IBM Press room - 2007-11-15 IBM Introduces Ready-to-Use Cloud Computing - United States

IBM Press room - 2007-11-15 IBM Introduces Ready-to-Use Cloud Computing - United States: "Armonk, N.Y. and Shanghai, China - 15 Nov 2007: In Shanghai today, IBM unveiled plans for “Blue Cloud,” a series of cloud computing offerings that will allow corporate data centers to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, rather than on local machines or remote server farms."

IBM developerWorks : High Performance On Demand Solutions

IBM developerWorks : High Performance On Demand Solutions: "Welcome! This page provides resources to help you plan, design, and build real-world on demand solutions. The HiPODS team is a group of specialists within IBM's Software Strategy group, with seven locations around the world. Our skills represent a cross-section of IBM from the Software, Research, Global Services, and System and Technology divisions. We work to solve customer problems by innovating and collaborating with leading edge IBM customers.

The HiPODS team delivers first-of-a-kind, end-to-end integrated solutions that span IBM software and hardware brands to deliver a unified solution for our customers. HiPODS has worked with a wide range of businesses, such as eBay�, Google™, New York Stock Exchange, China Telecom, Sprint�, the Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology, and more.

Some of our current project areas include:

• Cloud Computing

  Develop and deliver process-driven virtualized infrastructure solutions. Values to customers include:

  • Reducing IT management complexity and skill requirements
  • Sharing resources among multiple applications
  • Accelerating application launches
  • Supporting both existing and emerging, data-intensive workloads

"

Defining cloud computing | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com

Defining cloud computing | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com: "Ask a dozen people what 'cloud computing' means and you'll get a dozen different answers, all pointing to the network. Rob Boothby of Joyent interviewed more than a dozen technology wonks, including Steve Gillmor, Matt Mullenweg, Tim O'Reilly, Kevin Marks, Rafe Needleman, Stowe Boyd, Brian Solis and myself, at the Web 2.0 Expo, to answer the question, 'What is Cloud Computing ?'

Check out the responses in this video:"

Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline

Welcome to Project Caroline | Project Caroline: "Project Caroline is a research program developing a horizontally scalable platform for the development and deployment of Internet services. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. Project Caroline helps software providers develop services rapidly, update in-production services frequently, and automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands."

An advanced R&D project at Sun Microsystems, Project Caroline is a hosting platform for development and delivery of dynamically scalable Internet-based services. It is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium sized software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers. Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java(tm) programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl, to update in-production services frequently, and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands.

Key features of Project Caroline include:

• Project Caroline enables services to programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources. By providing programmatic interfaces for managing platform resources, Project Caroline enables developers to create services that can themselves update and flex platform resource usage, dynamically and without human intervention.

• Project Caroline resources are exposed through high level abstractions, including language level virtual machines, networks, and network accessible filesystems and databases. These abstractions can improve developer productivity by providing simplified interfaces to infrastructure resources. They also enable developers to create more robust, long-living services by insulating service code from changes to the underlying infrastructure.

• Project Caroline presents a horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources as a single system, providing developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling these resources. In addition to simplifying developers' use of distributed resources, this unified system model also allows the platform to draw on a horizontally scaled resource pool to meet the allocation requests of multiple applications, running on behalf of multiple users.

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog

Hurry, The Cloud Computing Platform Opportunity is Perishable! � SmoothSpan Blog: "As I write this post, many are predicting that the big announcement from Google tonight will be that it’s opening up BigTable for the world to use. At least Kevin Burton and Mike Arrington think so. I hope so, because the world needs a lot more cloud computing choices. I wonder how many have figured out just how little time remains to introduce new cloud computing platforms?

Ray Ozzie has said, “[the cloud market] really isn’t being taken seriously right now by anybody except Amazon.” He’s right on the mark: it isn’t being taken seriously by anyone except Amazon. The distant runner up is Benioff’s Force.com. I say distant because there are a lot of problems with it, not the least of which is an economic model that makes it completely untenable for anyone but big corporate IT to use. Technically, it is a completely closed and proprietary environment that offers only minimal leverage. It’s true, they’re very seirous about it, so in that sense we should add them to the list, but the way they’re going about it makes it seem less than serious.

Here’s an important tip for various big industry players who’ve made noise about Cloud Computing at various points: it’s a perishable opportunity! You don’t have forever to contemplate how to get in and start winning.

"

CohesiveFT's Elastic Server On-Demand - Easy Server Provisioning

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/elasticserver

Complexity really is a growing problem for people. Every day we are hit with “more of everything” - more software choice, more versions, more systems and more business change. And soon - with more virtualization - more VMs. How many VMs will there be in your organization in 2010? How will they be manufactured and provisioned and will this be done in the same way as it is today? InfoQ spoke with Alexis Richardson, a founder of startup CohesiveFT, about their "Elastic Server On-Demand" product, which aims to simplify working with virtualized application stacks.

InfoQ: Please provide an overview of Elastic Server On-Demand for InfoQ readers.

CohesiveFT: Elastic Server addresses the problem of virtual machine management using self-service and automation. The Elastic Server On-Demand service delivers ready-to-run application stacks to order, for virtual server and cloud formats. It takes the complexity and uncertainty out of assembly and deployment lifecycles by replacing multiple manual steps and scripts, with a single automated process that is both quick and easy to use. We give you a place to create and share servers, or reproduce them from recommended patterns, with speed and quality.

InfoQ. How do I use Elastic Server?

CohesiveFT: Say you have an application, written for Ruby on Rails, and you want to run test builds on your laptop but move to a data centre in production - for instance on Amazon EC2. No problem. On the Elastic Server site you’ll see a collection of portals each catering to a different technology community or product pattern. Choose the Ruby on Rails portal and customize the components you want in your base stack - e.g. Rails 2.0.2, Mongrel 1.1.4, PostgreSQL libraries, and some RubyGems. Now press ‘build’. That’s it - in a few minutes you can be running your Rails server on EC2.

Choices can be saved as a template, so you can reuse the same configuration and run it on your own hardware in other formats, currently VMware, Parallels, or Xen. This is why we call servers “Elastic” - you have one server recipe, but keep the flexibility to reuse it across multiple business cases and technology platforms. Every aspect of this is managed in a consistent way in one place. Additionally, every server has a web console and API for organizing maintenance functions such as network settings, security, audit, and lifecycle.

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice."

A Web-Scale Computing Architecture

IT Conversations | O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference | Werner Vogels: "One of the key difficulties in running and managing an internet business lies in building a technical infrastructure that can handle spikes in traffic but which remains cost-effective for normal operations. In other words, businesses often need to be able to scale up or down at a moment's notice.

These problems affect companies of all sizes and are as relevant to an enterprise trying to shave costs as they are to a start-up.Werner Vogels presents the Amazon solution and shows how their S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) offerings provide a blueprint for 'Web-Scale Computing'. Vogels contends that this allows businesses to outsource their 'heavy lifting' and implement an elastic business model that can quickly respond to demand.

Vogels introduces customers who are already using these business models. One of these is our very own Doug Kaye, who describes how Gigavox Media is exploiting the potential of Amazon's web services."