Your tech career depends on preparing for the cloud

HP enters public cloud market, puts muscle behind hybrid computing value and management for enterprises

By Dana Gardner | January 25, 2011, 7:53am PST

HP today fully threw its hat into the public cloud-computing ring, joining the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM, to provide a full range of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings hosted on HP data centers.
Targeting enterprises, independent software vendors (ISVs), service providers, and the global HP channel and partner ecosystem, the new HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute (ECS-Compute) bundles server, storage, network and security resources for consumption as pure services.
ECS-Compute is an HP-hosted compute fabric that’s governed via policies for service, performance, security, and privacy requirements. The fabric is available next month via bursting with elasticity provisioning that rapidly adjusts infrastructure capacity, as enterprise demands shift and change, said HP. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
HP CloudSystem, a new private-hybrid cloud enablement offering that automates private cloud provisioning, uses HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) solutions and HP Converged Infrastructure physical assets so that enterprises, governments, and service providers can better build, manage, and consume hybrid cloud services, said HP.
This is a hybrid services delivery capability, and you can manage it all as a service.
HP CloudSystem supports a broad spectrum of applications while speeding and simplifying the buying, deployment and support of cloud environments, said HP. CloudSystem brings “cloud maps” to play so that more applications can be quick-start “ported” to a cloud or hybrid environment.

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dajogejr said:

As an IT professional, I will resist the cloud as long as I can...if not forever.

You will not have a choice. But it will be awhile before this happens.

Average company spends $6,300 on cloud computing, will spend 10% more this year

By Joe McKendrick | January 27, 2011, 9:11pm PST


A new survey asked companies about their average spend on cloud computing resources, and the results are surprising, in a low-spend way. That is, the average company spent just over $6,300 in 2010. This spending is expected to ramp up at least 10% during 2011.


Survey confirms companies are still trying to sort out cloud.


The survey of 100 IT executives, conducted by Osterman Research for Electric Cloud finds that among organizations that have implemented cloud computing, spending on cloud-based infrastructure averaged $6,335, or $23.31 per employee, in 2010. That spend is expected to rise to $6,920, or $26.63 per employee, in 2011. This suggests that the companies with cloud computing tend to be on the smaller side, averaging about 300 employees each. In fact, Osterman reports the median number of employees at the organizations surveyed was 403. (PDF of the report available here.)


A majority of respondents just started adoption of public cloud computing this past year, and about 40% say they just started their private cloud implementation in 2010. For a relatively new initiative, ROI has been sizable — the average return on investment was reported at 46%. However, ROI is still a mystery; 57% of respondents either did not know or could not quantify their ROI on cloud computing.

ROI numbers on cloud investments are a bunch of bull just like ROI estimates on any capital investment project are.

I used to do this sort of thing for a living.

Most major companies compute an estimated ROI for a project in order to get it improved.

But how many actually go back after the fact to see what the real ROI was? Probably very very few.

So the ROI numbers are nothing more than estimates of what the ROI will be and everyone knows that the estimated ROI on investments are about as accurate as forecasting where the stock market averages will be in five years.

Interesting article I think? I only say this because most of it is beyond my pay grade

Windows Azure futures: Turning the cloud into a supercomputer

By Mary Jo Foley | February 2, 2011, 1:34pm PST


February 1 is considered the “one year” anniversary of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform (even though February 2 is the actual date that billing was “turned on”).
Last year, Microsoft said it had 10,000 Azure customers; this week officials are saying they have 31,000, though they are refusing to say how many of these are paying customers, how many are divisions of Microsoft, etc.
As I noted last year, Microsoft has been slowly and steadily adding new features to Azure. But I haven’t written much about longer-term Azure futures. Until today.
Bill Hilf, General Manager of the Technical Computing Group (TCG) at Microsoft, isn’t part of the Azure team. But he and his band are doing work on technologies that ultimately may have substantial bearing on the future of Microsoft’s cloud platform. The TCG has a server operating system team, a parallelization team and a team “with the idea of connecting a consumer to a cloud service,” according to Hilf.
The TCG late last year stated its intentions to allow customers to provision and manage Windows Server 2008 R2 HPC nodes in Windows Azure from within on-premises server clusters as part of Service Pack 1 of HPC Server 2008 R2. But Hilf and his team want to go beyond this and turn the cloud into a supercomputer, as Hilf explained to me last week. “We want to take HPC out of niche access,” he said.

My biggest take-away from my interview with Hilf is Microsoft isn’t waiting around for its business customers to overcome their cloud objections. Microsoft is looking for other ways to attract enterprise customers to the cloud, with nearly unlimited data-access and processing power as the lure.

Chip maker's strategy is to let big users drive change, while it builds underlying technology in lockstep

By Patrick Thibodeau
May 12, 2011 06:47 AM ET

Computerworld - There is no shortage of criticism about the cloud, about its lack of interoperability, fear of vendor lock-in as well as the security risks.
Its critics include Vinton Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, who compares the status of cloud computing today to the early days of email.
"Today, cloud computing is like the email of the 1980s, [when] things were not interconnected, you couldn't interchange things between email (systems). {Now] you can't interchange things between clouds - that is going to change," said Cerf, at the Interop conference this week. "There will be the same pressures to get cloud systems to interoperate."
Mark Deibert, who is responsible for global enterprise architecture at a pharmaceutical firm that he asked not be identified, agreed with Cerf.

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The cloud is "either going to mature or it's going to fade away," said Deibert.

cont here

Imagine all the "Cloud Acquisitions" as well - This is business as usual and there's competition and profits to be had. So many start up clouds or what I like to call "Steamers" will be bought out and consumed by bigger clouds or "Storms".

Which will cause mass confusion for the "borrowers" of the data stored on those start ups. People who thought, "hey, keep it local, keep it clean" and are now integrated into much larger networks - which = market share = more profit. Things will get shifted about, re-configured, "modernized", and ultimately more expensive for the end users.

Of course while I sit here conjuring up some bird brained conspiracy - someone has already patented and copyrighted my terminology and developed a corporate think tank to speed there cloud acquisitions and ultimately increase profits by 200%.