TechStop » cloud

Cisco Says It Will Get Cloudier

Joshua Wood — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:56:26 +0000

Hi all, ok forgive the terrible pun in the headline but the cloud is all the rage these days and to some businesses it makes a lot of sense. It is basically outsourcing some of your key IT needs to another company. Email is a classic example of this. Places like Gmail or HotMail have been offering “cloud” resources for years and years now. While email isn’t typically the largest bandwidth hog Cisco is betting that cloud services will more bandwidth. A lot more bandwidth actually.

The guys over at venturebeat.com have put together a really nice blog about their expected rise of the bandwidth that cloud services are going to use. Among the many things that this site offers one of them is the data that Cisco has done a study and believes that cloud traffic will increase by more than 10 times its current Internet traffic use by 2015.. That is hard to believe. I know that Cisco is betting on applications using more bandwidth and they will but this seems excessive even for a Cisco projection. We will see though.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/11/29/cisco-global-cloud-traffic/

Until next time,
TechStop (JW)

VMware Causes Their Own Outage

Joshua Wood — Wed, 04 May 2011 23:00:27 +0000

Hi all,

It seems that the cloud is dissipating in the heat of the small amount of usage that it is getting. Recently VMware was dealing with outage and while trying to fix that one caused anther one. I can give VMware a break on this front since their service is still in Beta unlike Aamazon’s. The series of events is comical though. It seems that VMware had a power outage which lasted 10 hours. When the power was restored they were trying to figure out a way to setup early detection for power outages and caused another outage. Again, a beta program is more easily forgiven for outages than a service that has been production for a while but people are going to get even more nervous about outages if the run on cloud services keeps showing outages.

Until next time,
TechStop

Source: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/050211-vmware-foundry-outage.html

Amazon’s Cloud Outage

Joshua Wood — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 02:05:07 +0000

Hi all, so Amazon had an outage in their EC2 cloud. The sites and services affected included Quora and Reddit and many many other sites and services. At this point in time people feel like IT shouldn’t have outages. Business managers look at their IT departments like they are power or water services and wonder why after investing almost nothing into them they fail. Thus the “cloud” is a great way to offload the cost and responsibility of management.

While the cloud is a great idea the evolution of it is ongoing, just like IT as a whole. Occasionally there are power outages and water shortages even in the most well-managed of cities in North America and the cloud will have down times as well. Basically, while I would still advise a UPS power bumps I wouldn’t only use a generator for power and those basics apply to the cloud as well.

Until next time,
TechStop

Adobe Products Goes Subscription Based

Joshua Wood — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:00:50 +0000

Hello all,

In a world where the “cloud” is all the rage and subscriptions mean an almost unlimited pipeline of cash for companies (I am looking at your NetFlix) there is still a need to download and install software. But how do you adapt something like Adobe After Effects to a cloud based model when the files could be hundreds of gigs to upload/download and that doesn’t include the processing power.

Well, for now at least, you can’t. And that is where Adobe has latched onto the idea that people would want to rent their products. It is great idea for the hobbyist or the small business person who only needs the product for a couple of months in the year. The plans are really reasonably priced and the model seems like it should work very well. Have a look and tell me what you think.

Until next time,
TechStop (aka Josh Wood)

Source: http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/cssubscription.html?trackingid=IJZSU