cloud

AT&T joining cloud-computing field

Update, 8:32 a.m. PDT Tuesday: Makes note of actual AT&T announcement.

AT&T is joining the burgeoning field of cloud-computing service providers that offer networking and storage services, according to a report late Monday on The Wall Street Journal site.

Cloud computing, which has attracted such heavyweight players as Google, IBM, and Amazon.com, relieves companies of the burden of managing their own data centers. One of AT&T's first customers will be the U.S. Olympic Committee, which runs Teamusa.org and other Olympics Web sites, according to the newspaper. AT&… Read more

There will definitely be more than one major cloud vendor

Unlike search or Web browsing, using cloud resources is not, and won't soon be, a drive-by event.

For the foreseeable future, you will have to actively choose to use the cloud. As such, there is little room for total domination. The cloud requires you to opt-in to participate. Google and Microsoft's Internet Explorer are more passive in their usage.

Even with a new breed of tools like RightScale and GoGrid, you are still an active participant. And considering that the cloud is generally discussed as enterprise nirvana, there are some major flaws in the theory that there will … Read more

IBM muddying the Cloud?

One key missing piece from all of the press around IBM's Cloud building initiatives is what exactly they are going to offer. So far, it just seems like new data centers being built around the world. There have been few mentions of what will be available--for example, will there be VMs, on-demand deployment, Java environments, databases or is just hosting?

And while the data center physical infrastructure is obviously the first step, vendors seem to be confusing the physical with the meta-physical in the Cloud discussion. I pointed this out in the past when IBM announced a Cloud initiative … Read more

Dell tries to trademark "cloud computing"

Sam Johnston, a member of the Cloud Computing group (Google Groups login required) posted that Dell had used "Cloud Computing" with TM in a press release and decided to do a little digging.

Oddly the application was not opposed and from what it appears on the Industry Standard it may be too late.

If Dell wins the application and enforces the trademark it could dramatically alter the cloudscape.

Notice in the filing below that there is no first-use date associated with the claim whereas there are a number of articles etc. prior to the filing date that use … Read more

IBM aims $400 million at cloud computing

Who knew cloud computing could also clean the air?

IBM announced Friday that it's spending nearly $400 million on new cloud computing data centers in North Carolina and Tokyo. Big Blue will spend nearly $360 million to renovate an existing building at its Research Triangle Park campus in North Carolina. The goal is to reuse 95 percent of the existing building's "shell," recycle 90 percent of the old building's material, and make sure 20 percent of the new material is recycled. The new center is expected to be completed by late 2009.

Big Blue also … Read more

Tim O'Reilly: "[Open] architecture trumps [open source] licensing any time"

In a fantastic, insightful post, Tim O'Reilly lays the blueprint for the next decade of open source in the cloud. Money quote?

[I]f you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

This follows on Tim's constant theme over the last few years: Data is the new Intel Inside. It's a critical point given the almost meaningless tie between open-source licensing, triggered upon distribution of software, and the web, which is premised on non-distribution of software. Increasingly the web is being turned into competing bunkers of data, as Tim writes:… Read more

Sun finally creating a cloud-computing business

Gavin Clarke reports that Sun's nascent cloud/grid/whatever effort is being turned into a separate cloud business unit lead by Sun's chief sustainability officer, Dave Douglas.

Sun sort of had something with Project Caroline and they were early on the utility-computing bandwagon, but considering the massive dossier of software, hardware, and storage the company lays claim to, one would expect a lot more. In fact, I would argue that of all the BigCo vendors, Sun has the best chance of becoming a meaningful cloud vendor.

I do have to ask why Sun announced (leaked?) this today--just days … Read more

Red Hat's new CEO aims Linux at the cloud

Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky.

The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure.

"The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.

Being Red … Read more

Search Cloud lets you hack keywords in Web searches

Search Cloud is a search engine that uses weighted keywords to determine relevancy in its results. When entering search terms you can change which words or phrases need priority over others by changing their size from one to five. More important keywords appear larger, and will be bolded in the results.

The application runs entirely in Adobe Flash, and while not nearly as fast as Google, is no slouch. I was able to find some highly targeted results with just three or four keywords which ended up being better than Google and Yahoo's in several cases. To open results … Read more