devices, so you can keep bookmarks, settings, and open tabs synced among your desktop and iOS products.

Any questions about Google’s “go big or go home”-intent here with these cloud moves? Surely Google was gunning for Apple on Day One of I/O. With Day Two’s news, who should be most worried: Amazon or Microsoft?

Red Hat is gearing up to deliver products to build hybrid clouds in coming months, the company announced at its conference on Wednesday. Will they be cloud game-changers?

Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering at Red Hat said during a press conference: “Years ago, customers were primarily Red Hat Linux customers, but now they’re consuming a number of the vendor’s products, he said. To this end, the new hybrid cloud announcements represent Red Hat’s intention to integrate groups of products into single offerings with their own road maps…,” reports IDG News Service’s Chris Kanaracus.

“This is a new era for Red Hat,” Stevens said.

Read the rest of this entry →

The virtualization firm Pano Logic is one-upping Google and its Chromebook and Chromebox cloud PC devices with its own fully (read: no local OS or PC required) browser-based desktop computing platform.

John Kish, President and CEO of Pano Logic, outlined the deal with the new Pano System for Cloud and Pano Zero Client, a solid-state device that has no processor, no storage, no memory and no operating system: “For those organizations that don’t require a full Windows environment, the transition is seamless with immediate benefits. The end user sees the Chrome browser interface. The IT manager sees a simple management console. The CTO sees staff spending less time managing the desktop. The CIO sees a path to the cloud. And the CFO sees savings adding up.” Read the rest of this entry →

Google doubled down on the consumer cloud on Wednesday at Google I/O, where it unveiled the expected Nexus 7 tablet and the unexpected Nexus Q, which connects the new Google tablet and other Android smartphones to your TV. Read the rest of this entry →