The new contract is an industry first, with CSC being the first Microsoft partner to lead and win a cloud computing services agreement of this scale. Under terms of the contract, CSC will provide Royal Mail Group’s 30,000 employees with access to new IT services using Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. CSC’s cloud services are designed to help businesses easily and securely adopt cloud computing solutions, allowing them to reduce the costs of managing and maintaining business systems while giving them access to the latest Microsoft Online Services including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
Interarbor Solution principal analyst Dana Gardner had a drink with IBM Software chief Steve Mills last week. He said Mills thinks that the Oracle-Sun deal will go through but that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is buying Sun because he doesn’t “understand the hardware business” and won’t get his money’s worth at the $9.50 a share Oracle is proposing to pay for it. Well, what else is Mills going to say; IBM supposedly walked on the deal.
HP, which pre-announced relatively happy results a couple of weeks ago when it said it was buying 3Com, came in exactly on target with earnings of $2.4 billion, or 99 cents a share, up 14%, on revenues of $30.8 billion, down 8.4% year-over-year from $33.6 billion. And the company reiterated that it should do $29.6 billion to $29.9 billion this quarter and earn 90 to 92 cents a share. Its full-year outlook is for $118 billion-$119 billion and EPS of $4.25-$4.35.
Retalika, the first provider of an end-to-end solution enabling retailers to sell mobile content and services, in store, online, and on the mobile phone is expanding in the UK and Europe. Today the mobile content and services market is driven by tech-savvy early adopters who have bought expensive smart phones, fuelling double-digit growth expected to be worth $344(i) billion by 2013. However, althoughretailers account for over 50% of mobile handset sales they have very little presence in this new market. Retalika is now bringing mobile content and services to the mass-market through retailers using its patent pendingplatform technology. This allows retailers to easily and quickly select, sell and deploy a range of compelling mobile applications and services to their customers.
Lots of discussion lately about the need for virtualization in a cloud computing context. On one side you have people saying it’s not necessary and adds extra complexity, on the other you have people (vendors) saying that virtualization is inherently a cloud infrastructure. Some even go as far as saying that virtualization and cloud computing are one in the same. I’m here to tell you that neither is true. My position is Virtualization Doesn’t Make the Cloud, it makes the cloud better. Sure, you could manage raw servers Google style, but why? For me, it comes down two main aspects of scale, scaling up, and scaling out.
First let’s look at scaling out, or to scale horizontally which basically means to add more nodes to a distributed system, such as adding a new servers or storage (which is easier). These could be in the form of physical or virtual servers. An example might be scaling out from one web server system to many dedicated slaves machines. Google has made an art form of scaling out. They have data centers around the globe geared toward this one core task - just in time hardware provisioning, but for most this is a very difficult and costly endeavour. Virtualization makes this sort of instant replication & provisioning of many virtual machines much easier.
Next is scaling up or the ability to scale vertically which means adding resources to a single server in a distributed system. Typically this involves the addition of CPUs or memory to a single virtual server in the form of Virtual CPU and RAM. Unlike a physical server, in a virtual environment you can change your virtual hardware characteristics, a physical server is what it is. You run at it’s maximum potential limiting it’s ability to easily scale up. If you need more scale you need more hardware or have to manually add more components to the physical server (RAM, CPU, storage, etc), which means downtime while the servers are upgraded. In virtual environment this isn’t a limitation and can often be done on the fly.
Vertical scaling of existing systems also enables you to better leverage Virtualization technology because it provides more resources for the hosted Operating system and Applications that can share these resources in a multi-tenant environment. Virtualization also allows for more automated programmatic control of the system resources in correlation to the demands placed on the infrastructure or application being hosted. This is because in a virtual infrastructure you are not managing any actual physical components but instead virtual representations of them.
So it is very true that virtualization isn’t a requirement of a cloud infrastructure, it just makes it a heck of lot easier to manage and scale out or up or both.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=33e92ba2-1ea0-47b8-bad3-2d1746caa94b)
Announcing The Enomaly Cloud Service Provider Edition | Twitter Me | Get Linkedin | Contact Reuven | Disclosure Policy
Ulitzer.com announced today “the World’s 30 most influential Virtualization bloggers,” who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer’s annual “most influential Virtualization bloggers” list was announced at Cloud Expo 2009 West, which took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California. Cloud Expo 2009 West drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. “The world’s 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010″ list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend.
An anonymous reader writes “The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights: Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Disclaimer, warning, be advised, heads up, disclosure, this post is partially for fun so take it that way. Remember ILM, that is, Information Lifecycle Management among other meanings. It was a popular buzzword de jour a few years ago similar to how cloud is being tossed around lately, or in the recent past, virtualization, clusters, grids and SOA among others. One of the challenges with ILM besides its overuse and thus confusion was what it meant, after all was or is it a product, process, paradigm or something else?
View this webscast for a solution perspective on desktop virtualization, the drivers behind it and the challengesin in achitecting and implementing it.
Published by: Dell, Inc.
This document describes the results of work done by VMware in conjunction with Dell to create a scalable server and storage architecture for VMware View environments.
Published by: Dell, Inc.