Your tech career depends on preparing for the cloud

[Tepid]

Tepid, your post should be engraved on a 12x9 horizontal plaque and hung above every office door and office bathroom door on planet earth. It would probably cost 4-5 trillion dollars but I think it would be worth it.

Thanks Travis, I may post that on my site, if you don't mind.

 

[dajogejr]

As an IT professional, I will resist the cloud as long as I can...if not forever.
I need to have my data on hand, at our location.
We have weekly backups sent off site to certified locations that handle such data.
(Via Tapes)

I think the cloud is great for personal use.
I use my Live account for pictures, videos, etc., things I like to show friends and family while visiting, etc.

For a professional use, as a professional...it's not for us.
While a bad storm could sever Internet connections, etc., we'd have to have a total catastrophe for us not to be able to work with documents, etc., located here on our LAN.

 

[Buddahfan]

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.

more on link at top

 

[Bearcatrp]

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.

 

[Buddahfan]

Ave company spends $6,300 on cloud computing, Amt Rising

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.

 

[Buddahfan]

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.

 

[Buddahfan]

Intel, partners push for cloud standards

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.

Cloud Watch

• Amazon cloud outage was triggered by configuration error
• What happens to data when your cloud provider evaporates?
• Security still top concern with cloud, despite Amazon outage
• Investigation on after Amazon's cloud nightmare
• Amazon outage sparks frustration, doubts about cloud
• Amazon gets 'black eye' from cloud outage
• Legal Risks in the Cloud
• Dell to spend $1B on cloud services this year
• IBM jumps into cloud, customers tiptoe behind
• Most IT managers plan to adopt cloud storage

More in Cloud Computing

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

cont here

 

[mr pc]

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%.

:shock:

 

[Win7User512]

For a professional use, as a professional...it's not for us.
While a bad storm could sever Internet connections, etc., we'd have to have a total catastrophe for us not to be able to work with documents, etc., located here on our LAN.

That's always been my peeve concerning cloud computing. Businesses need their data today, not tomorrow; now, not later, when an internet connection can be restored.

 

[Tarka Dal]

It all depends on broadband!

Just to get my 1p worth in...
It'll work....
As broadband becomes more reliable and easy access wherever you are it will work...
But, it's not for everyone....
especially .gov

 

[brady]

Why is everyone defining clouds as 'other' companies property and or space? Instead of arguing public cloud vs private cloud consider compliance. Any company that holds customer data/private data can't use public clouds. Companies with any funding behind their technology departments will create and maintain their own cloud space via san and or replicating nas devices.
This is an easy DR/BCP operation that costs very little to engineer and implement when compared to other forms of BCP and offsite DR.

The Cloud IS the future of DR/BCP.

 

[Tepid]

Yeah, lets see how well this goes over with Internet Regulations and Bandwidth usage limits and/or additional charges.
I don't see very many public people will to drop their home videos on the cloud and then be charged to view them.

Company side my be a different story, but I assume they will control most of that in house anyway, depending on the company. with more people moving to a Work From Home climate, yes, the Company cloud will be a must, but, the public cloud is not.

 

[deathwind211]

I'm not interested in someone elses cloud. That is what it is today is it not? There is Google's cloud or Microsoft's cloud etc. Someone let me know when i can control my own cloud. when i can get myself a nice shiny cloud server that will house my digital data and allow me to use it when and where i please. Without someone else's paws in the mix. Let me know when i can control my storage space not a conglomerate someplace out in the ether.

Don't get me wrong i love the idea of multiple people being able to access their data remotely form any computer on the net, I love the idea of posting up videos that can then be streamed to multiple boxes at once. I just want to control my information that is out there, not put my faith in someone else and roll the dice.

This would be a great server add-on, but i am not interested in the cloud until i have the ability to be the master of my cloud not someone else.

 

[ionbasa]

I'm not interested in someone elses cloud. That is what it is today is it not? There is Google's cloud or Microsoft's cloud etc. Someone let me know when i can control my own cloud. when i can get myself a nice shiny cloud server that will house my digital data and allow me to use it when and where i please. Without someone else's paws in the mix. Let me know when i can control my storage space not a conglomerate someplace out in the ether.

Don't get me wrong i love the idea of multiple people being able to access their data remotely form any computer on the net, I love the idea of posting up videos that can then be streamed to multiple boxes at once. I just want to control my information that is out there, not put my faith in someone else and roll the dice.

This would be a great server add-on, but i am not interested in the cloud until i have the ability to be the master of my cloud not someone else.

Cloud | Ubuntu
Its already here. all you have to do is set it up, on any capable computer and try connecting from another, possibly by using PXE boot or a custom boot manager that pointed to the server.

 

[linnemeyerhere]

If my career must be in the clouds then I'll need depends !

 

[JeremyAlexander]

1) Don't ever talk smack about netflix. It's freak'n awesome!!!
2) If it will force upgrades to the Infrastructure to make it work seemlessly it would be a good thing, but since there's so many people still running XP, people that have dial up, or are stuck in shltty places that only have crappy 3mbs dsl. It would take decades to do that and I can't see anyone taking the risk of investment untill the government get's involved and decides to subsidize comapies for upgrading the networks to support high speed internet -oh wait they already did that LOL. Business will like the idea and it is going to happen, but for home users the cloud is not looming so soon. Maybe (I HOPE) that ugly azz toolbar/office ribbon in windows 8 will be access to/from the 'cloud' because if it's just more ugly ways of doing the same things and you can't hide it (completly) then windows 8 will flop like vista. And when I buy a 15gig game online and it literally takes 6 hours to download how would I play that in the cloud? Or will it be the illusion of a cloud where you have to be connected to the cloud for it to work like games for windows live. Gee be nice if they could backup my save games for me since I have to run it to play it and they make it near impossible to back them up yourself. Sorry bout my rant, but not my opinion.

 

[Buddahfan]

Business intelligence, mobility, cloud top CIO priorities list this ye

Cloud has moved up the most significantly since the 2009 survey, followed to a lesser extend by Mobility Solutions.

-------------------------------------2009--2011
Business intelligence/analytics--83%83%
Mobility solutions----------------- 68%74%
Virtualization-----------------------75%68%
Cloud computing Link------------ -33%60%
Business process management---64%60%
Risk management/compliance---71%58%
Self-service portals----------------66%57%
Collaboration/social networking-54%55%

 

[fseal]

I'm not interested in someone elses cloud. That is what it is today is it not? There is Google's cloud or Microsoft's cloud etc. Someone let me know when i can control my own cloud. when i can get myself a nice shiny cloud server that will house my digital data and allow me to use it when and where i please. Without someone else's paws in the mix. Let me know when i can control my storage space not a conglomerate someplace out in the ether.

Don't get me wrong i love the idea of multiple people being able to access their data remotely form any computer on the net, I love the idea of posting up videos that can then be streamed to multiple boxes at once. I just want to control my information that is out there, not put my faith in someone else and roll the dice.

This would be a great server add-on, but i am not interested in the cloud until i have the ability to be the master of my cloud not someone else.

Cloud | Ubuntu
Its already here. all you have to do is set it up, on any capable computer and try connecting from another, possibly by using PXE boot or a custom boot manager that pointed to the server.

I was going to suggest Windows Home Server hehe...

 

[Buddahfan]

Microsoft Wins San Francisco Cloud Email Deal

Microsoft Wins San Francisco Cloud Email Deal

CIO Jon Walter said the city will move 23,000 users on seven separate systems to Microsoft Exchange Online and consider the cloud for future migrations.

By Elizabeth Montalbano InformationWeek

May 18, 2011 03:58 PM


(click image for larger view)
Slideshow: Top 20 Government Cloud Service Providers

The city of San Francisco plans to consolidate seven separate email systems to Microsoft's hosted cloud-based email service over the next year.

The city is currently migrating 23,000 employees across 60 departments and agencies to Microsoft Exchange Online, SF CIO Jon Walton said in a news conference Wednesdy. Exchange Online is a cloud-based enterprise messaging platform that offers email, calendaring and collaboration features.

San Francisco will pay $1.2 million a year--or $6.50 per month, per user--for hosted email and archiving on the service, which will be hosted in Microsoft's data centers, Walton said. He said the cost savings of the deal is one of the ways the IT department is achieving a 20% cost reduction required by the city, which is experiencing budget cuts.

more here

 

[Lordbob75]

My idea of a personal cloud will be a nice linux webserver running in my basement with an open port for access.

I have no interest in a corporate owned cloud OS.

~Lordbob