While many businesses are developing private clouds as a tentative first step into cloud computing, a Microsoft executive at a cloud industry conference in Silicon Valley said that eventually, they’ll plug into public cloud utilities because cost and efficiency benefits will be impossible to ignore.
Network Computing
Microsoft Exec Says Cloud Cost Savings Are ‘Too Big To Be Ignored’
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How Will Thunderbolt Affect Enterprise Storage?
Last week, Intel and Apple dropped a bombshell on the consumer computer peripheral market. The new Thunderbolt port, a 10G bps interconnect found on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro laptop computers, combines DisplayPort video and PCI Express and is opening a new world of expansion options. But how will this technology, formerly known as Light Peak, impact enterprise storage?
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Western Digital Buys Hitachi GST, And Then There Were Four
Just as the sports-crazed among us have recovered from Super Bowl Sunday and are preparing for March Madness, Western Digital announced that it is buying Hitachi’s Global Storage Technologies division, which will bring the hard drive market to a final four vendors a full month before the NCAA tournament does. The new Western Digital will be far and away the largest hard drive vendor, selling 49 percent of the world’s hard drives.
Network Computing
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Gemini Releases Cloudian: Amazon S3 Compliant Multi-Tenant Cloud Storage System
Gemini Mobile Technologies (“Gemini”) announced today that several Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have started trials of its Cloudian software. Cloudian allows ISPs and CSPs to provide Amazon S3 compliant “Cloud Storage on Demand” services to web service providers and enterprise applications. Applications developed for the Amazon S3 API will work on a Cloudian system without modification. Cloudian allows the same physical storage cluster to be shared by thousands of tenant users, with flexible billing based on usage and traffic. A fully redundant Cloudian service requires only 2 PCs and scales to hundreds of PCs in multiple datacenters.
Network Computing
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Cloud Connect Is All About Automation
Automation. That is the theme I continue to come back to while at Cloud Connect. I think organizations are going to be getting the most benefit from automation in the near term, and automation is one of the many steps on the road to private cloud computing. Automation, when done right, can save you and your staff loads of work and can ensure that deployments go more smoothly. I sat down with representatives from VMWare, Gale Technologies, HP, TransLattice and Cloud.com, and got the lowdown on automation and private cloud.
Network Computing
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HP Builds Portfolio Of Services For Energy Efficiency And Sustainability
HP said on Thursday that it’s rolling out an array of nine different consulting services that are all designed to help enterprises and other businesses significantly improve energy efficiency and adopt environmental sustainability practices. The services, developed in conjunction with various partners, are focused not just on data center operations but on building facilities and improved supply chain management.
Network Computing
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Pure-Play Vendors Rule The Storage Roost
With the amount of data to be stored growing at 50-percent-plus per year, it’s no surprise that storage vendors are selling a lot more storage. According to Gartner, Inc., the worldwide external controller-based (ECB) disk storage market surpassed $ 19.4 billion in 2010, an 18.1 percent increase from 2009 revenue and beating the previous high set in 2008 by $ 1.4 billion. What may come as a surprise is that EMC increased its market lead by 3 points and NetApp jumped from sixth to third spot among the top vendors.
Network Computing
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Standardizing Cloud APIs Is Useless
In a session on open source in the cloud at the Cloud Connect show in Santa Clara, Calif., Randy Bias of Cloudscaling dropped a bombshell of a statement: “API’s don’t matter.” What Bias was really asking was, “What role do standards play in cloud computing?” With a wry smirk, Bias went on to explain that mimicking Amazon’s APIs, for example, is useless if providers don’t have the ability to deliver all of the features and functions of Amazon’s service, including the things you don’t see like reliability and scaling. Of course APIs matter, but having a functional standardized cloud service management API doesn’t and, I’d argue, never will.
Network Computing
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Coraid And Arista Partner On High-Performance Ethernet SAN
Presaging a future data center with converged networking and storage, storage vendor Coraid and data switching vendor Arista Networks announced this week that they are partnering to deliver high-performance Ethernet storage area networking that the companies say could offer a five to eight times price/performance advantage over legacy storage systems, and at the same time make it easier to deploy virtualization and the cloud. The companies are doing this in two steps: first, by certifying that their products work with each other’s and second, through deeper product integration in the future.
Network Computing
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OpenFCoE: Will Software Initiators Win Again?
Now that second and, for some components, third generation FCoE equipment is coming to market, Intel is once again promoting the use of OpenFCoE software initiators with their X520 10Gbps network cards as an alternative to CNAs that process the FCoE protocol traffic on-card. The question for OpenFCoE is will the FCoE market develop like the Fibre Channel market or the iSCSI market did?
Network Computing
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