Last summer a CIO for a high profile ecommerce company told me that the smartest way to play the cloud was to rent the spike.  I just read the same thing from Zynga’s Infrastructure CTO Allan Leinwand in Inside Zynga’s Big Move To Private Cloud by InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock: "We own the base, rent the spike. We want a hybrid operation. We love knowing that shock absorber is there." – Allan Leinwand In 2008 when we formed the Infrastructure 2.0 working group, many of the most influential voices were trumpeting a new (8th) layer in the OSI stack as a solution to the critical ability to move workloads between clouds. I remember watching senior executives from Cisco, F5, and others roll their eyes when one of the participants was sketching out what would have been a massive re-architecting of the network as we know it. Those of us absorbed in the workings of the wo... (more)

Is There a Place for Big Data in SMB Markets?

Is Big Data destined for only the top 3,000 companies worldwide? What about medium or small companies who are equally as data-driven? Is there a place for Big Data in SMB markets? When I talk to SMB companies about their use of public cloud services, it’s a no-brainer. Pay as you go, lower costs upfront, quick time-to-market. With private and public cloud solutions, both big and small companies benefit. So what about big data platforms? Is there an equivalent opportunity, or is Big Data only suited for Big Companies with Big Problems? I think Big Data applies to all, and here’s wh... (more)

Start-Up Encrypts Data in the Cloud

A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that's just hit the radar says it's got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It's supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud - storing keys. It promises that a user's data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual ... (more)

Riding the Enterprise Cloud Computing Wave of Change into the Future

The term cloud computing was first coined in 2007. Enterprise Cloud Computing seems to have emerged as a term in 2009. It's now 2012 and many are trying to ride the wave of Enterprise cloud computing or private cloud into the future. In a short four years, we've seen this phenomena of cloud permeate everything. Some question its validity as a technology and a term. If you look at the Gartner hype curve, the mere questioning of cloud can be considered validation. The abbreviated Gartner curve shows the rapid progress of cloud and private cloud from term introduction to the "peak o... (more)

Hadoop Quickstart: Create and Better Manage Hadoop Clusters on Rackspace

We have previously provided a Quickstart guide to standing up Rackspace cloud servers (and have one for Amazon servers as well). These are very low cost ways of building reliable, production ready capabilities for enterprise use (commercial and government).  And Bryan Halfpap has provided a Quickstart guide which shows you how to build a Hadoop Cluster (leveraging Cloudera’s CDH3).  Using Bryan’s guide you can have a Hadoop Cluster up and running in under 20 minutes. With this post we would like to provide you with some additional tips that flow from these other posts. We will s... (more)