If cloud computing talk from the government seemed like lip service at first, it has certainly moved beyond that now. According to an InformationWeek article, the federal government’s General Services Administration (GSA) issued a Request For Quotation (RFQ) for cloud storage, web host...

I recently asked a CIO of a large Fortune 100 company how hard would it be for a person to pull the plug on a backbone switch in his datacenter. His answer was "Very difficult. We have lots of controls in place to ensure that level of access is protected." I then probed further and ask...

Our latest podcast discussion centers on using cloud computing technologies and models to improve the test and development stages of applications' creation and refinement. One area of cloud computing that has really taken off and generated a lot of interest is the development test and ...

In late May, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt came to Enomaly looking for our help to realize their latest brainchild, called "Connect". We'd previously worked with Best Buy to develop an internal social networking site called "Blueshirt Nation" and we were eager for an another opportunit...

For fifty years we've been moving data to where the computing power is. With intercloud computing, the world is going to look quite different, with the computing power moving to where the data is. The intercloud turns computing inside out. With traditional IT, we move the data to where...

Now that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is finally becoming mainstream, an increasing number of people are asking us what comes after SOA. If SOA is one step in the evolution of distributed computing, the reasoning goes, then something is bound to be next in line. Furthermore, jus...

Look all around and you can easily see that there is no shortage of press regarding the promises of cloud computing. Cloud evangelists have touted cloud computing as the next big thing, a game changer – a disruptive technology that will spark innovation and revolutionize the way busine...

Want to know what gets my blood pressure up? It’s when there’s both a huge shift in thinking around how we should do computing, namely cloud computing, and at the same time, there’s a bunch of information out there that causes confusion. As cloud computing hype spikes to a frenzy, so d...

CIOs and IT managers agree that memory is emerging as a critical resource constraint in the data center for both economic and operational reasons. Regardless of density, memory is not a shareable resource across the data center. In fact, new servers are often purchased to increase memo...

Recognizing e-mail as the central tool in today’s contemporary business model is effortless — any breakdown in this mission-critical instrument and companies come to a virtual halt. Staff collaboration is limited, customer and vendor relationships are potentially compromised, and IT re...

Reducing the cost of IT management is one of the primary pressures for most organizations. One of the most common ways to reduce such costs is to enable the reuse of applications that developers have already created and configured for the enterprise. In the past decade, especially in t...

Cloud computing is slowly gaining credibility and traction in the enterprise world. As giants such as Google and Amazon productize their massive cloud infrastructures, moving enterprise applications to the public cloud seems a more realistic possibility. The advantages of an enterprise...

It is increasingly clear that the economy has forced enterprises to rethink their traditional cost models and minimize their capital expenditures in favor of pay-as-you-go models; accordingly cloud computing, in any of its forms (internal, external, hybrid) is here to stay.

System architects and engineering teams are designing increasingly complex embedded systems in order to satisfy their customers’ stringent functionality and performance requirements. In addition, within tactical systems, it’s not uncommon to require deterministic real-time behavior whi...

How many companies, large and small, do you know that rely on the Internet? Some people may have never heard of the term "Cloud Computing". It refers to "a computation or storage offered as a service supported by a pool of distributed computing resources, also known as utility computin...

In today’s economy, an enterprise must have strong financial motives for transitioning to SOA. SOA’s superior technical capabilities are a strong motive for information technology professionals to make that transition. However, enterprise stakeholders are motivated by solid investment ...

Rich Internet Applications for the Enterprise (Enterprise RIA) can convey multiple benefits to a business, from lower cost of ownership, overall application availability and better security, to tremendous user experience. But these benefits come at a price: complexity and cost. For ent...

Cloud computing requires a dynamic computing infrastructure. The foundation for the dynamic infrastructure is a standardized, scalable, and secure physical infrastructure. There should be levels of redundancy to ensure high levels of availability, but mostly it must be easy to extend a...

Cloud computing platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, offer compelling advantages for building new scalable .NET applications. But can the Cloud be used for developing existing .NET applications? In this article, I’ll explain how we’ve made the leap to Cloud-based development for our int...

As the title of this article is The Economics of Cloud Computing and we need to talk dollars and cents. There are three ways to look at this. When I was a student at The Ohio State University, I learned an important lesson about money. There is the way that the business owners view it,...

In the mid-nineties, new directions in managerial accounting made cost center bookkeeping popular in large organizations. In this model, departments within an organization traded almost like a miniature economy, with some departments earning a net gain for the company and some departme...

With the explosive growth of Web-based businesses and applications, datacenter workloads have increased exponentially. IT managers are finding it difficult to meet the accelerating demands for performance, capacity, scalability and reliability, while at the same time meeting budgets, m...

Making software is easy. You just collect the market data, generate a high-level technical specification, build the product, and test it. All marketing needs to do is put together some screenshots and sales can just kick back and wait for the orders to start flooding in. Right? Unfortu...

Ever get one of those random phone calls in the midst of your work day that makes you think, huh -- interesting idea? Well earlier today I had one from a guy looking to learn more about cloud computing platforms. Although it ended up he wasn't specifically looking for an elastic comput...

With all the talk of cloud computing with in the U.S. Federal Government lately, it seems to be rubbing off on other governments around the globe. I've recently had conversations with the Canadian, US, UK, UN, and EU governments asking about how they might be able to investigate the cr...

I recently gave a talk at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York about where to begin if you’re building a cloud infrastructure or “Infrastructure-as-a-Service.” The response was great, so I’ll try to summarize the high points here for others who are interested. Whenever we see a “stack ...

There has been a lot of talk this week about a new cloud storage service being rolled out by Google as part of their Google App Engine offering. The announcement was part of a presentation at the Interop Conference in Las Vegas, by Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google who indicated i...

The idea of distributed computational computing isn't new, if anything it is one of the oldest concepts within computing. Recently there has been a renewed buzz within the world of computational computing with the release of Wolfram|Alpha. An on demand computational service with the go...

Cloud computing isn't a management model so much as a software delivery paradigm. What Apple has done with its App Store is show the world that the key to monetizing the cloud is in the delivery of the key applications and assets (music, video, ringtones) through a simple and accessibl...

Cloud Computing – a topic that has been steadily growing in popularity and interest in the IT industry over the past decade – has the potential to significantly change how IT works by offering ready access to new capabilities, less expensive IT resources and unrivaled flexibility for b...

From governments to the ordinary individual the Internet has become central to our personal technological identity. The term "cloud" has become an all encompassing buzz word open to interpretation meaning everything and nothing, meaningful and meaningless.

Following upon VMWare and others, Cisco has announced a new cloud strategy focused on enablement of cloud hosting & service providers. The program called "Unified Service Delivery" focuses on service providers who want to offer cloud services publicly.

Very interesting developments today from the U.S. federal government on cloud computing. Bob Marcus at the OMG has sent me an overview of a White House Cross-Cutting Programs Document released earlier. The document outlines the administration's 2010 budget requests. According to the do...

“I probably wouldn’t put anything mission-critical in the Cloud now.” That’s a recent quote from the CIO of a major consumer brand talking about his enterprise IT infrastructure. The CIO of a consumer e-commerce Web site would be equally nervous about moving its front- or back-end reso...

I've just spend the last two days in Washington DC in conversations with various US government officials regarding the opportunities for cloud computing within the federal government. During these conversations it has become very clear that the topic of "Cloud Computing" is front and c...

A few years ago we were talking about grid computing and Web 2.0 services. Today we talk about Cloud Computing as an evolution of those terms applied to the new technologies usually based on working through a Web browser and the Internet. New books, newspapers, and magazines pushing ...

Traditionally, organizations have had two choices for delivering a PC application: a “fat” PC or server-based terminal services. Terminal services is an approach that hosts the application in an x86 “mainframe” environment, collects keystrokes and mouse clicks from the user, and delive...

It’s a long-standing goal in enterprise networking to cost-effectively converge all local and storage area network (LAN and SAN) traffic on a single powerful infrastructure via one flexible, reliable, high-performance and low-latency protocol. And the future data center will, indeed, o...

I love it when people call me up out of the blue and start to debate whether there is such a thing as a "private cloud". Today is one of those days. I can't help but wonder if these people think that a cloud infrastructure will somehow magically create itself.

"There's a lot of hype over cloud computing, but we're confident that we will have the tools to make the hype a reality and help enterprises leverage this new computing model for all of their applications and with their management and security concerns addressed," says VMware CTO Steve...