RSSWhile some industry analysts claim that private clouds don't make economic sense for many organizations due to the capital and operational costs to build one, they fail to take into account that IT departments have already sunk those costs into IT. Nor do they consider the different goals organizations have for private clouds. They don't need elastic scale. They need more efficient use of resources and operations. That's where private clouds come in with a focus on efficient use of recourses and orchestrated IT.
News and Analysis
Cloud Security: No Guarantees
When adopting a cloud service--whether it's software as a service or platform as a service--enterprise IT organizations frequently make the assumption that the provider's security will be an improvement over the security of their own on-premise systems. Verifying that this is true, however, is tricky, and, in the end, there are no guarantees.
Cisco & Friends Debate Cloud Future
Cloud computing is evolving to the point where unique clouds will be developed for specific industry verticals, such as healthcare, government and financial services, predicts a Cisco Systems executive speaking at the CloudConnect 2012 conference this week in Silicon Valley. This runs contrary to what some have called the Coke versus Pepsi rule--that companies would not want to be in multitenant cloud environments with their competitors.
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Blogs
The Inevitability of Private Cloud
February 15, 2012 09:46 AM
Posted by Jonathan Feldman
Private cloud may be inevitable, but diving into cloud without a plan is a terrible idea. And even with a technology plan, there are also two massive cultural problems to overcome: the buy-big syndrome and the belief that servers are not software.
See all blogs by Jonathan Feldman
Riverbed's Granite Virtualizes Branch Office Storage
February 10, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
When Riverbed and others brought WAN acceleration to the market around the turn of the century, many of us hoped that with WAN acceleration we could pull the servers, and the headaches they cause, from branch offices. Unfortunately, many organizations found reasons to keep servers in the branches. Riverbed's new Granite appliance allows organizations to keep servers in their branch offices while eliminating many of the headaches through what Riverbed's calling Edge Virtual Server Infrastructure.
See all blogs by Howard Marks
DocuSign Does Android
February 09, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by Lee H. Badman
One of the great promises of the mobile device explosion is increased productivity. But productivity is in the eye of the beholder, and many mobile users still haven't caught on to the notion that you can sign documents digitally, with a legally binding signature, from a mobile device. Whether the goal is paperwork reduction or expedience, DocuSign combines the power of digital ink and a slick, cloud-enabled document-handling framework to put an end to the likes of scanning and faxing. And now, those of us with Android devices can use DocuSign, too.
See all blogs by Lee H. Badman
dinCloud: Making a Big Impact in the Cloud
February 06, 2012 09:00 AM
Posted by David Hill
Have you reached the saturation point yet on the cloud? The endless cacophony of cloud messages seems to have transformed into white noise, where trying to distinguish and differentiate among competitive cloud offerings can leave one in either a state of decision-making paralysis or trusting that familiar vendors know what they're talking about without, perhaps, the full measure of due diligence that is appropriate. Enter dinCloud, which plans to break through the droning blather and show how its approach to cloud is different.
See all blogs by David Hill
Scale Computing: New Twists To Scale-Out Storage For The Mid-Market
January 27, 2012 03:30 PM
Posted by David Hill
Startup Scale Computing delivers scale-out, unified storage for the mid-market, meaning users can access SAN/NAS resources from the same, scalable pool of disk storage. Scale Computing is by no means alone in doing this, but the company goes beyond just delivering storage in a box to delivering a data center in a storage box. And that is very interesting.
See all blogs by David Hill
Meraki Ups The Cloud-Based Networking Ante
January 23, 2012 10:10 AM
Posted by Lee H. Badman
Mainstream network players and those chasing them are out to erase the lines between wireless and wired networking. As the network edge gets redefined and the cloud makes its presence felt in LAN and WLAN spaces, announcements like Meraki's latest update are getting to be more commonplace--and exciting. With a number of interesting product updates to share, Meraki is starting 2012 with a bang.
See all blogs by Lee H. Badman
Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.
