Email is the lifeblood of today’s business environment. Not only do employees need constant email access to do their jobs effectively, but, due to recent changes in regulations and the threat of litigation, companies also must have the ability to retrieve emails dating back several yea...

There is a lot of hype and reality in the world of Cloud computing today. On the hype side there are numerous data points; VC investments, M&A, data centers under construction, new conferences and events. On the other hand there are now many examples of reality as well. SaaS offerings ...

As described in Part One of this series, the cloud is not the answer for every enterprise or every workload. This is true based on the current economics even without considering additional factors like security, control and SLA's. On the other hand the economics do point out a major cl...

Sun's role in enabling Cloud Computing is not widely recognized today. However, did you know Sun is playing a big role in this space? Check out Sun's Cloud Computing porfolio below and stay tuned for more to come from Sun in this space.

The economics of Cloud Computing do point out a major Cloud advantage when it comes to short term or variable workloads. On the surface though it's apparent that Amazon's EC2, for example, is significantly more expensive if the set up is utilized 24x7x365, even a 40 hour week yields a ...

If you've been following me on Twitter, or through my other blogs, you already know that I made it to the SOA World Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA, which was collocated with Cloud Computing Conference & Expo. I did the keynote on Wednesday and then stayed around for some of the sess...

Cloud-based tools, including large-scale data-intensive computing as offered by Hadoop, are key to the rise and rise of cloud computing. In this wide-ranging Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal, the Director of Grid Services at Yahoo! - Rob Weltman - explains how analy...

It's August 2007. VMware goes public and virtualization, in all its forms, reigns as the leading IT infrastructure megatrend. Fast forward to the summer of 2008 and virtualization is already giving way to the new king of IT media – cloud computing. All of a sudden, the conversations ab...

A few months ago a number of us came together to create "The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum". The purpose of this group is to discuss the creation of a common cloud computing interface. The group is made up of a some of the largest cloud related vendors and startups who all sha...

You’ve heard of downsizing and rightsizing, so how about Cloudsizing? As properly defined, Cloudsizing is: The improvement of efficiency and effectiveness of an organization through the selective use of computing resources that are delivered over the Internet. Simple but powerful, and ...

Google has shifted from solving problems in distributed, massively parallel computing to developing next-generation cloud-centric applications. Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operat...

In the past month or so I have talked to a lot of people in the cloud computing and virtualization space. Many of these folks are working at/on startups that solves one of the many challenges for Enterprise cloud computing. What are these challenges? I have tried to summarize them here...

For too long, the emphasis in Cloud Computing circles has been almost exclusively upon provision of rapidly scalable and ad hoc remote computing on top of cost-effective commodity hardware. The Cloud play from Salesforce, Amazon’s EC2 and the rest has been dominated by the implicit ass...

I am completely obsessed with working in a virtual environment. There is no better extension of this obsession than cloud computing. I will intermittently post snippets of various "cloud" tools that I use to work and live. There are fanatics out there that "need" a clear line and defin...

I think it is only a matter of time before ALL of the leading networking players start talking about the (strategic importance of the) network as a way to succeed in an uncertain economic climate. Last week, in "Cloud Computing, Virtualization and IT Diseconomies" I talked about the in...

The term Cloud Computing is getting a lot of air play these days — it is the computing equivalent of a U.S. Presidential Election. It has loads of twists and turns, plenty of eager participants, lots of money being spent on it and it gets to consume large amounts of the news cycle...of...

I was chatting with a customer the other day who was struggling with some of the implications of cloud computing. The analogy that finally made sense to them is what I will call 'cloud dining.' I am the cook in the house and I am tasked with feeding the family. If my 10-year old is lob...

You've always heard that you "get what you pay for," but that does not seem to be the case with the new cloud computing movement, specifically with Web APIs. Some of the best services out there don’t need a credit card number, and I suspect that trend will continue until greater number...

Although cloud computing provides financial benefits like reduction of CAPEX and the ability to pay-as-you-go, organizations will still need a reasonable amount of granularity in the reporting of cloud usage and the ability to map that usage into a financial chargeback model that makes...

The industry is in broad agreement that the future of computing will include significant innovation and value in web/cloud platforms. On November 19-21, in the San Jose Fairmont Hotel, California, Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West Sponsors and Exhibitors will be viewed as the leading comp...

Infrastructure2.0 is the next technology boom. It is already underway. Cisco, F5 Networks, Riverbed and even VMware promise to benefit from this new infrastructure and the level of connectivity intelligence it promises. (More about these companies and others later in this article.)

Cloud computing is taking IT by storm. Companies and departments that have ventured into the cloud have already started enjoying the benefits of reduced costs, and the ability to cost-effectively scale their infrastructure based on demand. While these early adapters are adjusting to li...

Cloud computing refers to the ability to deploy your application on infrastructure that you do not necessarily own nor manage yourself and that can be easily scaled up to handle demand and provide resiliency to failure. The hardware infrastructure can be composed of clusters of many ch...

Cloud Computing, in its current incarnation, falls short on its promise to make computing as a whole as simple as plugging an application into a utility service. Kirill Sheynkman, Founder & CEO of Elastra Corporation, will be giving a session on Elastic Computing vs. Cloud Computing at...

Cloud storage is a relatively new concept that is becoming a more recognizable term in industry vernacular. Originally delivered as a service, it gained early popularity with Web 2.0 startups looking to outsource storage administration. As the concept spread and offerings expanded, the...

With Amazon recently stating they plan to start offering a content delivery network service as part of their S3 offering and Microsoft reportedly creating their own CDN in partnership with Limelight there seems to be a renewed interest in CDN's. Whether for public usage like Amazons or...

With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer...

What are the telltale signs that your company is already Computing in the Cloud? Is it when the CIO makes a big announcement at the monthly IT meeting? Is it when the IT newsletter drops a reference to pilot testing of some ‘web based’ software? Or, is it when the secretary whips out t...

Google is following a common pattern used in the IT industry - get something out there and then tweak it as necessary. I'm not sure how all of this will play out. I do know that when the elephants start fighting a lot of dust will be raised. Only when that dust settles will we have a b...

I have been reading about Cloud Computing, and from my perspective, Cloud Computing is a great tool for startups and organizations that do not have a web based infrastructure, or for folks that need to deploy and scale applications quickly. I recently came across a number of posts wher...

Recently I've been asked about the benefits of cloud computing in comparison to that of virtualization. Generally my answer has been they are an ideal match. For the most part virtualization has been about doing more with less (consolidation). VMware in particular positioned their prod...

The web moved from static HTML pages to Web 2.0. Software is increasing moving away from the delivery to the “hosted” model. Computing resource acquisitions is moving from buying to renting. This has given rise to new paradigms of delivering software such as Software-as-a-Service or Sa...

What Apple has done with its App Store is show the world that the key to monetizing the cloud is in the delivery of the key applications and assets (music, video, ringtones) through a simple and accessible channel. In the last few weeks Microsoft, Google and T-mobile have all announced...

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is one of the buzzwords that’s mentioned often in the cloud computing space. In short, PaaS is a platform for delivering applications, similar to a pre-built system with hardware, OS and application stack all built in. In the PaaS case, this system is hoste...

RightScale, the cloud management start-up, is now supporting Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) cloud storage solution. Its users will have access to what it calls a “virtually limitless” storage area network directly from the RightScale Dashboard.

The demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current 'in house' storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Patrick Harr, CEO of Nirvanix, will be giving a session at SYS-CON's 'Cloud Computing Expo' (November 19-21, 2008) - a groundbr...

IBM’s going to peel off another $300 million and sink the money into building 13 clouds scattered in 10 countries around the world where business and government can tuck their data and applications against disaster and destruction.

The term 'Cloud Computing' is much too vague. People want and need 'slots' or 'segments' where they can group things. This is how the mind operates through categorization and ordering. So, to possibly help with this, I would like to propose a 'Cloud Pyramid' to help differentiate the v...

If Dell is going to pursue its quixotic quest to trademark the expression “Cloud Computing,” it’s going to have to convince the US Patent and Trademark Office that the buzzword is neither merely descriptive (like, say, spotted pony) or generic and so “incapable of functioning as a sour...

There seems to be a lot of debate as to what Grid computing really is. In fact, the blogosphere seems to be throwing around terms like Grid, Cloud, Utility, Distributed and Cluster computing almost interchangeably. And rather than clarifying things, I feel that the waters are just gett...