Every Friday we like to highlight some of our favorite posts on IT Operations, Cloud Computing, DevOps, Big Data and anything else that grabbed our attention over the week. Here are some great articles from the week of February 20th that are worth taking a look at. Enjoy and have a fantastic weekend!
Citrix Floats CloudStack 3Â by Maureen O'Gara
Citrix has opened up a beta of its CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. Citrix acquired the Java-based cloud management last year when it bought Cloud.com. A full production version of the branded stuff is supposed to be available later this quarter.
Microsoft Expands Dublin Cloud Computing Hub by Rich Miller
Microsoft will add 13.2 megawatts of capacity to its data center in Dublin, Ireland, which powers its online services throughout Europe and the Middle East, the company said today. The new expansion will feature enhancements of energy efficiency features that debuted in the first phase of the Dublin facility, which was one of the first major data centers to rely almost entirely on outside air to cool servers.
Business Cloud: Bring Your Workers, Customers Together with Cloud Collaboration Tools by Todd R. Weiss
As a business owner, you're always looking for ways to streamline your processes, save money and improve the ways you communicate with employees, partners and customers. That's where collaboration applications and services in the cloud can help. Nowadays, you certainly don't have to invest lots of money up front for big collaboration suites that might overwhelm your business, and you don't have to tie your IT team up with deploying and managing such applications either.
How Setting the Cloud Free Could Change the Internet Forever by Sarah Kessler
In reality, however, cloud computing is very much tethered to the physical world, through football-field-sized warehouses of connected servers that enable it. A computing job, though it can be accessed from anywhere in the world, canât be easily moved from one warehouse to another. It canât even necessarily be moved from one area of a warehouse to another area of the same warehouse.
Evolution in Data Integration From EII to Big Data by JP Morgenthal
To quote the old Virginia Slims ads, âWeâve come a long way, baby!â Advances in technology as discussed in this article have had a significant impact on the way we design solutions regarding data in the second decade of the 2000âs. Commoditization and minaturization have once again removed barriers that forced a scarcity mindset to allow architects to focus solely on the problem instead of just pragmatic and implementable solutions to problems. For pennies an hour for each resource we can instantiate a 10,000 node processing engine that can tear through a Petabyte in seconds unlocking the potential of all the data trapped therein.
Is Cloud Computing A Global Market Yet? by Charles Babcock
Some European and fast-growing developing countries such as Brazil and China fear the U.S. will run away with the emerging cloud computing market. As a result, they have erected barriers to data moving across their boundaries and impeded the development of a global cloud market, said a large software business group on Wednesday.
Take Your Company Private: The Right Cloud for the Growing Enterprise by Bart Copeland
Remember the early days of the cloud? Outsourced application hosting seemed so...alluring. Public-cloud providers like Google, Heroku, EngineYard and DotCloud seduced us with promises of cost-efficiency, scalability and convenience. Early adopters spun off a few VMs, connected the users and prepared for growth. And when that corporate growth arrived, the public cloud would grow too.
Predictive Policing with Big Data by Bob Gourley
Police Departments nationwide have been using data and statistics to drive policing since the 90s in an approach founded by the NYPD named CompStat was credited with dramatic reductions in crime and increases in efficiency.
Cloud Computing Market Trends 2012Â by Arnal Dayaratna
Although 2012 is barely two months old, the cloud computing landscape already evinces some important new trends related to the market appetite for cloud products and services. Whereas 2011 witnessed the proliferation of new market entrants that established or consolidated their branding, the market for cloud computing services has matured in 2012 to a point where the battle lines are beginning to be drawn as the actors take their place at the table.
Cloud Benefits in the Energy and Utility Industry by Rick at CloudTweaks
A report issued in June 2011 by the Carbon Disclosure Project and supported by AT&T discovered that companies which embrace cloud computing technologies can reduce energy consumption, lower their carbon emissions, and decrease their capital expenditure on IT resources while improving operational efficiency. By 2020, the same group estimates that large US companies using cloud can achieve annual energy savings of $12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil.
A few more noteworthy articles...
- Case Study: NASA JPL and Amazon SWFÂ by Amazon Web Services
- Red Hat MRG Grid Subscriptions Can Move to EC2Â by Maureen O'Gara
