Broadband Developments

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced it has acquired Q-layer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds. The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, will become part of Sun’s Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

This is an interesting announcement because cloud computing is very “cloudy” in that it’s very ‘hot’ right now but there are some major security and reliabiity issues with cloud computing.  Just this week Amazon crashed my server on a project and we lost all of our code - we have backup but the hassle factor is high.  Cloud Computing is not ready for primetime so I’m interested in finding out how this annoucement might cause some “needed” SUN to shine in this cloud computing area.

Here is more info on the SUN acquisition.  The Q-layer technology simplifies cloud management and allows users to quickly provision and deploy applications, a key component in Sun’s strategy to enable building public and private clouds. As businesses continue to rely more on technology to drive mission-critical processes, the agility of the datacenter determines the flexibility of the entire company. The Q-layer software supports instant provisioning of services such as servers, storage, bandwidth and applications, enabling users to scale their own environments to meet their specific requirements.

“Sun’s open, network-centric approach coupled with optimized systems, software and services provides the critical building blocks for private and public cloud offerings,” said David Douglas, senior vice president of Cloud Computing and chief sustainability officer, Sun Microsystems. “Q-layer’s technology and expertise will enhance Sun’s offerings, simplifying cloud management and speeding application deployment.”

Cloud computing brings compute and data resources onto the Web and offers higher efficiency, massive scalability and faster and easier software development. Sun is an ideal advisor and partner for companies that want to build cloud computing facilities within their organizations, and for companies and service providers that want to build publicly available cloud computing services. Sun has the open technology, expertise and vision to help companies build, run and use their own clouds. For more information on Sun’s cloud computing strategy, please visit: http://sun.com/cloud.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed as the transaction is not material to Sun.

The CTO of Amazon is blogging the new service from Amazon called CloudFront. I love this approach for obvious reasons but the question remains about reliability and security. In talking to Mendal Rosenblum this past weekend he and I both agreed that many are afraid of pushing information in the cloud. Mendal is the leader in pushing large scale computing and his observations ring true for many corporate enterprises. No doubt Amazon is great for startups but the open question remains for reliability and security.

When those two issues are lock solid then the era of cloud computing will be mainstream.

Here is the information on Amazon CloudFront.

Hello Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.

Amazon CloudFront will be useful for many different application scenarios such as giving your customers low-latency access to popular objects and protecting your site from popularity surges; other popular examples are low-cost delivery of rich media and sustainable fast transfer rates for software distributions.

See also the posting on the AWS Developer weblog and at Rightscale.

Amazon has seen success with the scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness of Amazon S3 and now with the integration with Amazon EC2 it is easy to distribute Amazon S3 content world-wide. The combination of the two services is really powerful: Amazon S3 will give you durable storage of your data, and the network of edge locations on three continents used by the Amazon CloudFront will deliver the content with low latency from the most appropriate location.

The network of edge locations

To ensure low-latency delivery, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide:

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Simplicity

Because Amazon CloudFront follows the core principles of all Amazon Web Services it is a unique content delivery service. The simplicity in getting started has been described by many of our early customers as a very important feature.

Using Amazon CloudFront is dead simple:

1. Put your objects in an Amazon S3 bucket.
2. Call the CreateDistribution API with the name of the S3 bucket, which will return your distribution’s domain name.
3. Use the new domain name in urls on your web or in your application. Whenever these urls are accessed CloudFront will determine the optimal edge location from where to serve your content.

The second Amazon Web Services principle that sets Amazon CloudFront apart is that no upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. There are no upfront fees or high volume requirements and no negotiations are necessary because we have published low prices from the start. This brings content delivery in the hands of all businesses, and you can exploit the benefits of Amazon’s world-wide network of edge locations, regardless of whether you are a highly popular website, a small blog, a complex enterprise application or a developer doing some prototyping.

A core distributed systems component

It is not uncommon to think about a service for content delivery such as Amazon CloudFront only in the context of media distribution for web sites, but it actually plays a more fundamental role.

There are two main technology components to such a service; the first is intelligent request routing, which routes requests to the location that can best serve the user given a series of requirements and the status of the network. The second technology component is that of object caching, which is a fundamental building block in both operating systems and in distributed systems.

Caching is an essential technique that is used to make sure that components can operate at the fastest speed possible, to overcome the performance differences that exist in systems. For example CPU’s have caches that are much faster than memory, memory works as caches for disks, local disks can function as caches for remote disks, etc.

In distributed systems caching is primarily used to provide fast access to popular objects that are located in remote storage servers. These systems of caching servers often cooperate to create massive aggregate world-wide capacity to provide low latency access. And by using globally decentralized cache servers for distribution, very high data transfer speed can be achieved.

Caching technology has long been the center piece of computer systems research and in Amazon CloudFront we use the type of highly advanced algorithms for reliability and scale that you have come to expect from our Amazon services.

I am waiting for the enterprise keynote on Cloud The Apps.

By Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don’t happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.1

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn’t the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we’ve learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

Thanks to Mike Arrington at Techcrunch I  found this gem of an email. Arrington sees it as a software message.  I see it a bit different. Is it me or is Microsoft absolutely is moving it’s army.  We are seeing a massive movement of all their troops since the failed Yahoo takeover.  Great earnings and activity in every sector.  They could fire multiple warheads at little or no warning on any market - take your pick.

It’s clear to me that Microsoft is rolling again.  Balmer and team are focused.  As a blogger I still get no response from anyone from Microsoft for outreach or coverage.

Anyway enough ranting here is Balmer’s memo to the troops.

—–Original Message—–
From: Steve Ballmer [mailto:sballmer@microsoft.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:37 PM
To:
Subject: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution

During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It’s a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It’s a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It’s a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.

Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. “Cloud computing” that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive datacenters is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.

Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.

What’s missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn’t bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can’t we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn’t all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can’t we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?

This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond-to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us.

A NEW PLATFORM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

At PDC, we announced the availability of an early preview release of a new technology called Windows Azure. Windows Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone. For the first time, we shared pre-beta code for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows 7, which is the next version of the Windows desktop operating system, will take advantage of software and hardware advances to help eliminate the boundaries between information, people, and devices.

We also previewed Office Web applications, which are light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are designed to be accessed through a browser. Office Web applications will be part of the next version of Office and will enable people to view, edit, and share information and collaborate on documents on the desktop, the phone, and in a Web browser in a way that is consistent and familiar.

Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services that reside in Microsoft’s network of datacenters. Using the Azure Services Platform, developers will be able to build applications that run in the cloud and extend existing applications to take advantage of cloud-based capabilities. The Azure Services Platform provides the foundation for business and consumer applications that deliver a consistent way for people to store and share information easily and securely in the cloud, and access it on any device from any location.

Windows Azure is not software that companies will run on their own servers. It’s something new: a service that runs in Microsoft’s growing network of datacenters and provides the platform that helps companies respond to the realities of today’s business environment, and tomorrow’s. Windows Azure technologies are already finding their way into products such as Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling organizations and Microsoft partners to create their own cloud infrastructure.

Windows Azure will enable organizations to respond to realities such as the need to use the Web to provide customers with comprehensive information and to interact with an audience that has the potential to expand exponentially overnight; to integrate operations with partners-and sometimes even competitors-to meet customer needs; to add new capabilities quickly to respond to new opportunities; and to enable employees to work efficiently and effectively no matter where they are. These realities apply not just to businesses, but to organizations of all kinds: schools, governments, community groups, and more.

Traditional approaches to building technology infrastructure and delivering computing capabilities make it difficult and expensive to adjust to these realities. You need systems with enough capacity to meet the highest possible demand-capacity that includes servers and buildings to house them, the power to run them, and the people to manage them. You have to spread that capacity across locations so there’s a backup if one part fails. You have to solve issues like access for different types of users and compliance with tax regulations in all countries where your customers reside.

Designed specifically to meet the global scale that today’s organizations require, the Azure Services Platform will provide fundamentally new ways to deploy services and capabilities. It gives businesses the option to take advantage of the capacity available in the cloud as it is needed, reducing the need to make large upfront investments in infrastructure simply to be ready when demand spikes. It will enable developers to create applications that run in the cloud and provide the features, information, and interactivity that employees, partners, and customers expect-no matter how many of them there are, where they are in the world, or what device they have at hand.

SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES AND THE POWER OF CHOICE

The Azure Services Platform reflects our belief that choice is critical for developers, companies, and consumers. It is also based on our belief that the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web-an approach we call “software plus services.”

Our software plus services approach lets people take full advantage of the incredible power of today’s devices. While there are undeniable benefits to being able to tap into the wealth of information and services that can be accessed over the Web through a browser, the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors.

The richness of these experiences will only increase as multicore processors expand the computing capabilities of our devices and new programming languages open the door to a new generation of applications that let us use more natural ways to interact with digital technology such as voice, touch, and gestures.

Software plus services also recognizes that for most companies, the ideal way to build IT infrastructure is to find the right balance of applications that are run and managed within the organization and applications that are run and managed in the cloud.

This balance varies by company. A financial services company may choose to maintain customer records within its own datacenter to provide the extra layers of protection that it feels are needed to safeguard the privacy of personal information. It may outsource IT systems that provide basic capabilities such as email.

This balance will change over time within an organization, as well. A company may run its own online transaction system most of the year, but outsource for added capacity to meet extra demand during the holiday season. With software plus services, an organization can move applications back and forth between its own servers and the cloud quickly and smoothly.

Today, companies around the world are implementing Microsoft technologies to take advantage of the best combination of on-premise software and cloud-based services. Using Microsoft Online Services, businesses including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer access and manage Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and Live Meeting over the Web through a single, secure infrastructure. In addition, 1 million people rely on Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating with friends, family, and colleagues.

EXPANDING THE DEFINITION OF PERSONAL COMPUTING

Ultimately, the reason to create a cloud services platform is to continue to enhance the value that computing delivers, whether it’s by improving productivity, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, or simplifying the way we access information and respond to changing business conditions.

In the world of software plus services and cloud computing, this means extending the definition of personal computing beyond the PC to include the Web and an ever-growing array of devices. Our goal is to make the combination of PCs, mobile devices, and the Web something that is significantly than more the sum of its parts.

The starting point is to recognize the unique value of each part. The value of the PC lies in its computing power, its storage capacity, and its ability to help us be more productive and create and consume rich and complex documents and content.

For the Web, it’s the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

With the mobile phone and other devices, it’s the ability to take action spontaneously-to make a call, take a picture, or send a text message in the flow of our activities.

Through Live Mesh-a service from Microsoft that we announced earlier this year and about which we shared new information week-we’re beginning to bridge the PC, phone, and Web and create this next generation of connected experiences. Built on the Azure Services Platform, Live Mesh enables you to use programs and information stored on your work computer from your home PC, and vice versa. With Live Mesh, you can share folders and ensure that the information is automatically synchronized across your devices.

Live Mesh hints at how our lives will be transformed as the barriers between devices disappear and the option to connect instantly to people, devices, programs, and information becomes a reality.

We’re not quite there yet. Today, the Azure Services Platform is available only as a limited technology preview release. But as developers begin to combine the capabilities of this new platform with the amazing ongoing hardware and software innovations that we are seeing from companies across the industry, it will bring us significantly closer to the time when information, communication, and computing flows along with us seamlessly as we move through our day-to-day activities.

You can learn more about these technologies and the progress we are making by visiting the Microsoft Software + Services Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/.

I look forward to sharing more information with you about these new technologies in the near future.

Steve Ballmer

Recession = Innovation; George Colony over at Forrester is saying it will be different, but people are still freaking out in Silicon Valley. I just got off the phone with someone in NY and they are freaking out all over the place in the Big Apple.  I’m not afraid of this market and other entrepreneurs are doing stuff as well. Entrepreneurs are blind to the recession but it doesn’t matter they don’t have the money only the ideas.  It will be a tough road ahead.

I think it is only a matter of time before ALL of the leading networking players start talking about the (strategic importance of the) network as a way to succeed in an uncertain economic climate. Last week, in “Cloud Computing, Virtualization and IT Diseconomies” I talked about the increasingly intense pressures already building on static network infrastructure, and the underlying need for more intelligence and automation.

These intense pressures are setting the stage for the next technology boom, by creating gaps between what networks can do today and what they’ll need to do tomorrow. I was amazed at how quickly the concept of Infrastructure2.0 spread, including an interesting discussion at F5 Network’s pace-setting DevCentral blog.

These pressures are coming from increasing rates of change, especially in larger networks supporting more devices and branches and processes, as well as with the introduction of consolidation, virtualization and cloud computing initiatives. These new initiatives are introducing even higher rates of change and making it clear that a static network will no longer be a strategic network.

The rest of the article is here at Greg Ness’ personal blog

Thanks Greg for the deep analysis.

Cloud computing is all the rage.  We’ve been covering it here at Broadband Developments since we started this blog in June 2008.  Just search on Cloud here on the blog for all the blog posts.

Microsoft announces Azure - here is Mary Jo’s post.

Am I bullish on Microsoft with the cloud?  No not really.  I’m confused is this part of their Unified Communications or Online plans?  I’m neutral because I think that Microsoft could do some compelling things if they can just get the formula right.  I will start covering this.  In the past stuff from Microsoft has been a big yawn.

Today, during a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 (PDC2008), Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp.’s chief software architect, announced Windows Azure, the cloud-based service foundation underlying its Azure Services Platform, and highlighted this platform’s role in delivering a software plus services approach to computing. The Azure Services Platform is an industry-leading move by Microsoft to help developers build the next generation of applications that will span from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.

Ozzie described how this platform combines cloud-based developer capabilities with storage, computational and networking infrastructure services, all hosted on servers operating within Microsoft’s global datacenter network. This provides developers with the ability to deploy applications in the cloud or on-premises and enables experiences across a broad range of business and consumer scenarios. A limited community technology preview (CTP) of the Azure Services Platform was initially made available to developers in attendance at PDC2008, giving them a chance to try out its features and functions and plan for their own future development.

“Today marks a turning point for Microsoft and the development community,” Ozzie said. “We have introduced a game-changing set of technologies that will bring new opportunities to Web developers and business developers alike. The Azure Services Platform, built from the ground up to be consistent with Microsoft’s commitment to openness and interoperability, promises to transform the way businesses operate and how consumers access their information and experience the Web. Most important, it gives our customers the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based Internet services or through on-premises servers, or to combine them in any way that makes the most sense for the needs of their business.”

Empowering Cloud Development With the Azure Services Platform

Unlike many of today’s service-based solutions, the Azure Services Platform provides developers with the flexibility and ability to create applications while taking advantage of their existing skills, tools and technologies such as the Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio. Developers also can choose from a broad range of commercial or open source development tools and technologies, and access the Azure Services Platform using a variety of common Internet standards including HTTP, representational state transfer (REST), WS-* and Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub).

Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following:

State-of-the-Art Datacenter Infrastructure

During the keynote, Ozzie said of Windows Azure, “It’s designed to be the foundation, to be the bedrock, underneath all of Microsoft’s service offerings for consumers and business alike.” Los Angeles, Oct. 27, 2008. Click for high-res version.

Microsoft also described the importance of building robust datacenters in delivering online services. Over the past year, Microsoft has opened major datacenters in Quincy, Wash., and San Antonio, with additional centers scheduled to open in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland. Microsoft is leading the way in services infrastructure with innovative use of shipping containers as flexible and portable housing for servers, providing 10 times the density and dramatic savings in power usage. Supporting the Microsoft software plus services strategy, Microsoft’s datacenters serve up e-mail accounts, Web pages, instant messages, photos, videos, software programs and search information to millions of Internet customers worldwide.

Cut Costs and Unlock Innovation

Services technologies, when employed alongside other core technology enablers such as virtualization and modeling, will result in dramatic benefits for customers’ IT departments. Specifically, these technologies will enable a new and more dynamic world, where IT departments can drive down operating costs, focus their spending on systems that differentiate the business, and ultimately enable IT to become a more strategic asset.

“Only a few companies in the world can bring the promise of cloud computing to reality, and we are excited about the strong capabilities of the Azure Services Platform,” said Paul Farrell, senior vice president of research and development for Epicor Software Corp. “We believe that Microsoft’s initiative and leadership in software plus services will be beneficial to Epicor customers as we architect our solutions to optimize for cloud and on-premises solutions.”

Broadband Developments blogger Greg Ness writes a guest post on Seeking Alpha today that basically asks the question:  Can cloud computing be as disruptive to changing the game as TCP/IP was?

TCP/IP fueld a entire generation of great companies as well as creating massive wealth for investors, entrepreneurs, and employees.

It’s a long article so bookmark it or take it to go with you.  It’s a good read.

Some higlights that I like…

We’ve seen this collision between new software demands and network infrastructure many times before, as it has powered generations of innovation around TCP/IP, network security and traffic management and optimization.

It has produced a lineup of successful public companies well positioned to lead the next tech boom, which may even be recession-proof.  Cisco (CSCO), F5 Networks (FFIV), Riverbed (RVBD) and even VMware (VMW) promise to benefit from this new infrastructure and the level of connectivity intelligence it promises.

Until the current network evolves into a more dynamic infrastructure, all bets are off on the payoffs of pretty much every major IT initiative on the horizon today, including cost-cutting measures that would be employed in order to shrink operating costs without shrinking the network.

Automation and control has been both a key driver and a barrier for the adoption of new technology as well as an enterprise’s ability to monetize past investments.  Increasingly complex networks are requiring escalating rates of manual intervention.  This dynamic will have more impact on IT spending over the next five years than the global recession, because automation is often the best answer to the productivity and expense challenge.

Cloud computing is dynamic computing power on a massive scale delivering new economies for IT services and applications.  In between those economies and the prices existing enterprises are already paying for their own services is the business case, in addition to operations, sales, marketing, and new infrastructure requirements.

As much as cloud computing has rallied behind the prospect of electricity and real estate savings, the business case still feels like a dotcom hangover in some cases.  Virtualization is still a bit hamstrung in the enterprise by the disconnect between static infrastructure and moving, state-changing VMs; and labor is the largest cost component of server TCO (IDC findings) and a significant component of network TCO (as suggested by the Computerworld findings).  So just how much will real estate and electricity savings offset other diseconomies and barriers in the cloud game?  I think cloud computing will also have to innovate in areas like automation and connectivity intelligence.

For the network to be dynamic, for example, it needs continuous, dynamic connectivity at the core network services level.  Network, endpoint and application intelligence will all depend upon connectivity intelligence in order to evolve into dynamic, automated systems that don’t require escalating manual intervention in the face of network expansion and rising system and endpoint demands.

All eys are on Amazon today.  This is great news for web services in the cloud.  The Infrastructure 2.0 model is moving fast.  More on this story as it develops.  Can’t help but get excited.   I love the speed of provisioning on Amazons services but I’m very skeptical on it’s scale and reliability.  This is a classic cost of ownership issue - downtime has been a problem and that costs money folks.  Putting that aside I’m very bullish on the innovation for Amazon and their ecosystem of vendors to apporach close to 5-9s fast.

Keep running fast Amazon… Here’s what’s happening today:

• Amazon EC2 is now in full production. The beta label is gone.
• There’s now an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for EC2.
• Microsoft Windows is now available in beta form on EC2.
• Microsoft SQL Server is now available in beta form on EC2.
• We plan to release an interactive AWS management console.
• We plan to release new load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

.  j

PCWorld is reporting that the latest IDC research is showing that in a recession people will be using cloud services. I can believe this data. It is often talked about that music, entertainment, booze, drugs, all vices are recession proof. Basically anything that has a high yield of low cost high performance. Reminds me of that song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds (LSD) - Cloud computing will grow this recession.

The current economic crisis in the U.S. may have a silver lining for IT companies that invest in cloud computing, as it will contribute to significant growth in that sector over the next five years, according to research firm IDC.

Based on a survey of IT executives, CIOs and other business leaders, IDC said Monday that it expects spending on IT cloud services to reach US$42 billion by 2012, a growth of threefold that will in part be bolstered by the current economic crisis that began in the U.S. and is spreading around the world.

IDC differentiates between cloud services and cloud computing, but is reporting sharp growth in both areas. The research firm defines cloud services as both business and consumer services that people use over the Internet and cloud computing as an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model that enables real-time delivery of products and services over the Internet.

Spending on cloud computing will capture 25 percent of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth in 2013, IDC predicts.

Moreover, by 2012 almost 10 percent of customer spending on IT will be on cloud offerings, including software as a service and cloud storage, Gens said in video about the report posted to the IDC Web site.

While the definition for cloud services does include what people typically think of as Web-based services from Google, Amazon.com and eBay, among others, the segment also includes any Web-based services that other companies will offer to make engagement with customers and partners easier, according to Frank Gens of IDC.