utility computing

Terremark Completes Infinistructure Deployment

August 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Terremark Worldwide today announced the completed deployment of the Infinistructure utility-computing platform at its facilities in Madrid and Amsterdam. The platform will benefit Terremark’s European and American customers and has been met with high demand from current customers and prospects.

Infinistructure’s server and storage infrastructure combines Terremark’s proprietary service-management platform with virtualization technology from partners including VMWare, Cisco, and IBM, providing a highly scalable and flexible high-performance computing platform.

Infinistructure’s on-demand network, storage and computing architecture allows customers to precisely match their infrastructure to their business needs, while leveraging a fully managed solution with plug-and-play access to network connectivity from multiple carriers. The Infinistructure platform is connected to the ESpanix exchange point in Spain and the AMS-IX exchange point in The Netherlands, the largest internet connection point in Europe with over 400 Gb/s in peak traffic.

terremark

Hyperic Launches CloudStatus, Cloud Management Software Deluxe

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 3 Comments

In an impressive effort to make the cloud more transparent, open source cloud management software vendor Hyperic has launched CloudStatus.com, a web service (in beta) that lets a user peek in on the various compute clouds to see how things are running.

CloudStatus measures service availability, latency and throughput for cloud-based infrastructure and application services. The initial release provides metrics for Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (which runs on the Xen hypervisor), Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service and Flexible Payment Service. Hyperic does so by sending a software agent to make requests against various cloud services, which obviously leads to a few questions about the viability of the service.

As Stacey Higginbotham puts it on GigaOm:

“It’s a decent idea, but my worry is that Amazon or another cloud provider could shut the service down, either by offering their own status service or by stopping the Hyperic agent. Given the rush to provide dashboards, application-testing products and other services on top of established computing services, I’m eager to see how startups keep their footing in the clouds.”

The Hyperic team also blogged about the release featuring a promotion video which we’re happy to share with you.

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie On Cloud & Utility Computing

March 10, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Interesting interview up on GigaOM today, featuring Microsoft‘s Chief Software Architect and industry luminary Ray Ozzie talking about MS’s strategy, the economics of cloud computing and the relevance of desktop and infrastructure challenges.

The most interesting bits:

OM: The costs of computing, hardware and bandwidth are dropping quickly. Do you believe that the cost will come down fast enough to make cloud computing actually a profitable business?

RAY OZZIE: Well, it’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom.

…

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity?

RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth.

I think all of these utility-computing services, as they’re born will either be breaking even or profitable. At the scale that we’re talking about, nobody can afford, (even Microsoft) can’t afford to do it at a loss. We could subsidize it, I suppose. Google could subsidize it by profits in other parts of their business, we could subsidize it, but I don’t think there’s any reason that any of us in this world would bring out that infrastructure like this without charging for what we’re paying, and then trying to make some profit over it. The cost base is so high in terms of building these data centers you do want to kind of make it up.

Read the rest of the (edited) interview here.