John Considine

Just a week after our blog post on the telcos, we find another big company joining the cloud computing tsunami – Oracle’s announcement of its “cloud in a box” offering as well as new offerings of Oracle software running on Amazon’s EC2. For a company whose leader shunned the term “cloud” last year, this is a lot of cloud announcements in one week.  Oracle’s new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is perhaps the first “cloud in a box” solution that is actually delivered in a box (of hardware).  Unlike the offerings we have seen from Eucalyptus, Nimbula, Azure, and VMware, the Exalogic product contains the control software as well as the hardware components to make a virtualized resource pool.  The other vendors have focused on delivering a software solution that can be combined with the users’ choice of servers, storage, and networking gear to build a cloud. Oracle, powered by ... (more)

Cloud Computing Standards – Not This Year

I started out writing a blog about the state of cloud computing to review how things have evolved in the cloud space over the last year (2010 was a good year for cloud computing) but I got sidetracked thinking about how clouds are converging, or in reality, not converging. It’s clear that end users of cloud computing would like to see true interoperability.  Companies want the freedom to pick a cloud that meets their needs, without worrying that choices made today will cost them big in the future or lock them in.  Interoperability would mean that a company could choose a cloud fo... (more)

Cloud Wars Heat Up

Last week I wrote about the Cloud.com acquisition and what it means for Citrix, Rackspace, OpenStack and the industry. Next, I’d like to dig into the VMware announcement about their cloud infrastructure suite. Citrix clearly wanted to announce their news just prior to VMware’s, and for a good reason – Citrix is hitting VMware in a weak spot of their cloud strategy.  It’s pretty clear that VMware is not getting the vCloud adoption they were anticipating from service providers and even enterprises. In Paul Maritz’s presentation, he mentioned that VMware “…has been working closely ... (more)

Image Conversion and VM Imports in Amazon

Amazon has announced another important tool in their ongoing platform innovation for EC2 – the VM Import tool. This converter allows you to “bring your VMware images to the cloud.” As we’ve seen extensively at CloudSwitch, this is a primary use case for most enterprises – the ability to take images you’ve already built (likely in VMware) and migrate them into the cloud. It’s great to see Amazon continue to innovate around these gaps in their offering, as this continues to drive the overall market growth and enterprise adoption. But it’s important to understand what this means f... (more)

IaaS and PaaS: Getting Closer All the Time

Happy New Year! In this first post of 2011, I’d like to explore one of the primary ways the cloud landscape is evolving. Two of the pillars of cloud computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and Platform as a Service (PAAS), are showing some interesting trends as cloud providers adapt to meet the needs of their customers. Over the coming year, we may see these familiar models evolving into something new since the ideal solution for most enterprises is not one approach or the other but some combination of both. Traditionally these two methods of cloud computing have been quite ... (more)