Cloud Computing Revenue Predictions
Interesting article from Linda Leung that estimates revenue from Cloud Computing operations for a few major cloud providers
Private Cloud Adoption Models
EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis describes the 3 primary adoption models he has seen companies adopt with private clouds.
The tech industry has been abuzz the past week now that the Oracle acquisition of Sun has cleared the last hurdle from the European Union and is officially complete.
Oracle and Sun executives have begun addressing a number of questions about how Oracle will integrate Suns various hardware, system and software stacks into the Oracle ecosystem.
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:
Cloud Storage Services
Virtual Machines
Cloud Web Hosting
The RFQ also includes a high level view of the Federal Cloud Computing Framework; found in the Draft National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Working Definition of Cloud Computing.
The RFQ and framework help Cloud Computing Service Providers understand the cloud computing vision that the Fed has adopted in addition to various interoperability, bandwidth and security standards that the Fed mandates. The Framework also outlines the Feds high level categorization of Software as a Service Applications and Platform as A Service.This helps the fledgling cloud computing industry in 3 ways.
First off, it helps put to rest some of the misgivings and fears that private industry and sceptics have held concerning the adoption of cloud computing. Once the Federal government adopts certain cloud computing standards in its own framework, it is safe to say that sceptics and holdouts in private industry will soon come around and adopt these standards as well.
Secondly, this RFQ will give the service providers who are chosen to provide cloud computing services to the GSA, real world use cases and examples that can be put to use in selling cloud services to private industry.
Finally, the detailed cloud computing requirements that the GSA outlines in the document give both established and startup cloud service providers a blueprint for services and standards that they should adopt in the future.
The scope of this initial RFQ may limit the chosen service providers to larger cloud providers who can provide the full breadth of services, but the trickle down effect of the Fed RFQ will surely help smaller Cloud Service providers at the state, local and private industry level.
WebSphere CloudBurst is a hardware appliance based on IBM’s DataPower SOA appliance server that allows companies to run virtual images that can be used in a private cloud environment. Shipped with the new IBM WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, (WASVI) CloudBurst is optimized for use with virtualized hardware environments like VmWare.
Designed primarily to be used for private cloud deployments behind the firewall, IBM is also marketing the CloudBurst Appliance to SAAS and Cloud service providers who need an off the shelf cloud solution that offers easy and rapid deployment in a data center environment. CloudBurst ships with a number of preconfigured VmWare ESX virtual images with standardized configurations based on IBM WebSphere best practices. The virtual images are composed of WebSphere components, an IBM HTTP server and Linux.
The Virtual Images and Scripts (called patterns) are deployed and managed via a familiar drag and drop Web 2.0 console.
The patterns are designed to appeal to a wide range of users and vary from a basic single server topology suitable for a SMB client to a very large cluster of servers more attuned to a SAAS service providers needs. Users can customize the seeded patterns with custom scripts or by cloning seeded patterns via the CloudBurst console.
Custom patterns are stored on the CloudBurst Appliance and are also managed via the CloudBurst console.
The CloudBurst console also allows administrators to setup users and security and to manage and monitor the appliance and deployed cloud.
The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance will be available in June 2009 and will be priced starting at $45,000 USD. Initially only VMware ESX Server file formats will be supported but IBM expects to support other formats in the near future.
WebSphere CloudBurst is being touted as the first appliance based cloud solution on the market and should gain traction amongst SMB customers and service providers alike. But IBM should expect competition in this space fairly quickly from the likes of Cisco-VMware, HP, Oracle-Sun and perhaps even from the Open Source arena as the barriers to entry for such solutions are relatively low assuming a compelling combination of software and hardware in a reasonably priced appliance.
