Links List 4.10.09

April 13th, 2009 by Julia Lim

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and salesforce.com. What do they all have in common? Beyond being major cloud players, they all opted not to sign the Open Cloud Manifesto. Forrester’s James Staten gave the scoop on why Microsoft  wouldn’t sign: Microsoft’s biggest issue was being told to sign it ‘as is’ (Microsoft’s tale) – as one of the leading cloud vendors they wanted to be able to have some input. Specific issues:

•  The “cloud” term is limiting, especially for meaningful mass communication since it currently encompasses so many services.
• The Manifesto’s idealism is worthy, but not a useful guide for strategy.
• The value of some cloud service offerings will come directly from being closed, not open.

Regardless of the “he said, she said” nature of the debate, an open cloud platform with interoperability built in is a good thing for everyone. Nobody (except a company that has a history of locking people into a proprietary platform) wants to strand their cloud application on one platform. Portabillity is key for the true benefits and possible savings of cloud computing to come into play.

InteropNet Hot Stage took place last week and as soon as I can pin Alejandro down, you’ll get a blog post all about it. 18+ vendors, several kilometers of fiber and many energy (and other) drinks later, the InteropNet has been built and tested. During the build stage, project lead Geoff Horne took some time out to over the main technologies of InteropNet which come out of a KISS doctrine to build a best practices network – including the network management piece which is EM7 of course.

While the debate still rages about just what’s included in the uber-term “cloud computing, Royal Pingdom gives us the origin of 9 popular buzzwords, including “The Cloud”, SaaS and Web 2.0

Baby steps into the cloud… Elizabeth Montalbano suggests that using a private cloud to test in-house until more formal standards are in place for public clouds may be a better option for companies considering it. A nice part of the article is Jeff Birnbaum, managing director of Merrill Lynch, who defines public cloud. “I want to be able to move that thing around, quickly run that application on 10 or 1,000 computers, workload manage the entire complex. It’s the software layers of workload management and smart placement of applications that separates it [from a typical datacenter].”

How much savings are you expecting to get out of your server virtualization project? How about 50 percent? VMware is making a guarantee: work with their Pro Services organization and you won’t have to pay the design and implementation costs until you save at least 50 percent on the server hardware. The nice perspective: VMware is really looking out for their customers! The not-so-nice perspective: Just the server hardware costs, huh? I guess they don’t even want to get into all the additional costs of training and planning, storage or even want to touch what this means for power and cooling.

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