Continue reading here:
CDW - Charles Barkley - New Office - Video
Read More..Go here to see the original:
Using Porticor to protect data in a snapshot scenario in AWS - Video
Read More..View original post here:
Cloud Web Hosting Reviews - Australian Cloud Hosting Providers - Video
Read More..Our insatiable demand for cloud computing services may have created a data centre boom , but cloud service providers and enterprises are still figuring out ways to build cheaper and more efficient data centres.
Indeed, the rising cost of power, cooling equipment and other data centre facilities has been plaguing the IT industry for years. According to Gartner, an average of US$8 million a year is spent on manual IT operations such as installing server updates. Additionally, the tons of energy needed to power the servers and keep the lights can cost companies up to US$29 million over three years.
Earlier this Friday, HP took the wraps off ProLiant Gen8 , a new line of servers designed to slash the cost of data centre operations. The servers are touted to be self-sufficient, which means the machines can take care of themselves by monitoring over 1,600 system parameters and fix problems when necessary. The servers were developed under a two-year US$300 million program dubbed Project Voyager , which HP hopes will redefine data centre economics by automating every aspect of the server lifecycle.
Much of the automation is carried out by a dedicated ILO (integrated lights-out) processor with minimal overheads in system performance, HP executives said during a media briefing in Beijing. The chip will read data from sensors embedded within the system, and notify administrators of impending faults before they occur. That means you could quickly identify, say, a faulty network card without running a whole bunch of diagnostics to find the root cause of your problem.
Besides highlighting system problems, Proliant Gen8 servers can be housed in HPs new intelligent racks that allow data centre administrators to monitor the energy consumption of each server, plus track and manage server inventory on a dashboard. The server uses metallic connectors at its edges that snap into an intelligent rack to relay status data.
The servers, which run on Intels Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors , are available in blade, tower and rack server configurations. They come with PCI Express 3.0 slots, as well as HPs SmartDisk controller tuned for speedy solid-state drives with three-disk mirroring. Upgrading to the latest hardware drivers software updates is also a breeze with HPs Smart Update technology that takes the task off administrators.
When combined with the latest processor technologies, HP claims the Proliant Gen8 can speed up performance of applications such as databases and video streaming by as much as 50 percent. But at least one analyst believes HPs confidence in identifying patterns on how applications are working and applying that insight to optimise performance is overstated.
There is neither the data nor the architecture to provide true application SLA (service level agreement) monitoring, said David Foyer, an analyst at Wikibon , an open IT advisory service. Wikibon believes this should be a strong focus for ProLiant Gen9. Server administration will need to migrate to management of virtual machines and applications.
Enterprises that need a little more help with managing the Gen8 machines can turn to HP Insight Online, a new cloud-based, IT management portal that offers support services from HP Insight Remote Support and HP services.
HP says the new support portal will improve IT productivity by automatically retrieving and managing system health, asset and warranty information, eliminating as much as 90 percent of the time used to track contract and warranty details, and 85 percent for asset configuration data.
Continued here:
HP trots out new line of “self-sufficient” servers
Read More..Summary: Recent research indicates that Amazons EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million serverseach of them running a variation of Red Hat Linux for their base operating system.
Almost half-a-million Amazon cloud servers run Linux every day.
We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadnt know that Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.
Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.
While Amazon has never officially said what its running as EC2s base operating system, its generally accepted that its a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On top of that, for the virtual machines, Amazon uses the Xen hypervisor to host Linux; OpenSolaris; Solaris; Windows 2003 and 2008; and FreeBSD and NetBSD virtual machine instances.
Amazon also doesnt talk about how many servers their popular cloud is made up of, so Huang had to work it out. He explained, Figuring out EC2s size is not trivial. Part of the reason is that EC2 provides you with virtual machines and it is difficult to know how many virtual machines are active on a physical host. Thus, even if we can determine how many virtual machines are there, we still cannot figure out the number of physical servers. Instead of focusing on how many servers are there, our methodology probes for the number of server racks out there.
Huang continued, It may sound harder to probe for the number of server racks. Luckily, EC2 uses a regular pattern of IP address assignment, which can be exploited to correlate with server racks. We noticed the pattern by looking at a lot of instances we launched over time and running traceroutes between our instances.
Then Understanding the pattern allows us to deduce how many racks are there. In particular, if we know a virtual machine at a certain internal IP address (e.g., 10.2.13.243), then we know there is a rack using the /22 address range (e.g., a rack at 10.2.12.x/22). If we take this to the extreme where we know the IP address of at least one virtual machine on each rack, then we can see all racks in EC2.
By itself, though, thats not enough. You could use try to use port-scanning to work ot how many servers there are, but that would violate Amazons terms of service. So instead, since each Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance also has an external IP address. we can leverage DNS translation to figure out the internal IP addresses.
With that data, he was able to work out the number of server racks. With this he then just multiplied by the number of physical servers on the rack. Unfortunately, we do not know how many physical servers are on each rack, so we have to make assumptions. We assume Amazon has dense racks, each rack has 4 10U chassis, and each chassis holds 16 blades for a total of 64 blades/rack.
Read the rest here:
Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers
Read More..Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 16, 2012 - Public SharePoint Cloud is out and Private SharePoint Cloud is in. Those are the latest words of wisdom from SharePoint cloud hosting expert Jay Atkinson, who said today that when it comes to hosting Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for a large organization, a private cloud environment is the only way to go based on sheer practicality and bang-for-the buck.
Atkinson, who is CEO of hosting pioneer AIS Network, said that his company is now deploying the SharePoint Server 2010 platform in a single private cloud for significantly less than competitors charge to implement it in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud.
Plain and simple, you want the most control over your SharePoint 2010 environment with the least hit to your organizations bottom line, and you get every bit of that and more by moving from a traditional deployment to a hosted private cloud architecture, said Atkinson.
Currently, hosting providers are steering enterprise-class SharePoint 2010 customers toward public cloud and hybrid cloud hosting models. Our cost analysis research shows that those deployment approaches are needlessly costing more than they should and the customer sacrifices control at multiple levels.
A private SharePoint cloud is simply more economical and easier to manage for a large organization with security and compliance concerns, Atkinson said. An enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented wholly in a private cloud, including the online storage components, exceeds core compliance requirements and surpasses the benefits of a public cloud or hybrid cloud.
With SharePoint 2010 deployed entirely in a private cloud, Atkinson said the customer gets:
* a hosted environment that is exclusively internal to the organization, * complete control of its servers, security, permissions, policies and customization, * seamless federation between line-of-business systems and various data sources, * quick scalability for system resources, and * the ability to move other core applications and platforms to the same private cloud.
Public cloud services like Microsoft Office 365s SharePoint Online and deployments of SharePoint Server 2010 in a public or hybrid cloud are okay for small to mid-size businesses, but theyre very impractical when it comes to serving the best interests of a large business, said Atkinson.
The private SharePoint cloud model is an ideal outsourcing alternative. Sooner or later, global and large enterprises evaluating SharePoint 2010 deployment platforms are going to realize that an enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented solely in a private cloud is the only way to go.
Within the last two years, AIS Network has doubled in size and opened a second office. Last month, the company reported that customer demand for cloud computing had compelled it to double the size of its public cloud.
See the article here:
Private SharePoint Cloud Beats Other Cloud Hosting Options for Enterprises, Says AISN
Read More..AIS Network is deploying SharePoint Server 2010 in a single private cloud for less than competitors charge for a public or hybrid cloud implementation. Enterprise-class SharePoint 2010 customers should look only to private cloud environments for the most practical, cost-effective solution, the CEO says.
Chicago, IL (PRWEB) March 16, 2012
Atkinson, who is CEO of hosting pioneer AIS Network, said that his company is now deploying the SharePoint Server 2010 platform in a single private cloud for significantly less than competitors charge to implement it in a public cloud or a hybrid cloud.
Plain and simple, you want the most control over your SharePoint 2010 environment with the least hit to your organizations bottom line, and you get every bit of that and more by moving from a traditional deployment to a hosted private cloud architecture, said Atkinson.
Currently, hosting providers are steering enterprise-class SharePoint 2010 customers toward public cloud and hybrid cloud hosting models. Our cost analysis research shows that those deployment approaches are needlessly costing more than they should and the customer sacrifices control at multiple levels.
A private SharePoint cloud is simply more economical and easier to manage for a large organization with security and compliance concerns, Atkinson said. An enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented wholly in a private cloud, including the online storage components, exceeds core compliance requirements and surpasses the benefits of a public cloud or hybrid cloud.
With SharePoint 2010 deployed entirely in a private cloud, Atkinson said the customer gets:
Public cloud services like Microsoft Office 365s SharePoint Online and deployments of SharePoint Server 2010 in a public or hybrid cloud are okay for small to mid-size businesses, but theyre very impractical when it comes to serving the best interests of a large business, said Atkinson.
The private SharePoint cloud model is an ideal outsourcing alternative. Sooner or later, global and large enterprises evaluating SharePoint 2010 deployment platforms are going to realize that an enterprise SharePoint Server 2010 platform implemented solely in a private cloud is the only way to go.
Within the last two years, AIS Network has doubled in size and opened a second office. Last month, the company reported that customer demand for cloud computing had compelled it to double the size of its public cloud.
Originally posted here:
Private SharePoint Cloud Beats Other Cloud Hosting Options for Enterprises on Price, Practicality
Read More..Link:
Cloud Desktop from Compute Blocks - Video
Read More..Summary: 2011 saw, according to IDC, Linux servers grow while Windows and Unix servers numbers shrank. In 2012, Linuxs server future looks brighter than ever.
Linux servers are soaring.
In 2011, we saw, according to IDCs latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew for Linux while it shrank for Windows and Unix. What I find especially interesting about this is that IDC doesnt measure when you or your company install Linux on a bare-metal server or a re-purposed server, which is historically how Linux got into companies, but only servers with Linux already pre-installed.
That means more and more customers are asking IBM, HP and Dell, the big three server hardware vendors, for Linux on their hardware. Specifically, IDC found that Linux server demand was positively impacted by high performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments, as hardware revenue improved 2.2% year over year in 4Q11 to $2.6 billion. Linux servers now represent 18.4% of all server revenue, up 1.7 points when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.
Its competitors? Windows server demand subsided slightly in 4Q11 as hardware revenue decreased 1.5% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $6.5 billion for Windows servers represented 45.8% of overall quarterly factory revenue, up 2.6 points over the prior years quarter.
As has long been the case, Unix is the server operating system that really got knocked around. Unix servers experienced a revenue decline of 10.7% year over year to $3.4 billion representing 24.2% of quarterly server revenue for the quarter. IBM grew Unix server revenue 2.5% year-over-year and gained 7.9 points of Unix server market share when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.
What that translates into is fourth-ranked Oracle experienced a year-over-year revenue decline of 11.5% in 4Q11 to a 5.2% share of market while Fujitsu, ranked number 5, experienced a 10.5% decrease in factory revenue holding 3.4% revenue share in 4Q10. While Oracle also has a Linux distribution for IDCs hardware server measurement purposes, Oracle and Fujitsu saw their income go down as their Solaris Unix-powered systems continue to decline.
As Jim Zemlin, chairman of The Linux Foundation observed in his blog, IDC attributes some of that Linux success to its role in what the analyst firm calls density-optimized machines, which are really just white box servers, and are responsible for a lot of the growth in the server market. These machines have gained popularity in a space still squeezed on budget and that continues to be commoditized. But there are other factors at play for Linuxs success over its rivals.
These are, Zemlin wrote, Our latest survey of the worlds largest enterprise Linux users found that Total Cost of Ownership, technical superiority and security were the top three drivers for Linux adoption. These points support Linuxs maturity and recent success. Everyone is running their data centers with Linux. Stock exchanges, supercomputers, transportation systems and much more are using Linux for mission-critical workloads.
In addition, Linuxs growth owes a lot to the accelerated pace by which companies are migrating to the cloud. Long a buzzword, the cloud is getting real, right now. While there is still work to do for Linux and the cloud, there is no denying its dominant role in todays biggest cloud companies: Amazon and Google to name just two.
Read the original:
Linux servers keep growing, Windows & Unix keep shrinking
Read More..See the rest here:
DotNetNuke Tutorial - Great hosting tool - PowerDNN Control Suite - part 2/3 - Video #311 - Video
Read More..