Virtualization is a term that has exploded into the public consciousness over the past few years. Though the promise of the necessary technology has existed for decades, only now can consumers and businesses take full advantage of virtualized storage solutions. Companies that must save massive amounts of data are looking for ways to store the …
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Colo and Cloud spent some time with Toph Whitmore, and asked about ActiveState’s Stackato PaaS. How did Stackato come about? ActiveState has been making products focused on solving developers’ needs for 15 years. Developers told us that it was too difficult to develop, deploy, and manage cloud applications — They spent far too much time …
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Flash storage has been making a comeback in tech circles lately with news of EMC’s recent acquisition of XtremIO and PureStorage’s second generation FlashArray 300-Series system. While flash storage is nothing new, since it’s been in portable flash drives, smartphones, tablets and laptops for years, it’s been sneaking its way into the enterprise and midsize …
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Platform as a Service (Paas), along with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (Saas), make up the three primary service models of cloud computing. Although each serve an equally vital role in the overall cloud model, this article will focus on what Paas is, as well as a brief overview of …
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Configuration systems play an important role in cloud management and automation. We’ve compared Func, MCollective, Salt and RunDeck, and we’ve had a great interview with Salt’s author as well, a Black Duck 2011 rookie of the year. Now we’re excited to showcase another open source configuration management system called Ansible, with an interview of its …
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This editorial was contributed by Industry Thought Leader and Data Center Migration Specialist, Kenneth Jamaca. Data Center migrations are not something anyone should take for granted. A poorly planned and/or executed migration can have lasting impacts, including: unexpected downtime, interruption to revenue, and customer satisfaction losses. With corporate data centers and co-location facilities housing the …
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On January 18th, 2012 Salt was named a Black Duck 2011 Open Source Rookie of The Year. Below is an interview with Thomas Hatch, author of Salt, on January 26th, 2012. Q. What Makes Salt so interesting? Salt is gaining traction because of a few specific things, primarily the fact that it is a very …
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With a giant tech industry in Silicon Valley, and the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, millions of square feet of data center floor space have been built to service the demands for California colocation. California Colocation Hot Spots The popular places in California for colocation include metro areas such as Sacramento, San …
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Quincy, WA is the location of several giant data center facilities from industry titans such as Microsoft, Intuit, Vantage Data Centers, Yahoo!, Sabey, and Dell. There is around 2,308,000 sq. ft. of data center facility space (including current projects and additional phase build-outs). Not bad for an area predominantly known for it’s U.S. leading potato …
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Colocation is a mess of a word. It’s also the most common term used to describe outsourcing a company’s IT infrastructure to a data center facility, e.g. “I’d like to get a quote for colocation at your data center facility”. Every now and then, I get emails from people who simply guess at the spelling …
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Remote execution is an often underestimated component of cloud computing. Some compare it to the foundation of a building that easily gets looked over, but facilitates the construction of the edifice placed on top. The goal of a remote execution system is to have a means to execute commands on large numbers of desktops/servers without …
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Data centers are adapting to the requirements around them with creative solutions to security, technology and efficiency. Let’s take a quick look at a sample of ten interesting data center implementations from around the world. Sci-fi Themeing 1. Bahnhof’s Pionen made the list for having a James Bond / Silent Running data center theme. The …
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The cloud as a whole is very complex, with several open source projects taking on its various aspects. In general we can break down the cloud complexities to a few core components: 1. Virtualization 2. Network Services 3. Configuration Management 4. Storage 5. Monitoring 6. Communication / remote execution Each of these components are used …
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Most people have heard of Openstack, the cloud platform built by Rackspace and NASA. XCP and KVM are other popular open source platforms. But beyond the first two or three common open source platforms, it is difficult to name others. So here’s a little list of well know and not-so well known open-source cloud platforms …
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Do you remember the crazy supercomputer in Superman III that was so smart that it could transform a human into a robot, but didn’t understand that it needed a disaster recovery plan? What about the Tron Legacy Encom tower server room that makes poor use of space? It’s always fun to see how impractical movie …
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You’ve heard of “server huggers” right? They’re the IT personality type that has a difficult time feeling comfortable with colocating their servers to a remote data center, opting to have the servers on-site or in a local data center facility. Well, so in 2008, the popular tech site GigaOM.com wrote an interesting article on the …
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