Cloud Hosting HQ

Which option should you choose? This article found on TechJournal South takes a look at three different deployment models and their benefits:

A Consonus customer, a large information services developer and provider, spent years considering various cloud computing models and their permutations. The customer first examined three of the four cloud computing deployment models — private, community, public, and hybrid — then evaluated four different management options: in-house, hosted, managed, and managed/hosted.

What cloud computing model and management option did they choose? Well, let’s first look at the benefits and challenges of the three cloud models they considered.

Charles Homes takes a look a brief look a few methods to help increase profitability with cloud hosting over at Portals and KM:

The union of cloud computing and hosting technology has produced wonders for the business community. The main progeny of this marriage has been a dynamic, scalable system that allows business to allocated informational resources with an efficiency hitherto only dreamed of. The hosting packages paid for by your business can be modified as needed as website traffic grows, with no need of strict hosting plans or even laid-out rules. Flexibility like this saves businesses money because they only have to pay for the services they use while simultaneously avoiding server down-time, one of the banes of the information technology industry.

According to this article, Rackspace has finally broken the one-hundred thousand customer mark. Congratulations to them and their continued success in the cloud hosting industry.

Rackspace Hosting ended the first quarter with 99,446 customers, meaning the company has by now easily cleared the 100,000 customer mark. More than 80 percent of those customers are using Rackspace’s cloud computing services, a clear sign of the evolution of the company’s business beyond its roots in managed hosting.

Roger Strukhoff talks about the recent Cloud Expo in New York  in this article over at in.sys-con.com:

A year ago, most IT execs were looking into the “what” of Cloud Computing, as Cloud Expo speaker Dr. Hal Stern of Oracle noted. “But this year, people are here to talk about ‘how.’” as he said during his session in New York. (Hal was so integral to Sun Microsystems for so long, it’s odd to write or see the phrase “Dr. Hal Stern of Oracle.” It’s sort of like saying “Wayne Gretzky of the Los Angeles Kings,” although we’re not sure how hockey-fan Hal feels about being compared to The Great One.)

Cloud Expo in New York did have that “how” feel through and through, in a way that Santa Clara did not. The last-minute rush in Santa Clara reflected an extreme interest in Cloud; everyone showed up at once to see what all the hubbub was about. In New York, they showed up to see how to squeeze performance out of Cloud Computing, how to become more efficient with it, and how to make it secure.

This article over at pcworld.com takes a look at bringing your business into the cloud.

The Internet has changed the way people do nearly everything–from consuming media to performing research to maintaining relationships to communicating.

Its effect on business has been similarly wide ranging. And today, for mission-critical data, Internet-based computing–aka cloud computing–is introducing major changes to the way work is done.

Whether you’re ready to move your business operations to the cloud full time or just want to dip a toe in the water vapor, cloud integration offers significant benefits.

In his latest The Wisdom of Clouds article, James Urquhart examines the link between the economy and cloud-computing.

Apparently, the idea is that tightening budgets have opened the minds of enterprises everywhere to the possibilities of cloud computing. That, in turn, seems to suggest that IT is somehow cheaper when run in cloud models.

That may or may not be the case, but I think the concept that the economic recession is driving interest in cloud is off the mark. What is driving enterprises to consider the cloud is ultimately the same thing that drives start-ups into the cloud: cash flow. Cash flow and the agility that comes from a more liquid “pay as you go” model.

In this intelligent-enterprise article, David Linthicum takes at the association between the iPad and the Cloud and misperceptions that many people hold regarding the device.

Truth-be-told, the iPad has about as much to do with cloud computing as any device that can connect to the Web. While any appliance, which is what this really is, needs to have a robust back-end infrastructure to support the native applications, from on-line banking to Twitter, there is not much new here that we’ve not seen before. Not the architecture, the concept, or even the technology. It looks a bit better, I will give you that.

Bernard Golden, a contributor to the International Data Group (IDG) News Service, talks about why some companies are running into problems trying to put their apps on the cloud. His reasoning is that they’re treating the cloud as if it were just an update to traditional hosting solutions.

In our discussions with these companies, their question is: “Shouldn’t this problem be solved by cloud computing? After all, the cloud offers resource elasticity, processing power on demand, huge scalability. So why is my application running into these problems?”

The challenge they’ve run into is that they treated cloud computing like Hosting 2.0, and now they’re suffering for it.

Read the full article here.

This press release on PRNewswire takes a some new features available for Verizon’s cloud-based CaaS:

As more companies move to embrace cloud computing, Verizon Business is enriching its on-demand, global cloud computing solution – Verizon Computing as a Service, or CaaS.  The enhancements provide business customers with better control and flexibility over their computing environments.

Based on customer demand, Verizon recently added the following features to CaaS:

• Server Cloning – Provides IT administrators with the option to customize the configuration of a CaaS virtual server and then create a golden, or reference, server image.  This eliminates the need to manually create the same server image multiple times and enables the rapid deployment of server clones supporting the same corporate application.

• Application and Operating System Expansion – The SUSE Linux operating system is now supported on the Verizon CaaS platform as a standard service offering.  Linux software is used with commonly deployed enterprise resource planning packages.  In addition, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 has been added as a “click-to-provision” database server option.

• Expanded Networking Flexibility – Enterprises now have expanded and streamlined networking options – virtual router and shared virtual private networks, including Verizon Private IP – for connecting back-end systems to Verizon CaaS via the online portal.  In addition, customers can purchase metered, burstable bandwidth up to 1Gbps to meet immediate requirements for temporary computing capacity.

This detailed article over at martdatacollective.com explains the concept of RAIC:

Well over a year ago, in a conversation with Alexis Richardson, I came up with a catchy acronym to articulate an idea that I had been kicking around as a simple way to respond to all of the Sturm und Drang in the press and the blogosphere about “lock-in”, “data portability” and reliability of cloud computing providers.  I said — “You know what, mate, done properly, it would be like a RAID setup — it would be an array of cloud providers.  Umm, yeah, it would be RAIC!  ‘Redundant Array of Independent Cloud providers’”.  Alexis, as I recall, burst out laughing, and said something like “You better trademark that, Mark.  That’s great.”