Cloud Hosting

The advantages of hosting in the cloud are very well documented, indeed on this site there are numerous articles explaining why the whole world and its dog should consider migrating to the cloud. This is the devil's advocate article that describes some of the dangers that you may be taking on if you do choose to make the switch.

What is going on behind the scenes?

Kevin Kelly from Wired Magazine gives his prediction of a very cloudy and machine based future. We have transcribed the video for users who don't have audio. The actual video is at the bottom of the page.

The Future of the Internet

ParaScale, a cloud storage provider, and Alfresco, an open source content management system provider have teamed up to offer a content management system in the cloud.

The new application allows "online shops to store and access data in the cloud without adding management overhead or cost, offers easy configuration and setup, and ensures smooth scale-out of capacity".

Big Blue clouds are emerging on the horizon with the launch of IBM's new set of cloud services. Due to be launched this week, IBM will be launching two main categories of service:

- IBM Smart Business: Software Development & Test
- IBM Smart Business: Virtual Desktops

Following their recent partnership announcement, Google and SalesForce have introduced Force.com for the Google App Engine. Web developers can now build web-based applications using the infrastructure from both companies.

Is the Cloud Hype or Reality?

Recently Google launched its Google Apps Outlook Sync stepping on the toes of Microsoft by luring their customers away from Microsoft Exchange email services.

Amazon's EC2 service experienced an outage at 6:39 Pacific Time on Wednesday apparently due to a lightning storm which caused damage to a power distribution unit. By 11:10pm, Amazon stated that "Most instances have full recovered" and at 1:20am on Thursday Amazon said the problem had been fully resolved.

Amazon stated that only "a very small percentage of instances" were affected and that it was not a "generalized service issue".

Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX), the world’s leader in hosting, today announced that the blogsite live.gdgt.com, a Rackspace Cloud hosting customer integrating both Cloud Sites and Cloud Files products, seamlessly handled 4.7 million web page views in less than two hours as a result of live.gdgt.com’s live coverage and live blogging of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009 on June 8 in San Francisco, CA. The much-anticipated keynote was the highlight of the sold-out WWDC 2009.

Hewlett Packard, the world's largest PC production company, will be promoting Symantec's online backup product to customers who purchase new HP PC's.

The customer will receive (aswell as a brand new PC!) a piece of software that consumers can install. The software allows you to connect to the Symantec cloud to backup your files through a program called "Norton Online Backup". The first month is for free and it costs $50/year thereafter.

Google have launched a new Google Apps Outlook Sync so that companies can host their emails in the cloud but at the same time keep the same Outlook user experience for users.

There are huge potential cost savings for businesses that make the switch. A major firm Avago made the switch and reported a cost saving of over $1.6 million a year. The overheads of running your own servers, Microsoft Exchange licensing, power etc. are all combined into a much more transparent cost to Google.

The three major OpenCirrus members (Yahoo, HP and Intel) announced today that more members will be joining the group. The new institutions include the Russian Academy of Sciences, South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and MIMOS, a strategic research and development organization under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Malaysia.

Data storage and hosting company Hosted Solutions announced today that it has launches a new cloud computing offering.

Predominantly based in Raleigh (US) and with a projected turnover of $50 million, Hosted Solutions new 'Stratus Trusted Cloud' offering can run applications for large enterprise customers.

Hosted Solutions becomes the latest company to offer cloud hosting in a market that becomes more and more competitive on a daily basis.

Nottingham, UK, June 2.

ForLinux announced today that it will begin offering Cloud Computing services to its customers, using the Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), Service Provider Edition. This will be one of the first ECP Cloud Computing service based in UK.

Verizon have launched a new Computing as a Service (CaaS) offering allowing customers to use both virtual and physical services as computing resource should requirements dictate.

The proposition is unique in that the customer is billed for each day of usage on top of an initial setup fee and monthly subscription.

Enomaly have announced 10 new global partners who have adopted their new Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), Service Provider Edition. The platform has been designed for carriers and hosting providers who want to benefit from the power, flexibility, and economies of cloud computing (a white label cloud product). The Service Provider Edition builds on the already successful ECP that was launched in 2005 as the world's first Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that has been adopted by over 15,000 companies.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM) is releasing the first in a four-part series of white papers offering perspective on cloud computing.

Available for download at akamai.com/cloud

In preparation for the release of its own cloud offering, Sun Microsystems has released a cloud portfolio of services to help business evaluate their readiness for the cloud and then to build a road-map for them to reach that goal.