February 25, 2013
Volume XLII, Issue 11
Unplugged: Got Cloud?
Excerpted from USA Today Report by Mark Ververka
Cloud computing is exploding and growing faster than a swirling funnel crossing the Oklahoma plains. The next generation of computing lowers information technology (IT) costs while increasing corporate profits at the same time. And what's not to like about that?
That one-two punch was revealed in a study obtained by USA TODAY conducted by England's Manchester Business School. The study, which was commissioned by San Antonio, TX based hosting company Rackspace, is expected to be released Wednesday.
The Manchester study indicates that cloud computing allows US businesses to slash their information technology costs by about 26%. What's more, 62% of those same American companies say that deploying in the cloud improved their bottom lines.
"The results are finally showing what we've known all along," says Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates. "It's not just about moving workloads from your data center to our data center."
The rise of cloud computing has much bigger ramifications. It marks a tectonic shift in how we work, live, and play. ITunes is in the cloud. Ford's cars are connected to the cloud. Google's Gmail is based in the cloud. But those are largely consumer examples; now corporate computing is also shifting to the cloud.
"The move to the cloud can't happen fast enough for some companies," says Engates, who has been on the ground floor of the cloud-computing movement.
Cloud computing has myriad definitions, but in the most general sense it means devices linked to data centers located just about anywhere over a combination of wireless and wired networks. There are "private clouds," where companies own and control the data centers, which are usually centrally located in lower-cost geographies. And then there are "public clouds," where companies use computing power delivered from servers they don't own, which are usually shared with other corporate customers.
Big companies tend to use a combination of private and public clouds, reserving their high-security functions and digital record keeping for the data centers they control. But the growing acceptance of public clouds foreshadows a future trend where computing power is delivered similar to the way electricity is distributed by utility companies. In fact, tech geeks refer to the long-term public cloud concept as "utility computing."
We are a long way from when most companies no longer own servers, or operate so-called on-premise data centers, and rely solely on public clouds. There are a number of reasons, including security concerns, control, and reliability. But the Manchester survey suggests that enterprise computer customers are embracing the shift enthusiastically.
In addition to the cost-efficiency of cloud computing, the study found that 68% of US firms are plowing the cash they saved back into their businesses. They are using the cost savings to improve and expand product lines, services, and other offerings. More than 60% of the companies surveyed say they are using the extra money to hire new employees, give raises, and offer bonuses. Employment at the American companies surveyed increased 28%.
While existing companies are transitioning to cloud computing at their own pace, start-ups unsurprisingly are totally embracing the change — especially software and social-media concerns and online retail outfits.
More than half of the start-ups surveyed said that they wouldn't have been able to afford on-premise data centers at the time of their launch.
Of course, it is self-serving for a cloud-service provider to hire a study that supports its case, but the numbers are the numbers, and Manchester interviewed some 1,300 companies in both the US and the United Kingdom.
Intel's General Manager of Cloud Computing, Jason Waxman, isn't surprised by the findings. Server, storage, and networking sales have been booming at the chip giant in recent years. In fact, Intel pegs the compounded growth rate for servers at about 25% to 30% a year based largely on expansion of private and public clouds.
"The more companies can save on computer infrastructure, the more they can spend on infrastructure," Waxman says. "All of these new opportunities represent a huge build-out."
Waxman thinks that public cloud providers, including Rackspace, Seattle, WA based Amazon and San Francisco, CA based GoGrid, could grow as much as 70% a year.
Gartner, the industry research consultant, predicts that the total public cloud market could swell to more than $206 billion in 2016, roughly double from where it is now.
Says Intel's Waxman, "It's an astronomical opportunity."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 We're very excited to announce the first wave of sponsors for our upcoming 2013 CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the NABShow taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center on April 8th and 9th in Las Vegas, NV.
This year's event track will demonstrate the new ways cloud-based solutions are providing increased reliability and security, not only for commercial broadcasting and enterprise applications, but also for military and government implementations.
Initial sponsors for the 2013 CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE are Amazon Web Services, Aspera, DAX, and YouSendIt.
From collaboration during production, to post-production and formatting, to interim storage, delivery, and playback on fixed and mobile devices, to viewership measurement and big-data analytics, cloud computing is having an enormous impact on high-value multimedia distribution.
Our 2013 conference has been extended from one to two full-days reflecting the increased importance of and growing interest in its subject matter.
Experts will provide a senior management overview of how cloud-based solutions positively impact each stage of the content distribution chain.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a complete set of infrastructure and application services that enable its customers to run virtually everything in the cloud: from enterprise applications and big data projects to social games and mobile apps.
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the opportunity to replace up-front capital infrastructure expenses with low variable costs that scale with a customer's business. Learn more about the benefits of using the AWS Cloud.
AWS enables its customers to eliminate the need for costly hardware and the administrative pain that goes along with it. AWS can reduce costs and improve cash flow, whether a customer is starting out or operating on a large scale. Learn the 7 reasons AWS customers are saving money.
Aspera's unwavering mission is to create the next-generation software technologies that move the world's data at maximum speed, regardless of file size, transfer distance and network conditions.
Aspera's highly efficient bulk data transport technology is unique and core to all Aspera high-performance file transfer software. With approximately 2,000 customers and over 16,000 active software licenses being used worldwide, Aspera serves all industries that need to move large volumes of data over wide area networks.
Aspera's patented "fasp" transport technology is a proven standard for the high-speed movement of large files or large collections of files over wide area networks (WANs). Explore use cases of Aspera software.
Media enterprises, telecommunications operators, sports leagues, games and software publishers, life sciences organizations, law firms, government agencies, and Fortune 500 corporations rely on Aspera software for the business or mission-critical transport of their most valuable digital assets.
DAX (formerly Sample Digital) is a highly secure, web-based media production workflow application. Designed to maximize efficiencies throughout the content creation lifecycle, DAX enables secure exchange, collaboration, approvals and distribution of work-in-progress materials - from concept development through final delivery.
DAX provides a centralized platform for different stakeholders within a creative group or corporate environment to access materials to create and manage ancillary content, build campaigns, and re-use and re-purpose content for different marketing, publicity, and home entertainment applications.
Extensive workflow/collaboration tools and full media asset management enables quick and easy access to approved content by different stakeholders, reducing switching costs and redundant expenses including physical media duplication and burning, digitization, encoding and ingestion into multiple systems or myriad FTP sites - that's all in the past. Today, "DAX it!" means it's all in the same place.
Founded in 2004, YouSendIt was working in the cloud before the term was even coined. At first the service was a simple way to send the large attachments that e-mail couldn't process, but has since grown to become a robust suite of online file storage and management capabilities.
Today, the company serves 40 million registered users across 193 countries and 98 percent of the Fortune 500. Aside from offering professionals an easy-to-use collaboration solution, YouSendIt's renowned reliability, untouched data security, and endless innovation make it the go-to solution for businesses, big and small.
YouSendIt for Business is a secure and simple-to-deploy file-sharing solution. Find out why Fortune 500 companies use YouSendIt for secure business collaboration. Click here for a free 14-Day Trial.
YouSendIt has acquired Found, an app for finding your information wherever it is in the cloud. Welcome, Team Found: let's build a cloud-nostic future together. Learn more.
"YouSendIt for Business was a win-win for users and IT," says Noah Broadwater, CIO of Sesame Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street. Read the case study.
To learn more about sponsoring the 2013 CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE, please contact Heather Shuster at 202-429-5468 or hshuster@nab.org.
There are also special discount codes for DCINFO readers to attend the NABShow. The code for $100 off conference registration is EP35. And the code for FREE exhibit-only registration is EP04. Share wisely, and take care.
CISPA Is Back — Act Now to Block It
Excerpted from Demand Progress Report
Remember when we defeated the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) last year? Well, it's back with a vengeance. The leading Republican and Democrat on the US House Intelligence subcommittee re-introduced the cybersnooping bill this week.
We beat it once. We can beat it again. Click here to tell your lawmakers to support privacy and oppose CISPA.
To refresh your memory, Demand Progress co-founder Aaron Swartz called CISPA 1.0 a Patriot Act for the Internet. But now they've rebooted the effort, and Rolling Stone says that with CISPA 2.0, "Congress is trying to kill Internet privacy again."
The bill gives Internet service providers (ISPs) protection from customers' lawsuits when they give the Feds information about your Internet use.
Amazingly, Congress and big businesses are claiming they need to violate our privacy to protect us from Iranian and Chinese hackers, but they refuse to put any basic privacy protections in writing.
CISPA would undermine our basic rights and jeopardize our privacy online. Click here to tell your lawmakers to oppose to it.
CISPA sponsor Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger even said at a hearing this week that he didn't see any reason why businesses needed to hide your personal data from the government.
Already over 200,000 Demand Progress members have contacted Congress to oppose this bill, but we need your help again.
Help us defend Internet privacy from the latest assault by Congress and big business.
Click here to tell your lawmakers to oppose CISPA 2.0.
Please urge your friends to take action by forwarding this email or using these links:
If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends.
If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet.
Cloud Computing Boosts Next Generation of Start-Ups
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Joe McKendrick
The study of 1,300 US and UK executives, conducted by Rackspace Hosting with support from Manchester Business School in the UK, finds cloud engagements are delivering positive impacts, from cost savings to more innovation. Interestingly, the survey also reveals that most of these executives see cloud as laying the groundwork for the next entrepreneurial boom.
Sixty-two percent of respondents either agreed totally or somewhat with the statement that "cloud computing is a key factor in the recent boom of entrepreneurs and start-ups," the survey finds. Twenty-five percent agreed strongly with this idea.
Many respondents are speaking from experience — 43 percent of the group, in fact, say their businesses were launched just within the past three years. A majority of respondents with startups in the survey, 52 percent, said they would have not have been able to afford on-premises IT resources, or would have had difficulty acquiring computer systems, if it weren't for cloud computing. In fact, 43 percent say the availability of cloud-based resources has made it "a lot easier" to set up their businesses.
Close to half, 49 percent, say that cloud computing has helped their organizations to compete with larger companies.
Cloud computing is the foundation of what the NY Times Tom Friedman called the do-it-yourself (DIY) economy, and this survey supports that notion. As I mentioned in my first Forbes post back in September 2011, cloud computing may be a shot in the arm our economy needs, because it enables entrepreneurs and innovators to start up new ventures with minimal capital requirements — most of what they need is now available as online services, sometimes at no cost.
As we ponder unemployment and underemployment in our economy, the availability of cheap cloud computing may be laying the groundwork for a start-up boom, the likes we have never seen before. This applies to departments of larger organizations as well — designing new products, without the need to go through corporate finance and IT approvals definitely is a great way to instill entrepreneurial spirit.
The result is we'll see more extremely lightweight businesses on the scene, powered by applications running in someone else's data center.
A word of caution is in order, however. As the Rackspace-Manchester survey was funded by a cloud provider, there's likely to be built-in bias toward the positive effects of cloud. To illustrate this point, a recent survey by the vendor-neutral Open Group finds that many executives are losing their confidence in predicting ROI from cloud engagements.
Nevertheless, the overwhelmingly positive reports of cloud benefits do show that there's a powerful value proposition for small businesses and startups. What about larger, more established organizations?
The benefits are seen in their IT budgets — two thirds (66 percent) of organizations who use private or public cloud services feel that cloud computing has reduced their IT costs, with almost six in ten (58 percent) reporting that cost savings through avoiding IT infrastructure is a benefit of cloud computing.
Of those organizations that say cloud computing has reduced their IT costs, the reduction has been by an average of 23 percent. Given their average overall IT spend, this saving amounts to an average of close to $500,000 by using cloud providers.
Connected TV Devices Have Big Future, More Than a Gimmick
Excerpted from VidBlog Report by PJ Bednarski
Forrester Research has just released its "2013 Mobile Trends for Marketers," a smart report about the mushrooming mobile business that predicts $4.6 billion in mobile ad revenue in 2013, an increase (in the customary web-incredible way) of 52%, and retail revenues of $12 billion, up 62%.
Don't get that excited. The report's authors, Thomas Husson and Julie Ask, say up top, that in 2013, "While there is no doubt that some retailers and media companies will be able to easily measure a positive mobile ROI, we expect the majority of players to face a mobile monetization gap." (I think that's a way to say they won't make much.)
Forrester has a good reputation for taking long looks at the media business, and this report is in that vein, basically concluding that companies that advertise on mobile still aren't "all in" and suggesting that marketers set-up separate units at their firms to deal exclusively with mobile efforts.
Marketers are often shopping their mobile efforts to outsiders, treating in-house IT staff "like your kid brother who 'just doesn't get it.' In 2013, you will need to build this relationship and convince them to move mobile requirements higher on the list of design parameters — or you'll find yourself even further behind in 2014."
Likewise, Forrester concludes, "While connected devices will remain outside the mainstream in 2013, marketers need to prepare for new scenarios for engagement by capturing and putting to work information about consumers' bodies and the physical environment they inhabit. As a consequence, there will be a further blurring of the lines between digital marketing and digital product development. Marketers should stop considering these new connected devices as just gimmicky shiny objects. Time spent in cars and in front of a TV is too huge to ignore the early opportunity to start experimenting with apps and services that can engage perpetually-connected consumers."
Not all (or even most) of this report is actually talking about mobile video but a lot of it is, because as mobile grows, so does the use of video on smart-phones and tablets (which Forrester looks at as distinct from a smart-phone and more as a kind of hybrid PC).
Forrester notes that in 2013, there are 1 million apps available, and globally, 150 million tablets and 1 billion smart-phones in use.
"But more important than the scale of the numbers," Husson and Ask write, "is the fact that mobile devices and their connectivity fundamentally shift how people behave and how businesses engage with them."
Comcast Launches B2B Cloud-Based Software Marketplace
Excerpted from Multichannel News Report by Mike Farrell
Comcast Business Services today launched Upware marketplace, which gives its commercial services customers access to a suite of cloud-based business solutions that can be purchased through a single integrated web portal.
Upware includes selected third-party, cloud-based business applications from companies in several key categories such as data backup, data security and collaboration.
Vendors include Carbonite (data backup), DigitalSafe (data backup), Mozy (online backup), Norton (security), Websense (security), Box (online storage), Microsoft (Web collaboration), Soonr (online file sharing), and YouSendIt (document collaboration).
"We know small business owners and we know what tools they need to grow their businesses," said Kevin O'Toole, Senior Vice President and General Manager, New Business Solutions at Comcast Business Services. "Upware simplifies what can be a complex world of choices when evaluating cloud-based services. With the choice of these top vendors, business owners can quickly choose what tools they need to run their businesses and keep their focus on their number one priority — serving their customers."
Upware is designed to meet the needs of small and medium sized businesses looking to use cloud-based solutions to simplify their IT systems, control costs and increase productivity.
Through the Upware marketplace, business customers can purchase and use cloud services, as well as order other Comcast Business services. It also enables customers to pick and choose one or many of the offerings, based on their unique technology and business needs.
Upware simplifies application management with the convenience of a single sign-on, which makes access fast and easy for individual users.
In addition, business owners can quickly add or remove employees from the system as their business needs change. Plus, users have the simplicity of one number to call for support, management and troubleshooting for everything associated with their Comcast Business Class Internet service including the Upware marketplace and the software applications themselves.
In addition to the nine applications currently on the Upware marketplace, more applications will be added in the near future to existing aisles and new aisles will be added to address other business needs such as marketing and customer relationship management.
BitTorrent to the Enterprise: Share a Terabyte for Free
Excerpted from CMSWire Report by Barry Levine
If you work with video, photos, graphics, or animation, sending those large files around can become a major logistical chore. To address your needs, BitTorrent launched a beta of its SoShare file-sharing service, permitting files or file bundles up to one terabyte to be shared.
SoShare, a project of BitTorrent Labs, requires a signup, but anyone can do so. After signing up, a user is prompted to download SoShare's plug-in for Internet Explorer for Windows, Safari for Mac, and Chrome or Firefox for either platform. SoShare was first made available in an alpha version a year ago, when it was called Share.
During the beta testing, the service is free but the company said it is looking at options for monetizing the service at some point.
Recipients do not need to be signed up with SoShare. A thumbnail gallery allows the recipient to glimpse an image from the file without opening it. Senders also receive a notification when a file has been opened, there is a function for stopping a file transfer and picking it up later, and users can publish a link and use BitTorrent to share the file. Files shared through SoShare are made available for up to 30 days.
BitTorrent is entering a market that is quickly heating up. Competitors in the file sharing space include YouSendIt, as well as storage and collaboration services such as Dropbox. But YouSendIt's file limit size for its free service is 50MG, and even its top-of-the-line consumer service, costing $149.99 a year, has a file size limit of 2 GB.
In addition to its terabyte file size cap, SoShare also has the advantage of BitTorrent's distributive protocol that uses peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, combined with cloud caching. And the company has a user base of 170 million active monthly users. But it has one disadvantage to overcome — convincing users and the public that it is not involved in bootlegging intellectual property (IP).
BitTorrent Labs are key to that strategy, since the unit is intended to develop and test new features with commercial value. In addition to SoShare, it has offered a personal file-sharing program called Sync, a Chrome extension called Surf and a streaming client called BitTorrent Live.
Abacast Introduces Cloud-Based Ad Insertion for Radio
Excerpted from All Access Music Group Report
Abacast has rolled out its patent pending cloud-based ad insertion system, enabling advertisers and broadcasters to serve individualized targeted ads to listening audiences no matter what player or device audiences are using.
With cloud-based ad insertion, each listener can receive individualized in-stream audio ads. Examples of targeting options include "all smart-phone listeners," "all listeners in the top-20 DMAs that are on iPhones," "all male listeners in the 25-34 age range in a group of zip codes," "all listeners listening on the TuneIn player" and many more.
"Abacast's cloud-based ad insertion is the first in the digital media and radio industries to be able to target new devices such as iPhones with cost-effective HTTP delivery, and at the same time address legacy players with this same advanced targeting, all without the need for additional client software," said CEO Rob Green.
"Targeted cloud-based ad insertion technologies will be an imperative driver for broadcaster profitability in online radio as we continue to see consumers using many devices to consume content when and where they choose."
Telefonica Planning "Top to Bottom" IPTV Overhaul
Excerpted from IPTV News Report by Jamie Beach
Spanish telco Telefonica has decided to breathe new life into its IPTV service "Movistar Imagenio," giving it a new name, new content, and new pricing plans, according to local reports.
Online news source ABC.es quotes Luis Miguel Gilperez, President of Telefonica Espana, as saying that this "radical" change will take place within the next three months and see the TV service rechristened "Movistar TV."
Making the comments in a meeting with the press last Wednesday, the exec declined to confirm which new channels will be added to the TV service, or what the new prices will be.
The current version of the IPTV service offers more than 80 channels (including 11 in HD) and is currently available for monthly charges ranging from 12 to 29 euros.
Telefonica ended September 2012 as Spain's second-largest pay-TV platform with 759,600 customers — still behind leading cable operator Ono with 882,457 subs.
Huawei Unfolds SDN Roadmap
Excerpted from Light Reading Report by Ray Le Maistre| Post a Comment
Huawei Technologies outlined its "SoftCOM" software-defined networking (SDN) strategy to industry analysts and media in London late Thursday, giving some insight into where the Chinese vendor believes it can add value to network operators' next-generation infrastructure strategies.
This wasn't the first outing for SoftCOM. It made an appearance on the Huawei stand at the Broadband World Forum show in Amsterdam last October for anyone peering closely at the small print (See SoftCOM: Huawei's Take on SDN.)
While the London presentation didn't deliver anything strange or startling - Huawei's approach follows the same basic principles as any technology equipment company wanting a piece of the SDN action - it did provide a broader picture of Huawei's aims and identify particular areas of attention for the vendor's SDN-focused R&D team.
It also introduced some new terminology that, hopefully, won't make it any further than this week's marketing materials - "cloudlization" (and that is the correct spelling) should be filed under "end of line" as quickly as possible, where it should be joined by its close (but distinct) relative "cloudization."
Away from the nomenclature, here are the highlights of Huawei's approach.
The overall picture is a familiar one: current communications architectures are "closed, complicated, and controlling" and need to be "open, simplified, and enabling."
This latter state, in Huawei's view (and in tune with others in the industry), can be achieved through the use of: SDN technologies (separate control and data planes); the virtualization of network elements, such as session border controllers (SBCs); hosted OSS and BSS functions within a cloud services-enabled telecom data center; and the mass deployment of cloud services — infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS).
The vendor also envisages a network architecture that would distribute cloud/hosting capabilities across the network - at edge aggregation points and in metro nodes as well as in regional and national data centers. That same vision was also shared by Ericsson AB earlier this week. (See Ericsson Gets Trendy for MWC.)
All of this functionality would, in theory, minimize capex, reduce operational complexity, increase efficiency and flexibility, vastly improve time-to-market for new services/applications and, with additional intelligence and insight from the use of "Big Data" business intelligence techniques, improve customer experience levels.
"It's comprehensive but it's a vision statement - there's a lot of detail that needs to be filled in," notes Heavy Reading Chief Analyst Graham Finnie, who attended the presentation. "It's pretty much what you'd expect from a large vendor such as Huawei."
What particularly caught Finnie's eye were Huawei's initial areas of R&D focus. It is developing SDN tools that can be deployed in an IP radio access network (IP RAN) architecture. It's also building network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities for the multiple elements — home subscriber server (HSS), the serving and packet data network (PDN) gateways and the mobility management entity (MME) — that comprise the 4G evolved packet core (EPC). Other network elements that will get the NFV treatment in Huawei's R&D labs include the SBC and various IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) functions.
Huawei expects to engage in commercial trials in 2014 and achieve commercial deployment in 2015. By that time, hopefully, "cloudlization" will be just a distant memory.
In the meantime, Huawei will be talking more about SoftCOM during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where SDN, NFV and all manner of Service Provider Information Technology (SPIT) developments will be in the spotlight.
In addition, you can get a more in-depth Huawei take on its SoftCOM approach by checking out this video: Huawei SoftCOM: Reshaping the Future of Network Architecture.
Free Cloud Computing Services from ProfitBricks
Excerpted from Data Center Report by Rakesh Dogra
Start-up companies can access cloud computing services free of cost thanks to ProfitBricks and its Foundation Program. This infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company is at the spearhead of efforts at changing the way cloud computing is used.
A start-up company only has to qualify for the Foundation Program in order to be able to enjoy the support of this organization's virtual data center at a massively reduced cost.
Eligibility criteria include having a minimum of one office in the US and revenue of less than $1 million per annum. If a start-up has made it to this list then it can enjoy accessing ProfitBricks' cloud server without any charge for a year and get 20% off on IaaS services too.
ProfitBricks works with InifiniBand technology that delivers benefits such as security, simplicity and swiftness of installation and maintenance. It is the first to use drag and drop feature of DataCenter Designer.
Dell Cloud Lets You Have It Your Way
Excerpted from InfoWorld Report by Peter Wayner
In business, you go where your customers are. If the kids want to listen to that rock n' roll music, well, you put it on the jukebox. If the enterprise caretakers want to buy something from a cloud, then you bundle up your server boxes and call them a cloud. That's what Dell is doing. If time is too short to buy your Dell machines with a purchase order and take delivery, you can call up the company and it will start them up in its data center.
Dell's new cloud has a distinctly Dell flavor that's apparent from the beginning. The company has always been very close to Microsoft, and now it's even closer after the leveraged buyout. While other clouds charge a bit more for a Microsoft license, you get one to Windows Server 2008 R2 as part of the whole bundle. The Dell Cloud portal where you control your machines insists that you log in via Internet Explorer or Firefox. Chrome isn't even on the list.
The sales process is also very Dell. You can buy a machine by the hour, but the first options you see ask you to reserve a chunk of hardware for a month - much as you might if you were leasing a real slab of silicon. Dell's sales team is ready to help at any time. A "small" machine comes with one virtual CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 100GB of storage for a going rate of $125 a month, averaging about 17.5 cents an hour.
A medium instance — the size I tested — has four virtual CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and 400GB of storage for $500 a month. If you want to buy by the hour, it's 5.5 cents per virtual CPU per hour, 7 cents per gigabyte of RAM per hour, and 30 cents per gigabyte of storage per month. Once you reserve this hardware, you can then split it up into VMware virtual machines, just as if you purchased a real piece of hardware and installed VMware.
The biggest difference about Dell may be in the openness to the virtual machine part of the stack. All of the other major cloud companies take your money and give you root on some virtual machine. Then they pretend that much of the virtualization isn't there. The root password makes it look as if you're logging into your very own box, when in reality you're logging into a virtual machine that's sharing one piece of hardware with a bunch of other customers.
With Dell, you open up your Dell Cloud portal and find a VMware vApp, described by one Dell support engineer as the equivalent of a rack where you can stick your own virtual machines. To fill the virtual rack, you can draw on a few standard templates to create an F5 load balancer, a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine, or a Suse Linux 11 box, but of course you're also welcome to upload any VMware or OVF virtual machine.
There's also an option for starting up a machine with a particular ISO file - useful if you want to boot up a particular LiveCD version of Linux or any other OS. The portal even lets you pretend that you're accessing the CD/DVD drive on your machine though you're just uploading ISO files.
The ability to poke around at this level is liberating. You can mess around with a virtual machine on your desktop using VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, then upload it to your virtual rack and start it up in the server farm. Most of the other clouds let you create images of your servers, but usually you end up doing the work to build the image on their machines.
The VMware software layer is also employed when you start communicating with your running machines. You can open up the SSH port if you like, but the simplest path is to use VMware's remote client. One screen on your portal shows a list of all of your virtual machines. If you click on one row, the VMware remote client will start up a connection in another window of your browser. This process was a bit glitchy for me, but I finally got it to work with Firefox. Once it started going, I was able to fiddle with the server from my desktop. The video wasn't as snappy, but that's the price of working across the country from the server.
To get a feel for the speed of Dell's cloud machines, I pushed a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine through the DaCapo benchmarks, a set of Java routines that tests many common Java server applications. As with other virtual machines in other clouds, the results varied greatly. Many of the benchmarks were 50 to 100 percent faster than an Amazon High-CPU instance (14.5 cents per hour). But others, such as the image rendering tests (batik and sunflow), ran neck and neck.
These differences mean you must try out your application yourself to see if you're getting the performance you want. For instance, the lucene indexing routines were faster on the Dell medium than on the Amazon High-CPU box, but the searching tests ran in the same amount of time. The good news is you can fiddle with the VMware machine on your desktop until you get the right combination of software packages and device routines to improve your performance.
Dell is also offering the same kind of transparency for the network configuration. You can choose between a number of different networking options for your VM once you get it running. You can configure internal and external networks, as well as reconfigure your virtual boxes in much the same way as you would your real servers. When you want your machines to speak to the outside, you can monkey around with NAT and DHCP to pass out the external IP addresses.
I'm a bit torn about this approach. Some of the other clouds sweep all of this under the rug and simply connect your box to the outside Internet. You get a root password and an IP address open to all. It's much easier to get rolling, but of course there's no flexibility.
Other clouds have dedicated internal and external networks but still hide the details. Dell's approach will be familiar to anyone running the network in an office or an internal server farm because the steps are similar. The technologies are the same and you can use all of the flexibility if you want to do so. It may be a bit more work, but that's the price for the openness.
Dell, like the others, is not charging for data coming into the system, just for data leaving it (24 cents per gigabyte). Dell Cloud doesn't yet boast an elaborate collection of different regions and services, unlike many of the other clouds. Amazon, for instance, has at least 18 different lines on its data price sheet that govern how much it costs to move a gigabyte from point A to B.
Dell Cloud isn't that complicated yet. But it will probably lose a bit of this simplicity as it grows into the space and starts offering different storage and database options. For now, Dell Cloud will be most attractive to IT staffs used to buying and configuring Dell or Windows machines in their own networks. Dell Cloud offers a wonderful amount of openness that will be familiar to anyone who's set up a rack of virtual machines with VMware in their own server room.
The big advantage to moving to Dell's cloud, of course, is that Dell handles much of the grungy details like bolting machines into racks and hooking up the air conditioning. But everything else will seem just as familiar as calling up your Dell representative, putting in an order, and installing the software you want. You just won't have to wait for FedEx to deliver and the server room staff to bolt it into a rack.
Why Akamai Is a Smart Play in Cloud Computing
Excerpted from MSN Money Report by Jim Jubak
I think Akamai's almost 18% plunge on February 7th after what Wall Street decided was a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report has taken some of the risk out of this stock.
You may have to be patient, since the company is entering one of those capital-intensive periods that can cut margins, but for investors willing to hold past a quarter or two (or for investors who can time their entry point with more exactitude that I usually can), Akamai is one of the best ways to play the growth of cloud computing and what looks like a coming explosion in video on demand as Netflix, Amazon, and Google gear up to go head-to-head-to-head in that space.
On February 6th, Akamai announced fourth-quarter earnings of 54 cents a share, 5 cents a share above the Wall Street consensus, and revenue of $378 million. That represented revenue growth of 17% but fell slightly below the Wall Street consensus of $381 million for the quarter. Gross margins of 82% and operating margins of 33.2% were both ahead of the consensus of 81.1% and 32.3%, respectively.
There were a few dings in the quarter. Revenue from the company's media and entertainment and its commerce segments came in a little light - at $158 million versus the consensus of $163 million and $90 million versus the consensus of $92 million, respectively — in a quarter when the company typically outperforms.
And Akamai issued slightly lower revenue guidance for the first quarter of $352 million to $362 million versus the analyst consensus of $371 million. The company also said that operating margin in 2013 would stay in the low 40%s as Akamai ramped up investments in sales, marketing, and research and development.
The fear that revenue growth might be slowing and that margins might contract produced the selloff. Well, I think you could actually say that extremely high expectations produced the selloff when the company reported merely high results.
I think it's important to understand that Akamai is a very capital-intensive technology company. To accelerate speeds on the Internet — and especially to accelerate the speeds of big downloads like movies — Akamai puts its servers into the network of its customers and using those servers to transparently mirror content for the end-user.
The end-user never sees an Akamai server, but if Akamai's software determines that one of its servers can deliver the content faster to the end-user — because an Akamai server is closer to the end-user or because it has a better connection to the end-user at the moment — then the content that the user has asked for is delivered by an Akamai server that has mirrored the content on its customer's network.
You can, I think understand from even this simple description, the three big drivers in Akamai's business.
First is the growth of traffic, especially big object traffic like video files, on the network. The numbers on growth in the markets that Akamai serves are kind of squishy, depending on what you count and how, but they are large. Forrester estimates that the cloud-computing market will grow from $41 billion in 2011 to $241 billion in 2020. Cisco Systems estimates that two-thirds of total data center traffic will be cloud traffic by 2016. IDC projects that application traffic in the cloud will growth at a compounded annual growth rate of 19.1% from 2011 to 2016.
Second, to get a big chunk of this growth Akamai has to spend big on research and development. The company is in a speed race with competitors such as Limelight Networks to see which company can speed up a customer's network the most. Hence the big bump in research and development by Akamai for 2013.
And third, this is a capital-intensive business — all those servers cost money. Akamai spends about 12% of sales on capital equipment.
What this all means, too, is that Akamai's results are cyclical. That's not just cyclical as in the ups and downs of the economy — which of course they are. But also cyclical in that the company has to spend money on R&D and on capital investments in an uneven pattern that depends on how competitive the market is at the moment (very competitive) and how fast the market is growing (very fast.)
At a time like this, it is only reasonable to expect that Akamai's margins might contract since the company is spending money on R&D and on capital equipment that it hopes will result in higher future revenue — but that don't bring in revenue immediately in a large enough volume to keep margins from compressing.
The issue for Akamai isn't growth in its market but whether it can capture that growth with its technology investments and whether it can recoup its capital investments. There's always risk in that. But less risk today than when the stock was 18% higher. I'm adding the shares to my Jubak's Picks portfolio with a target price of $45 a share by September 2013.
Swelling Volume of Cloud Computing Business Across the Globe
Excerpted from CloudTweaks Report by Walter Bailey
Many research and studies verify the fact that the volume of the cloud computing business is swelling exponentially across the globe — the growth rates are unprecedented and unexpectedly high. Among such reliable studies, Gartner research and Market Research Media group a few to name — from the results of these studies, it has been found that the growth rate of the volume of business based on cloud computing is much more than the expected.
Forrester Research reveals that the volume of cloud computing business would reach $241 billion in the year 2020 — which is many times the existing market of $41 billion in the year 2011. The investment in this field of the business is much more than expected during the past few years — meanwhile, it is also being predicted that the investment in future would be much more than previous estimations.
The results found in the study of Gartner research suggest that the volume of cloud based business would reach about $148.8 billion by the 2014 — this estimation is even more than that predicted by Forrester Research Company. The company also reveals that the major portion of this growth would take place in the public cloud and there would be a very little volume of $15.9 billion in the section of companies licensing software by the year 2020.
Market Research Media predicts through its studies that the business volume in the domain of cloud computing would much more than previous estimations and predictions — the volume would reach as much as about $270 billion in the year 2020. This study of the market based on cloud computing predicts that the annual growth rate of this business would be more than 30%; one of the reasons for this enormous growth in this domain of business is the confidence of the people and entrepreneurs to invest in this domain — many companies and enterprises are also showing confidence in adopting the cloud based services in their businesses. These enterprises were somewhat reluctant to adopt the cloud computing based services into their IT departments.
Many multi-billion and multi-million deals, mergers, and acquisition are taking place across the globe in this domain of business — the competition and quality of the services based on cloud computing are increasing very rapidly. Large IT giants like Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Cisco, Google, HP, VMware, and many others are investing huge amounts in the research and development for the enhancement and improvement of the services based on cloud computing models of business.
Coming Events of Interest
European Cloud Computing Conference - March 7th in Brussels, Belgium. This 2nd annual event will provide a platform to hear from key policymakers and stakeholders, discuss opportunities offered by the technology, and examine steps to be taken so that Europe can fully take advantage of the benefits provided by the cloud.
2013 Symposium on Cloud and Services Computing - March 14th-15th in Tainan, Taiwan. The goal of SCC 2013 is to bring together, researchers, developers, government sectors, and industrial vendors that are interested in cloud and services computing.
NAB Show 2013 - April 4th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. Every industry employs audio and video to communicate, educate and entertain. They all come together at NAB Show for creative inspiration and next-generation technologies to help breathe new life into their content. NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV.The New ways cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content distribution. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event.
Digital Hollywood Spring - April 29th-May 2nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The premier entertainment and technology conference. The conference where everything you do, everything you say, everything you see means business.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 20th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 — October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Three conference tracks will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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