Compressing data for the Cloud

By compressing data and eliminating duplicate copies, an Amazon Web Services customer can decrease by as much as 50% the cost of moving data out of the cloud, say spokesmen for Silver Peak Systems, which on Thursday started offering a virtual appliance to do just that.

According to a post in information week It can be critical for some public cloud users to reduce the amount of data exported from the cloud. Several vendors, including Amazon, charge nothing for the bandwidth to upload data. But they charge by the GB when it comes to downloading. AWS, for example, charges $0.12 per GB after the first free GB to move data out of S3 to a destination on the Internet, a charge that can quickly mount up. Ten terabytes would lead to a charge of $1,200, and truly big data would rack up multiples of that figure. That gives many cloud users second thoughts as they contemplate the cost of moving data out of the cloud, a possibly intended consequence of that pricing approach. Silver Peak has launched its Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture as an Amazon Machine Image appliance available in the Amazon Marketplace, ready to be activated in the cloud for a given workload.

Cloud Computing : Testing the Waters

Cloud Computing Country Perspective: New Zealand

According to a report " It’s a cliche but in cloud computing we really are missing the wood for the trees.

Perhaps unfairly, I blame IT vendors for pushing ‘x as a service’ ad nauseam. Most people hear all those tech terms and tune out.

Yet, cloud computing as a business strategy has the potential to be a game changer. Businesses, politicians and policy makers have to understand that cloud computing represents table stakes for international competitiveness today, a necessity rather than tech blah blah.

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Conditioned by thinking in physical terms- our small market and geographical isolation- the transition to digital and Internet thinking is not easy. It’s made worse by our collective failure to lift our sights from tech talk to strategic thinking, both at a business and country level.

Cloud computing does offer potentially significant benefits for the intended audience of IT vendor-speak, enterprises. All the talk of reduced operational costs, shift from capital expenditure to operational costs, access to best practices, reduced time to market, and increased agility/flexibility is true. But that’s missing the wood for the trees. Worse, we are drowning in a sea of IT vendors proclaiming how they have the bestest and truest cloud solution.

At the most fundamental level, cloud computing is truly about enabling new business strategies.

It is about New Zealand overcoming physical limitations of market size and the tyranny of distance. For details see here 

Open Cirrus: An Open Cloud Computing Research Testbed

Open Cirrus is an open cloud-computing research testbed designed to support research into the design, provisioning, and management of services at a global, multi-datacenter scale.

The open nature of the testbed is designed to encourage research into all aspects of service and datacenter management. In addition, we hope to foster a collaborative community around the testbed, providing ways to share tools, lessons and best practices, and ways to benchmark and compare alternative approaches to service management at datacenter scale.

To know more about Open Cirrus and its range of collaboration see here 

Research direction in Cluster computing

Enhance the Performance of Virtual Machines by Using Cluster Computing Architecture

CY Tseng, KY Liu, LT Lee - TELKOMNIKA Indonesian Journal of Electrical …, 2013

Abstract Virtualization is a very important technology in the IaaS of the cloud computing.
User uses computing resource as a virtual machine (VM) provided from the system provider.
The VM's performance is depended on physical machine. A VM should be deployed all 

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Cloud Architets in a Conversation

One of most practical ways to understand what a cloud architect does, is  to talk to people in that role? In this conversation, a pair of cloud architects, Oracle ACE Director Ron Batra (product director for cloud computing at AT&T) and Dr. James Baty  (VP of Oracle's Global Enterprise Architecture Program) , talk about how cloud computing is driving the supply-chaining of IT and the democratization of the activity of architecture, about the increasing velocity of IT, and about why architects need to up their game to succeed in a cloud-driven world.

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B. Rhubart	It seems logical to start by asking each of you to describe a little bit about what you do. Ron, let's start with you.
R. Batra	I'm a director of products at AT&T, and I focus on AT&T's public cloud services. Currently, I lead a product called AT&T Cloud Architect, which is the infrastructure of the service, and I worked with a few Cloud products prior to this role as well.
B. Rhubart	Jim, how about you?
J. Baty	It's a good question. At Oracle, I work on enterprise architecture and try to understand and build methodology. For the last several years, I have been working on methodology for cloud computing and dynamic infrastructure. I suppose that a simple way of looking at that is, it is pretty straightforward, old traditional-style architecture, but at the same time, the analogy I like to call on is the difference between building a car and building a factory for cars. A lot of what we try to do in cloud computing and the architecture associated with it is construct meta-architecture, these fields of resources upon which applications are dynamically developed and deployed. For complete conversation read here

Describing Cloud Computing Models

Cloud computing is catching the public attention. It has become a key buzzword on the lips of online population and every IT professional in the recent days. This trend is expected only to grow, as more and more cloud applications and solutions enter to the consumer market.

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Cloud computing has been in existence for quite long, offering different types of cloud computing solutions – called cloud models. Each model has a unique value proposition, helps provider to develop a different line of business, and offers consumer a variety of service options.  Some of the major or popular cloud computing are the following.

• Cloud services in the web- these are the solutions that end-users are most fascinated about. Online storage solution like Dropbox, have made cloud computing to reach out to end-user in greater depth. In simple term, these services provide one or more web functionality for the end user say, email, word processing , APIs and like
• Software as a service- This has been in action for longer time it is realized by large public. The reason for this is that earlier SaaS applications were addressed at business enterprise and included offers in the domains of HR, CRM and ERP functions. SaaS services allow numerous customers to access a given application, while providing greater flexibility and agility to all of them
• Platform as a service-  This PaaS is addressed at application and solution developers. Under PaaS configuration- the user actually manage the applications and but do so using the infrastructure provided by the cloud provider.
• Utility in the cloud- Essentially include cloud storage options available to users on demand
• Managed cloud service – This model was the pre-runner to all cloud computing model operating today. In this model, it is actually the provider that utilizes the application, not the end user. Anti-spam services are an example

 Cloud computing services are on the rise. They are expected grow, expand and change further in the coming days. Cloud computing has also become a great platform for innovative solutions and entrepreneurial ventures. As such more businesses are implementing new cloud solutions and new range of services are being designed and offered.