Intel, Rackspace, OpenStack, and a Cloud for All
I didn’t really get it, back in January 2014, when Intel, Amazon and others made a big noise about slapping the equivalent of an ‘Intel Inside’ sticker on your favourite cloud. Now they’re at it again, with the birth of a new ‘Cloud for All’ initiative, a nudge for OpenStack, and the promise that Intel and Rackspace […]
Rackspace
Rackspace results came in below analyst expectations. Shares ‘tumbled,’ according to The Register. Over at TechCrunch, they ‘plunged.’ Yup. They tumbled and plunged all the way to exactly where they were last week. (Source: Google) More interesting, for me, was the company’s emphasis on its increasingly important business supporting customers of other people’s clouds. Unsurprisingly, Barb Darrow […]
451 Research on IaaS
This diagram, from a recent 451 Research report, is intriguing. AWS is top of the heap, “used by the majority of enterprise IaaS customers in the study (57%) and is also cited as the most important IaaS provider by 35% of these current IaaS customers.” But look at Rackspace, ahead of AWS on ‘promise’ and only just […]
Hewlett-Packard gets real
The New York Times’ Quentin Hardy reports HP’s Bill Hilf as saying that: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head [with Amazon].” Well, yes. But, and it’s a huge but… this doesn’t mean HP is abandoning (or should abandon) the […]
Open Letter to the OpenStack Community: OpenStack’s Future Depends on Embracing Amazon. Now.
Dear Stackers, For three years, elements of the OpenStack community have arbitrarily and unfairly positioned OpenStack against incumbents, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware (VMW). The practical expression of this view is that OpenStack should build and maintain its own set of differentiated APIs. I’ve made no secret of my belief that this choice […]
What Makes Cloud Transformation So Hard?
Transformation is not a new concept, and has been around a long time before cloud and big data. It has always been a pretty nebulous term, but generally has referred to the fundamental reinvention or redesign of a business or function. From an enterprise-wide perspective this typically has meant redefining everything from target markets, products […]
Xeround, and a tale of evolving business models
Cloud database company Xeround announced that they’re shutting down the version of their service hosted in public clouds such as Amazon, Rackspace, GreenQloud, and others. Users of the free service have until 8 May to move elsewhere, whilst paying customers have until 15 May. The company describes this as an attempt to “re-focus,” with the […]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may […]
CloudPassage Cloud Security Survey
CloudPassage was kind enough to share with me the raw data from their latest cloud computing security survey. In many ways this is what you would expect to see in a survey of companies that are still working out exactly what they want to do in the cloud and the approaches they want to take […]
![[Some of] what you need to know about the cloud for 2013](https://mk0cloudavegc40cmtia.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/342289398_ddfd22d1a5_z-300x157-100x100.jpg)
[Some of] what you need to know about the cloud for 2013
Towards the end of last year, David Linthicum and I joined GigaOM’s Adam Lesser on a skype chat to take a look back at cloud successes and failures in 2012, and forward to cloud opportunities in 2013. GigaOM released the conversation as a podcast this morning. Amazon, Rackspace, Google, OpenStack, DropBox, and more get a […]
Nimbula Joins the OpenStack Community
A piece of news that I’ve been aware of for a month or two now is today public knowledge – Nimbula (more on them here), the cloud infrastructure company famously founded by the team that developed Amazon’s prescient EC2 offering, is signing up to join the OpenStack community. Nimbula is
On Open Source Cloud Adoption
Last week Lydia Leong from Gartner published an analyst report with some opinions on Open Stack. I’ve been critical in the past about traditional analyst firms and I’ve also gone on record as being positive about open source (and, for full disclosure, the CloudU program I run is sponsored by OpenStack member Rackspace) but notwithstanding […]
When did Amazon abandon Main Street for ‘the Skyscrapers of Cloud Hosting’ ?
In the competitive world of cloud-based computing infrastructure, Amazon remains top dog. It’s highly visible, its footprint is almost global, it incrementally adds features or cuts prices to keep competitors on their toes, and it generally manages to meet most people’s needs, most of the time. It may not always offer the lowest prices, or […]
OpenStack Seeing the Light of General Availability
The last few weeks have been interesting around the OpenStack ecosystem. We’ve had HP moving object storage and Cloud CDN to general availability. We had Morphlabs introduce an interesting combined hardware and software offering called mCloud Helix. The product is powered by OpenStack, and combines that with SSD-powered nodes to deliver a compact rack mount […]
Rackspace deploys OpenStack–AppFog Delivers the Promise of PaaS
Today is an exciting day for anyone who follows the infrastructure or PaaS space today as Rackspace announced the general availability of cloud services powered by OpenStack. It’s also a satisfying day for those who have argued at length with people within the cloud community who have been adamant that OpenStack isn’t actually ready for […]
