John Considine

Last week I wrote about the Cloud.com acquisition and what it means for Citrix, Rackspace, OpenStack and the industry. Next, I’d like to dig into the VMware announcement about their cloud infrastructure suite. Citrix clearly wanted to announce their news just prior to VMware’s, and for a good reason – Citrix is hitting VMware in a weak spot of their cloud strategy.  It’s pretty clear that VMware is not getting the vCloud adoption they were anticipating from service providers and even enterprises. In Paul Maritz’s presentation, he mentioned that VMware “…has been working closely with service providers because you need the same stacks on both sides [the private cloud and public cloud] to be able to ‘slide’ applications to the cloud…and back again.”  At CloudSwitch we are dedicated to the notion that you don’t have to have identical infrastructure stacks between the d... (more)

Dealing with the Cloud's Latent Tendencies

One of the frequent questions we get when we engage with customers moving applications to the cloud is: what about the latency issues when using a cloud?  This question arises because most IT departments have had to struggle with application performance issues and the idea of adding a big chunk of latency when integrating the cloud is very troubling.  Here is how we address this: 1.   Move the whole application to the cloud.  We have been working hard to allow you to move all of the components of your application to the cloud.  With this capability, you are not adding the latenc... (more)

What Cloud APIs Show Us About the Emerging Cloud Market

While there is no “official” definition of cloud computing, I believe programmatic access to virtually unlimited network, compute, and storage resources is an essential characteristic.  Even though many users access cloud computing through consoles and third-party applications, the foundation of a cloud is a solid Application Programming Interface (API). Since CloudSwitch works with many cloud providers, we have the opportunity to interact with a variety of cloud APIs—both active and soon-to-be-released versions.  After working closely with both the APIs and those implementing t... (more)

Opinion: "Cloud in a Box" Gets Boxed In

Just a week after our blog post on the telcos, we find another big company joining the cloud computing tsunami – Oracle’s announcement of its “cloud in a box” offering as well as new offerings of Oracle software running on Amazon’s EC2. For a company whose leader shunned the term “cloud” last year, this is a lot of cloud announcements in one week.  Oracle’s new Exalogic Elastic Cloud is perhaps the first “cloud in a box” solution that is actually delivered in a box (of hardware).  Unlike the offerings we have seen from Eucalyptus, Nimbula, Azure, and VMware, the Exalogic product... (more)

IaaS and PaaS: Getting Closer All the Time

Happy New Year! In this first post of 2011, I’d like to explore one of the primary ways the cloud landscape is evolving. Two of the pillars of cloud computing, Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and Platform as a Service (PAAS), are showing some interesting trends as cloud providers adapt to meet the needs of their customers. Over the coming year, we may see these familiar models evolving into something new since the ideal solution for most enterprises is not one approach or the other but some combination of both. Traditionally these two methods of cloud computing have been quite ... (more)