Q&A with Rackspace Cloud’s Emil Sayegh

San Antonio based Rackspace is a global web host and cloud provider known for their high end managed hosting and dedicated services. The company delivers managed services to over 16,000 customers from eight data centers worldwide.

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Consoles, Management Tools and Brokers

The web interfaces of cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) have consistently lagged behind third-party consoles in both user experience and functionality. Third party consoles supported rich meta-data around AWS resources in addition to  integrating CloudWatch and CloudFront support long before the AWS console.

The initial lack of capabilities in the provider interfaces created the market for cloud consoles. The initial crop of cloud consoles, however, has grown beyond simply providing a better interface into the cloud. This market has evolved into cloud brokers that act as the trust layer between the customer and their cloud infrastructures. The evolution from cloud console to cloud broker occurred in less than a year. In 2008, the only way to access Amazon Web Services was a command-line tool or writing your own code. As a result, a number of people built their own custom web interfaces for accessing AWS and a number of third-party tools like enStratus appeared in the market to simplify the job.

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Fed Clarifies Cloud Computing Plans

Up until the Obama administrations appointment of Vivek Kundra as the Federal CIO, the Fed had not presented a comprehensive vision of its Cloud Computing plans. This changes with the General Services Administration (GSA) recently released RFQ (Request for Quotation) for Cloud Computing Services.

The GSA RFQ focuses on Infrastructure as a Service with an emphasis on:

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Sun Offers Solaris In The Cloud

Vince Vasquez recently detailed Sun’s Solaris On Demand program. (This video is also posted over on Cloudbook)

Designed to help Sun ISV’s and other third parties with developing SaaS applications, a number of Sun partners including AT&T and Endeavors have launched SaaS solution on Solaris since the programs inception.

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Sun Details Cloud Storage Service

Sun recently posted a couple of videos that outline the Sun Cloud Storage Service and how to use the Sun Cloud for File Based Access.

Overview Of File Based Access On Sun Cloud Storage Service

Getting Started With File Based Access On The Sun Cloud

OneVision Solutions SAP Business ByDesign Experience

This is part one of a two part series on customer experiences with SAP’s Business ByDesign. 2 years in the making; Business ByDesign (BBD) is currently on Feature Pack 1.11 (Feature Pack 2.0 is due to be released soon) and there are approximately 100 customers live in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

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