cloud computing

Microsoft making waves with Azure and Dallas at ‘09 PDC

At the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) this year, Microsoft made headlines with its new “data marketplace,” Dallas, and surprised analysts with the announcement that Azure would run virtual machines next year.

“Windows Azure’s planned support for VMs with administrative access is a big step forward,” said David Chappell, principal of the Chapell and Associates consulting firm. “It addresses a concern that many customers have.” Continued »

Aggregate services across multiple cloud domains

Cloud computing and SOA governance provider, Vordel released a new product for aggregating and managing multi-domain services at the VordelWorld conference in Dublin, Ireland this week.

The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Weirder science: Hadoop and computational biology

Before there was cloud computing, there was grid computing. Instead of sending your jobs to the cloud, you’d send them to the grid. Instead of provisioning big banks of on-premise computers to do your calculations, you’d send them to the grid.
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Microsoft shares tips on Azure cloud development

By Rob Barry

Ahead of its anticipated formal unveiling of the Azure cloud platform at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) next month, Microsoft is firming up tool and platform details on its version of cloud architecture. Continued »

MercadoLibre employs private cloud to combat server growth

by Rob Barry

Since its launch in 1999, MercadoLibre, Latin America’s largest online marketplace, has continually outgrown its server farm. Because the company had started with Oracle DB to run its databases, it looked into Oracle’s other offerings when deciding the answer to its rapid growth would be a private cloud computing system.

“Six months ago we saw our servers growing very fast,” said Rodrigo Benzaquen, director of site operations and infrastructure at the Argentina-based company. “Month by month we had to keep adding servers for new projects.” Continued »

Appistry and NJVC pilot a private cloud offering

by Jack Vaughan

Grid and cloud computing pioneer Appistry is working with defense consultancy NJVC to create a private cloud computing environment addressing the taut security requirements of the intelligence and defense communities. An announcement was made this week at the GEOINT 2009 Symposium in San Antonio.

The two firms recently completed a proof of concept project that evaluated results as software was re-targeted at the cloud. Evaluated were an aeronautical flight navigation tool, a Web-based vertical obstruction dissemination system, and an ESRI-based on-demand chart creation utility. Continued »

Zend partners to simplify cloud computing service access

With so many differences between the various cloud platforms out there, could PHP be the one language to rule them all? PHP firm Zend Technologies thinks so. The company recently partnered with IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid to launch a simple API for cloud application services. Zend said the PHP-based, open-source API will be able to access services across all major cloud platforms.

In time, Zend aims to see the Simple Cloud API translated to any object-oriented language for the Web. This should come as good news to those fearing vendor lock-in with the cloud computing space.

Distributed computing veteran ScaleOut preps for cloud computing

by Rob Barry and Jack Vaughan

To get a view of how cloud computing may progress, one may look at the course of data grids and distributed caching. Boutique companies such as Appistry, GigaSpace, and DataSynapse have plied the parallel computing trade for a good while, and cloud computing seems a very natural next step.

Lesser known due to its roots in the narrower Microsoft software market is ScaleOut Software, which last month unveiled a Management Pack for its ScaleOut State Server that includes an object browser and parallel backup/restore capability intended to help architects and developers view, manage, and back up objects stored in its distributed cache. In recent releases, ScaleOut has expanded beyond .NET to support Java distributed applications as well. Continued »

BPM ‘cloud’ vendor picks up Jetty application server

There has been more than some discussion about SOA vendors moving to cloud computing, but BPM vendors are going there too. Witness the path of Intalio, now positioned as ”the leading vendor of enterprise cloud computing platforms.”  Continued »

DataSynapse acquisition will be Tibco’s Silver lining in the cloud

While cloud computing continues to gain momentum, middleware vendors have gone into a feeding frenzy with efforts to bite off their own piece of this new frontier. Just weeks after VMware announced its plan to acquire SpringSource, we now hear that Tibco has expanded its own cloud capabilities with the acquisition of grid specialist DataSynapse for a reported $27.7 million.

As cloud computing is really just the next evolutionary step for grid – at which DataSynapse is an old hand – the move is likely meant to strengthen the capabilities of Tibco’s Silver cloud application delivery product. While Silver already allows developers to deliver new applications onto cloud platforms, DataSynapse’s FabricServer software will give it the ability to deploy a wide variety of existing applications to cloud infrastructures.

Tibco’s strengths in public cloud will find in DataSynapse’s internal cloud expertise very complimentary. This is an important step when considering the push in modern application development to explore private cloud deployments in the very near future.