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• Roundup: Is OpenStack a Game-Changer?

  July 19th, 2010 : Rich Miller

  Rackspace has unveiled OpenStack, a new open source cloud platform that will incorporate code from Rackspace’s cloud services as well as the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. The announcement has triggered tons of reaction around the web. Here’s a roundup of noteworthy commentary and analysis on OpenStack’s debut:

  • Rackspace Open Sources Its Cloud Platform – Cloudwatcher Geva Perry raises some key questions: “It looks like we are entering the ‘Stack Wars,’ with the two leading IaaS cloud stacks being Amazon’s (with Eucalyptus as the private cloud version of the Amazon stack) and now OpenStack. It will be interesting to see how VMWare, Microsoft and Google all respond to this move.”
  • OpenStack: game changing open source cloud platform – RightScale CTO Thorsten von Eicken: “The bottom line is that we believe this to be a potentially game changing event. The reason is that RackSpace has committed itself to a true open source project, meaning that it’s not just source thrown over the wall into the open, but also an open design process, an open development process, and an open community.”
  • OpenStack Wants to Be Android of The Cloud – From Om Malik at GigaOm: “What Android is to smartphone operating systems, we want OpenStack to be for the cloud,” says Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace’s cloud operations. While a whole slew of companies are trying to offer up their own unique twists of enterprise, carrier and hybrid clouds, OpenStack offers a way to commoditize the entire cloud infrastructure.
  • Is the Open Stack Cloud Announcement a Big Deal? – Bob Warfield at SmoothSpan: “There is a lot of nervousness in the Not-Amazon-But-Wanna-Be-Cloud-Kings herd. It’s understandable. Not much to point to for scale in the Cloud world but Amazon. OpenStack is a good response.”
  • Rackspace , NASA Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem – From ReadWriteCloud: “Coming into this week at OSCON, we were starting to speculate if the open-source movement had lost a bit of its clout or its will to protect the cloud as much as it had the open Web. The Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems is proving to be a brutal blow for OpenSolaris. And the future of MySQL is still a question mark. OpenStack looks like it is a step in the right direction.”
  • Opening The Rackspace Cloud – Blog from Rackspace’s Lew Moorman: “For our customers, we think there are many benefits that flow from these community gains. Not only will this help our offers develop faster and more transparently, but our customers can run private editions of our core systems in house or in our managed hosting operation.”
  • As cloud platforms battle for credibility, OpenStack is pretty solid – Forrester analyst James Staten: OpenStack “might just have the more credible story enterprise infrastructure & operations professionals have been waiting on.”
  • OpenStack Targets One Million Machine Nebula – Timothy Prickett Morgan at the Register: “The problem with the tools being created and sold by Eucalyptus Systems, VMware, and others trying to provide tools to fluff up clouds is that the scale that NASA and Rackspace are wrestling with is beyond the capability of these products.”
  • How to set a Cloud Free in 47 simple steps – Some background and perspective from Mark Collier of Rackspace: “We’ve got to build our own army, out of all of the people out there who have an interest in seeing an open cloud emerge.”
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• Rackspace Backs the Open Source Cloud

  July 19th, 2010 : Rich Miller

  Rackspace Hosting (RAX) is tying the future of its fast-growing cloud computing business to the potential for open source code to bring standards to the cloud, and many industry players are joining the effort. Rackspace said late Sunday that it was donating the code for its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers offerings to OpenStack, a new open source cloud platform that will also incorporate code from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.

  OpenStack is the most comprehensive effort to date to focus the energies of the open source community around cloud technology that can provide a focal point for development and growth, while also providing a competitive counterpoint to propriaetary platforms from Google and Microsoft. A widely-supported open source cloud would also have appeal for enterprise customers, who are wary of “lock-in” and keen on the ability to easily migrate between providers.

  OpenStack will be of particular interest to web hosting companies, who have been leading adopters of the Apache server, Linux operating system and other open source technologies. The announcement comes as the hosting industry gathers in Austin for HostingCon 2010, while the open source community meets at OSCON in Portland, Oregon.

  Long List of Participants
  Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms. Other companies participating in the project include SoftLayer, RightScale, Peer 1 Hosting, iomart Group, Cloud.com, Citrix, Opscode, Puppet Labs and Limelight Networks (see the full list on the OpenStack web site). Rackspace said it will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. 

  “We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President of the Rackspace Cloud. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort.  Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.” 

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• Savvis Secures $625 Million Credit Line

  July 15th, 2010 : John Rath

  Savvis (SVVS) announced that it has arranged for a new senior secured credit facilities providing for borrowings of up to $625 million. These facilities will consist of a $550 million term loan, maturing in 2016, and a $75 million revolving credit facility, maturing in 2014. Led by Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, the net proceeds will be used, together with cash on hand, to repay existing indebtedness.

  Although revenue was down slightly in the first quarter of 2010, Savvis shares soared after the announcement due to management guidance and several key customer wins.  There have been several items in the first half of this year showing promise in delivering on the sequential quarterly revenue growth projected for the rest of the year.

  • In March Savvis appointed Jim Ousley as CEO , filled key sales positions and expanded Asia-Pacific Cloud solutions.
  • To meet the demands of the financial vertical, the company expanded itsr footprint in Chicago, Slough (UK),  and most recently the launch of NJ2X in Weehawken, New Jersey.
  • In June Savvis acquired Canadian managed IT and colocation provider Fusepoint for $124.5 million as a continued international expansion to new markets.
  • With the launch of Savvis Symphony, a Virtual Private Data Center offering, Savvis hopes to continue to capitalize on what Gartner says will be a worldwide cloud services market surpassing $68 billion in 2010.
  • Savvis was recently the recipient of the Best European New Cloud Service Award at the 6th Data Centres Europe 2010 awards ceremony.

  Savvis is set to release second quarter 2010 financial results before the market opens on Monday, July 26th.

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• Using the Cloud Instead of Scaling Your Colo

  July 7th, 2010 : Kevin Normandeau

  Cloud computing offers dramatic cost savings and flexibility improvements compared to traditional hosting providers or colocation facilities. The cloud enables rapid provisioning and scaling to meet peak usage, while eliminating the overhead of managing power, network connectivity, and physical hardware. Until now, enterprises considering the cloud have been faced with concerns about the security of their data and communications, and the hurdles of re-building applications and management tools for a specific cloud environment. Not anymore.

  In this live webinar on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT , you’ll learn how CloudSwitch’s breakthrough software lets enterprises kick the colo habit by running applications in the cloud with the security, confidence, and management tools they rely on. Hear first hand how several how real enterprises are using CloudSwitch to deploy and run applications in the cloud for rapid development and peak-period scaling – relieving them from the headaches and costs of maintaining traditional hosting environments. In a live demonstration, you’ll see how CloudSwitch automatically creates secure connectivity into the cloud allowing cloud-based applications to remain integrated with backend systems, and learn how to host your applications in the cloud with point-and-click simplicity and no modifications.

  Join us for a free webinar to learn how CloudSwitch enables you to move hosting infrastructure into the cloud with no modifications while dramatically lower operational costs. Register here.
  

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• Yahoo Rolls Out Hadoop Enhancements

  June 30th, 2010 : John Rath

  Yahoo announced significant enhancements to the open source Hadoop software Tuesday at the third annual Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara. Yahoo said the new features will accelerate the potential for enterprise-wise adoption by mainstream businesses. Apache Hadoop is an open source project for developing reliable, scalable, distributed computing.

  Over the years that Yahoo’s use of Hadoop has evolved from applied science projects to an enterprise-class platform being used across a 35,000 server infrastructure to develop personalized content for tens of millions of users.

  “Hadoop is where science meets big data – it’s the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world’s most advanced digital canvas,” said Blake Irving, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo. “Yahoo’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users.”

  At the Summit Yahoo announced the beta release of Hadoop with Security and Oozie, Yahoo’s workflow engine for Hadoop. Yahoo reported that it has tested these two releases and deployed them across tens of thousands of servers.

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• GoGrid Cloud Adds East Coast Data Center

  June 30th, 2010 : Rich Miller

  The growth of cloud computing continues to boost demand for data center space in key markets. San Francisco-based cloud provider GoGrid said today that it will open a new data center in a colocation facility in Ashburn, Virginia operated by Equinix.

  GoGrid is part of ServePath, the San Francisco colocation and dedicated server specialist that traces its roots to 1994. The company operates its own data center in San Francisco, but the addition of an East Coast facility provides additional options for customers seeking out-of-region failover and disaster recovery capabilities.

  “The decision to expand GoGrid was a direct response to our customers and the market,” said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. “We are successfully executing our expansion strategy and securing an East Coast presence is critical for us to scale and capture a significant piece of the fast growing cloud market. We are very excited to be partnering with a leader like Equinix and deployed within their customer-rich Ashburn campus to help fuel the continued growth of GoGrid.”

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• CSC Opens 7 Data Centers in Cloud Push

  June 15th, 2010 : Rich Miller

  Continuing its push into cloud computing, IT outsourcing specialist CSC will open seven new data centers around the globe to support enterprise adoption of cloud services. The new data centers will each feature fully virtualized cloud fabric and offerl public, private or hybrid cloud solutions. The data centers are located in Chantilly, Va., Newark, De., Chicago, Il., Sydney, Australia, Copenhagen, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the New Kent Complex, UK.

  CSC today also announced CSC Gateway, an e-commerce portal for hosting and cloud services that provides access to the complete catalog of CSC’s Trusted Cloud and Hosting solutions through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.The portal includes self-managing features such as auto-provisioning, pay-per-use and electronic purchase orders.

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• Pew: Cloud Services Will Dominate By 2020

  June 11th, 2010 : Colleen Miller

  By 2020, most people will access software applications online and access information through the use of cloud services hosted on remote server networks, according to a new Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of 895 technology stakeholders and critics.

  A solid majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey conducted by Pew Internet and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center agreed that the cloud will dominate, and desktop usage will diminish in the next 10 years.

  “Among the most popular cloud services now are social networking sites (the 500 million people using Facebook are being social in the cloud), webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, microblogging and blogging services such as Twitter and WordPress, video-sharing sites like YouTube, picture-sharing sites such as Flickr, document and applications sites like Google Docs, social-bookmarking sites like Delicious, business sites like eBay, and ranking, rating and commenting sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor,” according to the report findings.

  Hybrid Mix of Desktop and Cloud
  The survey found most of these experts think the desktop computer will not disappear soon. The majority sees a hybrid life in the next decade, as some computing functions move towards the cloud and others remain based on personal computers.

  “By 2020, most people won’t do their work with software running on a general-purpose PC. Instead, they will work in Internet-based applications such as Google Docs, and in applications run from smartphones,” the report notes. “Aspiring application developers will develop for smartphone vendors and companies that provide Internet-based applications, because most innovative work will be done in that domain, instead of designing applications that run on a PC operating system.”

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• Roundup: Equinix, Interxion, Terremark

  June 8th, 2010 : John Rath

  Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

  Equinix Selected by IPC.  Equinix (EQIX) announced that financial trading communications provider IPC has extended its core networking infrastructure to additional Equinix International Business Exchange data centers located throughout the Asia-Pacific region. IPC is also in Equinix facilities across North America and Canada.  The secure network offered by IPC interconnects more than 200 cities across six continents.  “IPC’s decision to select Equinix’s premier data center services in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo is another vote of confidence for Equinix across the Asia-Pacific region,” said David Wilkinson, senior director, Business Development of Equinix in Asia-Pacific. “Our established ecosystems of financial communities in our IBX data centers present an immediate market opportunity to IPC, hence facilitating its penetration into the regional markets.”

  Interxion selected by AlgoSpan and ALGO Technologies. European data center provider Interxion announced an agreement with AlgoSpan and ALGO Technologies, to offer low latency connectivity and market data services from Interxion’s City of London data center with immediate effect.  With an estimated one-way latency of below 270 microseconds AlgoSpan will be the first provider to create an ultra-fast connection between the London and Slough facilities.  “Interxion’s extensive customer base, combined with our speed of connectivity and quality of market data, positions us well to help the latency sensitive trading community gain ultra-fast connectivity to trading venues and market data feeds,” said Hirander Misra, CEO of ALGO Technologies and co-founding Director of AlgoSpan.

  Terremark launches Latin America Enterprise cloud. Terremark (TMRK) announced the initial deployment of its Enterprise Cloud in Latin America. Leveraging the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Terremark will provide customers scalable cloud-based resources from its Network Access Point (NAP) in Sao Paolo Brazil.  “By purchasing a dedicated resource pool of processing, memory and storage, the Enterprise Cloud offers our customers more flexibility and agility over the traditional server-based model, allowing for a precise and dynamic allocation of computing resources as needed,” said Rodolfo Garia, President of Terremark’s Latin American Business Unit. The Terremark enterprise cloud provides a flexible and scalable platform for companies to purchase dedicated resource pools of processing, memory and storage.

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