August 2nd, 2011
You have probably seen lists like this in many places on the web lately as more and more bloggers and web writers see the value of moving any kind of business, whether it is a small start-up or a large enterprise, onto the cloud. Since we have always believed in the value of the cloud, here are our top five reasons we feel that any business should be looking at moving their business to the cloud.
Data Backup – One of the most important elements, this is also one of the best reasons to move as many elements of your business as you can to the cloud. Backup of critical data is a headache for almost all businesses and yet you can easily setup a backup of all your data through a variety of solutions such as Carbonite, SugarSync, and CrashPlan. Combine this offsite cloud backup with two additional copies kept elsewhere (the 3-2-1 rule of three copies, two separate data and one offsite) and you will never have to worry about losing your data in a disaster again.
File Sharing/Virtual Machines – With the cloud you can have all your data accessible to all your offices at the same time. Since the data is shared in the cloud, the same documents are accessible without creating multiple copies that float around between offices. The same is true of the concept of virtual machines. With all your data on the cloud, workers can move from office to office or desk to desk, access what they are working on from anywhere. And with the software all in the cloud, investment in software is under control with plenty of options for a wide variety of cloud operating systems that means businesses can always have the latest software versions and the power of top-end machines without the investment.
Hosting Your Website – More and more businesses are seeing the wisdom in not going through the effort and money to buy the servers and spend the time creating and running their company site. Having it hosted in the cloud saves time, money and gives the business time to invest in ways to use that site to grow the business instead of just maintaining it.
Cloud Based Business Tools – Why spend the time and money on buying and learning software tools that you will need to maintain for everyone in your office when you can use cloud based office tools such as SalesForce for CRM-based solutions or even track statistics anytime and anywhere. These cloud-based business tools are flexible and can be tailored to your business needs, accessed from anywhere including your laptop when you are looking for that important piece of information for an upcoming business meeting, and give you a quick look at who uses what tools to help you forecast your business needs.
Cost Savings – This is the one you hear everywhere about the cloud for a good reason, it is probably the biggest reason most companies start looking at moving their operations to the cloud. The sheer cost of infrastructure and IT staff to support it has made moving into the cloud look better and better each year. If your business does game development, video and other media or you are looking to launch a business, you will find that the cloud makes collaboration easy. There are more companies offering cloud hosting so the options are better than ever, and once the move has been made, most companies find themselves wondering why they didn’t do it sooner.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
August 1st, 2011
The Cloud has an impact on more than just business; it has also brought its unique abilities to the scientific community. In the last decade the number of scientific instruments available that can add to the data stream has been enormous, and continues to grow. While this has spurred software development within the various scientific disciplines, hardware processing capabilities have struggled to handle the sheer volume of data. One of the areas where The Cloud has been brought in to handle this is astronomy, where the glut of data has been overwhelming for researchers.
One of the results has been the development of astroinformatics, the science of the exploitation of the information pertaining to astronomy through the development of grid and cloud computing. In Canada, researchers with The Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) in cooperation with CANARIE, a national research network organization is working to create a cloud-based platform to support astronomy research. The goal of the project is to create access for astronomers to datasets and resources in customized virtual compute and storage clouds. This would give them entrée to data that was previously only accessible locally and will allow astronomers across the country to handle the vast datasets being generated by global observatories. In addition, the expertise of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics and the National Research of Canada will be available through this network.
CANAR states that they envision this new cloud environment will “provide astronomers with novel and more immediate hands-on and interactive ways to process and share very large amounts of data emerging from space exploration”.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
July 29th, 2011
For many of the old timers in the mainframe world, the word cloud alone will get you an eye roll or two. They will tell you that it is just a new word for a function that mainframes have been performing for years. But is it?
Sure, there are many that claim that it is nothing more than a resource made available in a company with security and solid management controls that is dynamically provisioned, in other words a mainframe. But what seems to be missing from this definition is user control. And most experts will tell you that it is a key attribute of cloud hosting.
And one of the key characteristics that gives mainframes their reputation as old technology is the very controlled environment that makes it so secure. An administrator is needed to provision computing power for any specific task, unlike in the cloud technology. And this is why x86-based distributed architecture is the mainstay for cloud computing and not mainframes.
Even with this reasoning, mainframe vendors still claim that as many as 73% of their clients are looking to use their mainframes as part of the move to the cloud. In fact, IBM has been advocating for mainframes as cloud platforms the last several years, especially since the introduction of the zEnterprise last year. IBM introduced virtual operating systems over 30 years ago and with the addition of Linux, running virtual X86 servers on their mainframes was a logical next step.
But the problem of self-provisioning remains. When you have a system where in some companies the mainframe is in a locked room where no one can access it, it is hard to see how to develop self-service features. IBM’s system x cloud computing leader, Reed Mullen, claims that the problem Is a reflection of the culture of mainframes, not the technology. But even Mullen admits that any implementations are still going to be run through IT, probably via a request email to have resources allocated. Point and click allocations don’t seem to be part of the picture.
One scenario where mainframes as cloud platforms may be happening now is worldwide outsourcing companies with developers spread across the globe. These developers would have the ability to set up their own testing and development platforms, and some may be mainframe based. Mullen of IBM agrees this is the most likely situation with today’s technology and says it “is perhaps the dominant usage of a cloud infrastructure in mainframe environments today.”
As the cloud matures more situations may develop that will lead to a wider adaptation of mainframes to cloud platforms, but for now the ability still seems somewhat limited. But no matter how you look at it, the development of business units to self-provision a mainframe-based cloud is coming. It will probably change the way mainframes are seen as they run more of the same software and grow their service-management side. They may soon be seen as just another high-end element in the cloud world, instead of a class on their own.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
July 25th, 2011
One of the elements that have been closely discussed with the introduction of cloud hosting is multi-tenancy. This is when more than one non-related resource is allocated on the same hardware. A good example of this are VM instances that are running on the same servers sharing CPUs, memory and network adaptors. In the case of SaaS (Software as a Service), multi-tenancy is created when your have more than one client sharing the same application while making sure that the data is properly partitioned.
But when you have a tenant who behaves badly, the other tenants who act in good faith can find themselves starved out when there are controls lacking to limit the consumption habits of their neighbors. Sadly, this can happen all too easily. Often the limits are not enforced when the hosts believe they can easily scale up or down as needs arise. This is, after all, one of the big promises of cloud hosting.
Unfortunately, not all resources are created equal and so they also do not scale equally. Any re-allocations from the pool could result in a negative impact on the other tenants’ ability to scale as well. The area that is often forgotten in this scenario is bandwidth. While CPU time or memory can quite easily be controlled, the bandwidth process can be much harder to control for each tenant. Sometimes this can result in a denial of service to other tenants because they are sharing the same switch or running on the same network adaptor.
It is important for any cloud adaptor to remember that anything in the cloud needs bandwidth. So in addition to taking care of client requests, your client requests generate traffic which consumes bandwidth. In the end it doesn’t really matter if the traffic is created by communication with the storage network, database, or application servers. You could have the hypervisor substrate reallocating and balancing loads, they all take up bandwidth. The bottom line is there are limitations to the network, physical ones that can be as simple as fiber-based connections. It is rare for anyone to measure or understand the aggregate network load created by one tenant within the multi-tenant architecture and in many situations being able to directly access a particular network load may not even be possible.
So beyond how this affects performance, why should we care? Well, if you are designing solutions for the cloud, you need to be sure that you test your production environment’s real operating performance and not just count on the specs given by your host provider. A machine instance with two-cores operating at 2.5Ghz, 2048 megabytes of RAM, 500 gigabytes of disk space and 1 gigabyte network adapter does not equate 1:1 performance. Testing is imperative while the application is running in this environment. Of course, you still cannot assume it will run in real life the way it ran in a test environment. So be sure to also obtain average IOPS for storage, and average bandwidth over a reasonable amount of time, and always look at your response times around key processes. This should give you the minimum needed to assess.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
July 14th, 2011
As cloud adaptation quickly moves into business, IT Department Heads must learn how to prepare for changes in technology and staff or suffer the consequences. Here are a few pointers to help prepare for that move to the cloud in today’s IT world.
Prepare for the shift
Don’t assume you can just move everything to the cloud. Plan how your department will strategize to make organizational improvements to align your department with the cloud.
Restructure IT and Manage the Cloud
Don’t let management be seduced by the accessibility of the cloud. Be sure that your department is still the go to expert of all things IT, including the cloud.
Extend IT influence
With the cloud removing the IT department as simply maintenance, now is the time to establish the department’s place regarding strategy and business critical initiatives.
Make use of traditional outsourcing skills
This is one area where IT already should have skills, and working with the cloud has many similarities to the role of product and service evaluation, contract negotiations and performance monitoring that were needed before.
Reduce IT risk by adjusting your organizational design
Maintain control of the technology decision making process by making adjustments to your organizational design to align IT with the cloud.
Manage the cloud as part of IT structure
Take an active role in managing the cloud by deciding which services should migrate to the cloud and which should stay in-house. Create a hybrid environment that is the best of two worlds.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
June 29th, 2011
A recent survey of 1,800 small independent businesses revealed that 71% of small business owners had never heard of cloud computing.
The SB Authority Market Sentiment Survey was commissioned by Newtek Business Services as a monthly view into the concerns of independent business owners. It presented four questions covering cloud computing and security. It went on to show that of the 29% of those questioned who had heard of cloud computing, 74% could not describe just what cloud computing is.
The Small Business Authority CEO, Barry Sloane, commented on the results, stating that “Cloud computing will be the next important trend in the U.S. economy for businesses large and small…and (we) discovered that the concept of cloud computing has begun to disseminate into the marketplace.” He named cost control, data security, data protection, accessibility, efficiency and productivity as areas of great proficiency that small business needs to take advantage of in order to profit from this new business model.
In addition to the two questions regarding cloud computing, 78% thought their data was secure and yet 71% said their data was not backed up offsite. So when a disaster strikes, as the proliferation of extreme weather and computer hackers point to as a more likely scenario in the last few years, how are small businesses to recover?
Cloud Business Review points to the need for small business owners to learn more about the various cloud hosting opportunities as more and more companies offer a broad range of services. The business site commented on the results of this survey by pointing out that many small businesses need to do their due diligence when investigating cloud computing options and should be prepared to hire a cloud-savvy tech consultant. Reading up on reviews for cloud solutions you are interested in and discussing them with your IT team were among the suggestions made to small business owners who are looking to grow by moving onto the cloud. The most important point is to be informed.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
June 21st, 2011
With the rapid growth of Cloud Computing, particularly Cloud Hosting, many web designers and developers are finding a need to rethink their processes. The potential for it is huge, but so is the potential for misguided solutions. Let’s look at how Cloud Hosting, a subject we are very familiar with, is affecting how web designers and developers work.
For many developers, the lure of the cloud for web hosting is the potential for freeing them from the time and expense of managing physical hardware, leaving them more time for their real passion, the actual development of sites. The ability to scale up while in the development phase, especially when memory for resource heavy applications are needed, and then scaling down just as quickly at the end of the project is a wonderful tool for any developer.
For many web designers, cloud hosting’s ability to deal with traffic spikes, especially in this age of special promotions on social network sites such as Facebook or Twitter, make it an ideal environment. Traffic spikes that result in crashed sites make any designer’s life a nightmare. Many ecommerce sites are considering the move to cloud hosting as such promotions become more prevalent.
When you couple this flexibility with the cost control for a designer or developer when it hosts for their client sites, a certain inevitable conclusion begins to appear. A developer or designer that hosts the sites for its clients as well can enjoy the added benefits of a more easily controlled IT budget by not being tied to the cost of physical servers added to control traffic spikes. For many web developers and designers, the concept of public cloud hosting couldn’t have come at a better time.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
June 15th, 2011
GMO Cloud K.K. brings its experience as the number one hosting company in Japan to the US with the announcement of GMO Cloud America, its cloud hosting entry in the American market.
Cloud Hosting can offer a more cost-effective solution to hosting needs than traditional VPS or dedicated servers. Customers can design their own servers based on CPU, RAM, Hard Drive and Port Speed resource selection according to their individual or business needs.
The company’s three pre-defined packages, GMO10, GMO20 and GMO30, are being offered at a significantly low introductory price for the first six months following launch. Its basic plan, GMO10, is offered at absolutely no charge during this period.
Of course, with new technology comes a learning curve for everyone. That is why we have created the Think Cloud blog, to share the journey with you our fellow cloud innovators. Join us here daily as we bring you the latest and greatest in Cloud Computing and Cloud Hosting technology from around the world.
Our newsletters and blogs are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. We invite you to engage in our online community by following us on Twitter @GMOCloud and ‘Liking’ us on Facebook.
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