There is no doubt that EMC has shipped some Atmos storage since its introduction. Yes, EMC has Atmos. And the company claims that Atmos is specifically designed for the cloud. However, I believe that there are fundamental issues with the way EMC sells Atmos to customers. First of all, if Atmos is cloud storage, then it should be sold on a usage basis. Customers should be charged only for what they use–not for petabytes of capacity up front. After all, isn’t that the whole premise of cloud? Lowering your capital expenditures and shifting to a utility model? It makes me wonder if EMC is slowly becoming the Amdahl of Cloud Storage.
Network Computing
Could EMC Become The Amdahl of Cloud Storage?
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Categories: General.
Converged Network Reins in Runaway Cabling
Expansion is evident everywhere in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s data center. The number of servers, switches and storage systems has been growing as the academic institution has delivered more services to its users. As a result, cabling was strewn throughout the data center, and the need to simplify its wiring was a central reason why the higher educational institute decided to install an integrated computing solution.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Startup CloudPassage Tackles Cloud Server Security With New Services
Data privacy, security and reliability are the biggest concerns surrounding cloud computing, according to a recent survey of IT executives conducted by the non-profit IT Governance Institute (ITGI). It’s no surprise then that a number of IT vendors are scrambling to address those concerns. Take CloudPassage, for example. The startup recently unveiled its Halo SVM (Server Vulnerability Management) and Halo Firewall, server security and compliance services that the company says are built specifically for elastic clouds.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
New BridgeSTOR Appliance Aids Microsoft Data Protection Manager
Data management appliance vendor BridgeSTOR has released a new application-optimized storage (AOS) appliance that shrinks data in Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) backup and recovery system. The new appliance provides data deduplication and compression capabilities that DPM doesn’t offer on its own, and BridgeSTOR says it can shrink data stores to as small as 10 percent of their original size.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Your Cloud Future Is In China
Can we expect that cloud hosting will be focused on China within 10 years? The infrastructure, the money, the central planning and their enviable access to resources make this inevitable. And why not? In the great marketing machine that surrounds cloud computing, the claim is that your data can be anywhere and that compute power should not be close to you, nor should you even care. And as China moves from agrarian subsistence to manufacturing and then onto a tertiary economy, it will be positioned to move into a services economy. Indeed, the country is doing so already in a range of areas. It seems clear that with access to capital, town planning and labor it is not so hard to conceive that China will be better positioned to be an early mover in the cloud marketplace.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Self-Service IT, For IT, By IT
I always shake my head when I hear someone say that private cloud computing won’t take off because enterprises can’t realize the economies of scale that a public cloud provider can. Thing is, the benefits that enterprises get from a private cloud are not the same as a public cloud. I was reminded of this while reading F5′s Lori MacVittie succinctly sum up the difference in goals between private cloud and public cloud adopters in Focus of Cloud Implementation Depends on the Implementer: “Private cloud implementers are not trying to be Amazon or Google or Salesforce.com. They’re trying to be a more efficient, leaner version of themselves–IT as a Service.” While all organizations want to be efficient, the way they measure their success is vastly different from how cloud providers measure success.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Drobo Announces New SMB Storage Devices
Ever since launch of the PC, and increasingly more now, organizations have been dealing with users who bring technology into the company that they had started out using personally. One of those is the Drobo storage device, which gives users the ability to set up a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) system by mixing and matching a variety of disk drives. Faced with the fact that as many as a quarter of its sales were to small- to medium-sized businesses rather than to consumers, the company is announcing three models of its device – two eight-bays and a 12-bay – that are actually intended for business use.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Falconstor Eases Disaster Recovery Woes
Falconstor Software Inc. has added functionality to its Continuous Data Protector and Network Storage Server data replication products that make it easier for organizations to use those products for disaster recovery. Moreover, the RecoverTrac software is heterogeneous among platforms, networks, arrays, and hypervisors, meaning that organizations would not need to have identical implementations in different parts of the company to be able to restore data, as is typically required today.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
Zenprise Adds Powerful New Android Management Tools
Mobile device management is certainly becoming a hot topic. An increasing number of enterprises are finding themselves faced with the challenge of reconciling the popularity and potential problems associated with these devices, as well as taming the chaos that is possible when employees and customers alike adopt an increasingly mobile culture. Though Zenprise is a multi-OS mobile support framework with a long history covering BlackBerry and Apple devices, the latest release is all about improved Android capabilities.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.
RingCube Targets VDI Ghetto
At first glance, desktop virtualization is the poster child for the problem of satisfying an increasingly mobile workforce with increasingly scarcer resources. However, despite the proliferation of vendors entering the VDI market; including Citrix, MokaFive, Pano Logic, Ring Cube, Symantec, Oracle, and VMware; the reality has been both technically challenging and more expensive than expected.
Network Computing
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Categories: General.