This post was written by Mulah Johnson
Storage firm EMC has joined the Daoli Trusted Infrastructure Project which conducts research into “trust and assurance” in cloud computing environments. The team’s research will focus on cloud computing, trusted computing and virtualization. The issue of trust in cloud computing environments is becoming important as enterprises put applications, data and customer information in computing environments outside their local control. The research will explore a variety of techniques that could be applied to secure the underlying physical location as well as broadly shared resources.
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Q-layer announced the Q-layer Delegation Manager, a solution that turns virtual server environments into a true cloud computing platform. The Q-layer Delegation Manager enables fast browser-based provisioning of data center assets for helpdesk, technical end-users and non- technical end-users, with integrated credit-based charge-back capabilities, reporting and easy to use flash-based management controls. A quote from the piece
A financial services software company, Derivix(R), has announced the launch of its new real-time Portfolio Risk system. The product facilitates buy- and sell-side firms to visualize real-time options market dynamics and underlying risk exposures to manage and successfully navigate today’s highly volatile markets. The product will be available by early 2009. The company has leveraged cloud computing, which uses virtual servers and resources delivered via the Internet as a service. The novel solution is also a more cost-effect alternative.
Salesforce.com will be expanding its cloud computing services, allowing its customers to build external websites more easily. The new service, which will be known as Force.com Sites, will be launched by the company at its Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. Kendall Collins, senior vice president, product marketing, Salesforce.com stated that while infrastructure services of the company were expanding, it hoped to prevent the complexity brought into cloud computing by companies like Microsoft.
3Tera has announced that its eye-catching application building platform has gone through a major upgrade. The company calls its new platform an “infrastructure delivery network.” At the highest level, that means that the company can deliver remote backup on its technology platform, which is called AppLogic. “What’s new in cloud computing is the ability to leverage it for general purpose computing, and not have to write for a specific platform,” says Bert Armijo, 3Tera senior vice president of sales, marketing, and product management. “As long as the application runs on Linux (and now Solaris too), we can move between data centers with a single command.”
A San Francisco company, Hyperic Inc., has launched CloudStatus.com to monitor the health of Amazon’s cloud for other users. The company built various applications to test the Web services constantly. For example, an application could test how many seconds it takes to put a document on one of Amazon’s servers. According to Schneider, no technology can ever be successful unless developers can trust it. A great quote from the piece-
On Web2.0 Journal, Reuven Cohen says that defining what cloud computing is in itself a tough job, the lack of common cloud methodologies and best practices is making the job even harder. Trying to find experienced people with knowledge on how to build out a 30,000 machine cloud is nearly impossible, and finding someone who’s deployed hundreds is proving to be almost as difficult, according to Cohen. Cohen believes that, with increasing deployment of cloud computing, those who have seen the paradigm shift toward this type of service offering will prosper.
Microsoft Corp.’s new business applications division head, Stephen Elop, said that the company expects a “substantial portion” of revenues of this core division to come from online applications over the next few years. Elop said that he wants to “aggressively facilitate” the re-engineering of Microsoft’s Office division for a world where business applications increasingly are stored off-premise, a development known as “cloud computing.” The move would prove to be a critical shift for the company whose most of the software is stored on customers’ desktop computers.
Hewlett-Packard (HP), Intel Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have announced an ambitious research initiative focused on studying the software, hardware and datacenter management issues surrounding cloud computing. The group’s new Cloud Computing Test Bed is aimed at creating a large, globally distributed testing environment that they hope will encourage unprecedented levels of research. Although several companies are already offering some cloud computing services, Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs, believes that substantial effort is needed.
On Slashdot, Ian Lamont says that Dell Inc. is trying to trademark the cloud computing term. The phrase entered the tech lexicon years ago, but Dell’s application with serial number 77139082 was made in early 2007 to the US Patent and Trademark Office, apparently in connection with data center products and services that it was promoting around that time. However, a quick search of Google News has indicated that Dell itself did not use the term in press releases or discussions with indexed English-language media sources from 1996 to 2006, Lamont revealed.