Colocation Firm Telx Names Senior Vice President for Service Provider Markets

Colocation provider Telx announced on Thursday it has named Tony Rossabi senior vice president for service provider markets, a role in which he will focus on developing solutions for the expanding service provider market.

The move comes a few months after Telx appointed industry veteran Joe Weinman its senior vice president of cloud services and strategy.

Rossabi has more than a decade of international business and product development experience within IT and telecommunications organizations.

Telx recognizes network scalability, low latency and application performance as critical components for growth in the Service Provider sector.

Telx has tasked Rossabi with forming a senior team of professionals that will drive all aspects of the Telx go-to-market strategy and key initiatives in support of this segment.

Rossabi joins Telx from Tata Communications where he served as senior vice president of global carrier solutions. In this role he was responsible for leading global carrier solutions and business development initiatives.

In addition, Rossabi held positions with WilTel (Level 3), BellSouth Long Distance, and Telnext Communications.

“Telx is consistently deepening our roster of talented individuals to increase our ability to provide customers with excellent service and strategic direction,” said Eric Shepcaro, CEO for Telx. “Tony’s leadership experience building winning teams and driving business development on a global scale will further distinguish Telx as an industry leader. It is crucial for Telx to continue to deepen our expertise in the Service Provider segment and adding an industry veteran such as Tony to our team certainly is a strong push in this direction.”

Telx provides interconnection and data center services in strategic, high-demand North American markets.

The company owns and operates 17 C3 Cloud Connection Centers that server more than 1,000 customers, including leading telecommunications carriers, ISPs, cloud providers, content providers and enterprises.

Telx is a privately held company headquartered in New York City with five facilities in the New York Metro area, two facilities in Chicago, two facilities in Dallas, four facilities in California, (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and two in Santa Clara) and facilities in Atlanta, Miami, Phoenix and Charlotte, N.C.

Talk back: Have you ever formed a partnership through a platform such as the Telx Marketplace? Do you think such a partnership would benefit your hosting business? Let us know your thoughts in a comment.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/colocation-firm-telx-names-senior-vice-president-for-service-provider-markets

Internal Politics May Have Kept Microsoft From Dealing Amazon A Serious Blow

Microsoft's latest Windows operating system for enterprise servers launched yesterday and should sell well.

Microsoft is calling it a cloud-friendly operating system.

But will its success cause Microsoft to win lots of new customers for its own Amazon-competitor, Azure?

Probably not, one source close to Microsoft told BI.

He says the new OS does not integrate with Windows Azure "in any concrete way."

He says internal politics kept the Windows and Azure groups from working closely together.

"So no, I don't think it'll help with Azure adoption in any way."

We asked Microsoft about new features integrated with Azure and were sent a list:

• A feature in Windows Azure let's IT folks move apps between their own data center servers and Azure more easily.
• WS 2012 and Azure can now securely communicate though a virtual private networks.
• And Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure can be managed through a single management portal.

How is Azure doing as a product? Hard to say.

Microsoft has been shy about reporting exactly how many users it has for its cloud. In May, Azure marketing exec Bob Kelly, said that Microsoft had in the "high tens of thousands" of customers for it and was "adding hundreds a day."

Microsoft may have missed a good opportunity to beef up Azure's adoption.

That's because Windows Server 2012 has been getting good reviews. It offers a lot of improvements over the previous server. Enterprises will probably move to adopt it sooner than they adopt Windows 8.

We asked Microsoft if politics between the Windows Server team and the Azure team kept them from working more closely together. This is Microsoft's response:

"Windows Server 2012 and Windows Azure are designed and developed for close integration to help customers build, manage and deliver applications across both their own datacenters and the Windows Azure public cloud, or in many cases both.  Windows Server and Windows Azure are the foundation of the Cloud OS, which offers customers common application development, virtualization, management and identity technologies that can be applied to both."

Are you a Microsoft insider with insight to share? We want to hear it! We are discreet. jbort@businessinsider.com or @Julie188 on Twitter.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/source-politics-could-be-hurting-microsofts-cloud-2012-9

Move Over, Marc Benioff: Aneel Bhusri Is King Of The Cloud

Workday, on the cusp of a highly anticipated IPO, will be giving a big boost to another hot up-and-coming cloud startup: Okta.

The two cloud companies announced on Wednesday that they are deepening their partnership.

Okta's service—itself delivered through the cloud—lets enterprise companies manage the security of all of their cloud services.

Workday offers cloud-based human resources apps.

So the Okta-Workday deal lets Workday offer its customers enhanced security, while Okta gets access to Workday's large customer base.

In the middle of it all is Aneel Bhusri.

Bhusri is an investor in Okta and sits on its board. He's also cofounder of Workday.

Okta was founded by Todd McKinnon, who learned the ropes from Marc Benioff as an early employee at Salesforce.com. While Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff gave birth to the software-as-a-service phenom, Bhusri has quietly built an empire of some of the most successful next-gen SaaS companies around.

In addition to Workday and Okta, look at these others that Bhusri invested in:

ServiceNow: In a season of great enterprise IPOs, ServiceNow's June stock-market debut stood out, earning the company a whopping $3.5 billion valuation. It was the first company to go public after Facebook.

Cloudera: Arguably the biggest of the Hadoop startups, founded by ex-Yahoo bigwigs. Cloudera was the one that snared Hadoop creator Doug Cutting away from Yahoo—even though Yahoo has its own Hadoop spin-out, Hortonworks.

Zuora: A hot cloud service that does invoicing and billing. It was founded by another early Salesforce.com alum, Tien Tzuo, with Benioff's blessing (and some of his money).

Pure Storage: Pure Storage makes enterprise storage systems entirely out of flash memory. It's lead by ex-Yahoo exec Scott Dietzen, a cofounder of Zimbra (bought by Yahoo for $350 million in cash in 2007). Dietzen is also a board member for Cloudera.

Tidemark: A younger cloud startup that only came out of stealth mode about a year ago, but with some power behind it. It was founded by ex-SAP exec Christian Gheorghe and last month landed Phil Wilmington as its COO.  Wilmington had been co-president at PeopleSoft until it was acquired by Oracle. Gheorghe and Wilmington had run a previous startup together, OutlookSoft acquired by SAP in 2007. 

Wilmington and Bhusri are former coworkers, too. In what has become tech industry legend, Bhusri started his tech career in the early 1990s at PeopleSoft, working his way up to vice chairman. He and PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield unsuccessfully tried to save PeopleSoft from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's hostile takeover.

But now, Bhusri could be having the last laugh. Between his successful cloud startups, Oracle is threatened, as is SAP, another software giant PeopleSoft competed with.

Both are spending billions of dollars on cloud startups to catch up with the likes of Workday.

Some of that money may land in Bhusri's pockets. So he's set to win either way.

It's good to be king of the cloud.

Don't miss: The Next 25 Big Enterprise Startups 

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/aneel-bhusri-workday-cloud-computing-2012-9

Cloud Spectator Study Finds Internal Network Stability Crucial to Overall Cloud Performance

PEER 1 Hosting‘s cloud division Zunicore outperforms Amazon EC2 in terms of the stability of its internal cloud network, according to a report released last week by cloud consulting firm Cloud Spectator.

While CPU performance is around the same area between Zunicore and Amazon EC2, Cloud Spectator sees a drastic difference in their respective internal network performance. Cloud Spectator says the actual speed of a VPN is crucial to a customer’s cloud IaaS purchase decision.

It is worth mentioning that Cloud Spectator was not paid to write this report, which is a common practice among research that compares two competing services. As prospective customers look for cloud options for their business, they may consult third-party, independent studies to help inform their purchasing decision. With this in mind, it is a good idea to keep informed about the different performance studies available to end-customers, as well as the methodology behind them.

“When multi-server applications must maintain a stream of communication, the bottleneck that may occur in a network inside the VPN is a major consideration, and that performance must be reliable for complex and mission-critical applications running on the cloud,” Cloud Spectator writes in its report. “An application that must constantly read and write data from one or many servers depends on the speed of the internal network.”

CloudSpecs Performance Test System is a software suite of open-source, industry-standard server performance tests that can be replicated 4 times a day, 365 days a year. For this test, Cloud Spectator averaged performance over 30 days between July 30, 2012 and August 29, 2012.

“Apart from the fact that Zunicore outperforms Amazon in every one of our CloudSpecs performance measurements gauging the performance of the internal networks, the idea that Amazon’s network performance fluctuates so drastically over time should fire up a red flag. Other notable performers with steady network performance that we have measured include Rackspace and Hosting.com,” Cloud Spectator writes.

Reports such as this one also make a case for customers choosing a different cloud provider over Amazon. In a recent feature on the WHIR, SoftLayer explained how it wins cloud customers from Amazon.

The data Cloud Spectator collects through its testing process is used to measure the value and performance of different cloud providers. The full test results and methodology are explained in detail on its blog.

In July, the WHIR hosted a webinar with Cloud Spectator analysts and OnApp CMO Kosten Metreweli where OpenStack Essex was compared to OnApp Cloud. The archived webinar is available for viewing at the WHIR.

Talk back: How does performance of your cloud stack up? Do you think customers will be more aware of internal network performance with reports like these? Let us know in a comment.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services
2. The Open Group Publishes Standards for SOA and Cloud Computing

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-spectator-study-finds-internal-network-stability-crucial-to-overall-cloud-performance

Cloud traps: How to avoid them

Moving to the cloud is still a big challenge for many companies. For all its potential benefits - cost optimizations, greater reliability, improved scalability, easier access to computing resources - there are equally valid concerns that keep companies from making this move: security issues still plague several cloud solutions, the track record of vendors in achieving the promised SLAs has been less than stellar, and others. Deciding to make the move is only half the battle, though.

Even if they manage to properly address all the concerns related to the cloud, or to find use cases where these concerns aren’t as important, companies may still be hard pressed to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. This is a direct result of two cognitive traps: the trap of ownership and the trap of past successes.

The ownership trap

People are hardwired to value the things they own, and to have a hard time letting go of things once they have developed a sense of ownership (even if it isn’t real). In the cloud, this translates to users developing a sense of ownership over their cloud servers, turning resources which should have been hired on a pay-as-you-go basis into “dedicated virtual servers” for which people are paying hundreds of dollars every month. In the end, this developed sense of ownership creates a reluctance to shut down existing servers, leading to the elimination of any kind of cost optimizations that could be derived from a cloud model.

This is what I call the ownership trap. Instead of using the utility computing model that the cloud enables, companies end up having several underused virtual servers on-line, replicating the inefficiencies of a conventional data center at a much higher cost. And several vendors encourage this, offering “special” monthly prices that guarantee the full availability of the requested resource. If the monthly price is 50% of what you would pay to keep that server online the whole month on a pay-as-you-go model, but you only actually use that server for 10% of the month, you are still overpaying by a large margin.

The only way to beat this trap is by learning to let go. It’s not that companies shouldn’t own any servers, but rather that they can skip purchasing servers to handle peak demand, and rely instead on temporary servers that can be quickly brought online and then later shut down. The same goes for test servers: for most companies, there is no real need to keep a test server online 24×7. It can be spun up, used, and then have an image saved and shut down. This is what leads to cost optimizations.

The trap of past successes

One of the top methods people use to solve problems is by similarity: they’ll look to the past to find problems that are similar to the ones they are facing, and apply the same solutions used before. This usually works, but in the case of the cloud, it can lead to big trouble. As developers got used to the client-server computing model, system architectures based on centralization (of data, of access control, and of other elements) became widespread, mainly because it worked.

A cloud environment, however, is closer to a distributed system than a centralized one, and therefore solutions based on centralization don’t perform very well. A centralized data store, for instance, can create a single point of failure for applications, reducing the reliability. At the same time, it can create a performance bottleneck that restricts the possibility of horizontal scalability. As scalability and reliability are two of the promises of cloud-based systems, employing centralized solutions can quickly destroy these benefits.

To escape this trap, developers in particular need to recognize that cloud systems need to be designed and developed differently from conventional ones. Once we understand that the shift in computing paradigms leads to the need for new architectures and development techniques, it becomes plain that what worked before may well not work again.

Finding the right mentality

Escaping these traps is no easy feat. I’ve been working with cloud-based systems for over two years now, and every now and then I still catch myself falling into them. It requires constant attention and a sort of “reeducation” of IT professionals from all areas. At the same time, it is essential to achieving the full potential of cloud solutions.

I don’t mean that the other concerns about the cloud aren’t important. They are and, in most cases, they will actually determine if a move to the cloud is feasible or not. The right mindset, however, is necessary to keep companies from perceiving their cloud efforts as major failures.

Source : http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/cloud-traps-how-to-avoid-them/5775

Cloud Host ElasticHosts Offers SSDs at All Server Instance Sizes

Cloud hosting provider ElasticHosts announced on Wednesday that it has improved its user interface, as well as introduced Solid State Drives at all server instance sizes.

Customers with high I/O applications and heavy databases will be able to provision SSDs to offer a higher level of performance. SSDs allow data to be accessed up to 250 times faster than standard hard disk drives, according to ElasticHosts.

Previously, ElasticHosts only offered cloud servers backed by traditional hard disk drives. Its new SSD options are available in its London Portsmouth zone and will roll out across its data centers in the UK, US and Canada.

Database storage and transaction processing are two examples of I/O intensive workloads that require speed and performance. More cloud providers and hosting companies are introducing SSDs to provide higher I/O rates to customers. It has become an increasingly popular technology for cloud providers to offer performance as a value-add for customers.

ElasticHosts customers can now choose to include SSDs as part of their cloud hosting package and get improved performance on a flexible, pay-as-you-go basis. SSD options are available to customers regardless of the amount of resources they use.

“We are pleased to offer the option of cloud hosting based on SSD drives to all of our customers,” Richard Davies, CEO of ElasticHosts said in a statement. “While HDDs are fine in most cases, in certain instances customers need greater performance. The SSD options will be particularly attractive to those customers looking to move high performance databases to a cloud based infrastructure-as-a-service model. As the cloud market matures, offering SSD is the next step for us. Some cloud providers have offered SSD with only their largest, most expensive server instance sizes, but we believe that all of our customers should be offered the benefits of improved computing power and greater resiliency.”

As for the updated user interface, ElasticHosts says it has simplified management of large accounts and improved response times. Advanced Ajax functionality means that customers can see changes made to their virtual servers in real time.

At the beginning of July, ElasticHosts launched its new white-label cloud program.

Talk back: Have you introduced SSDs in your cloud server offering? Why or why not? Let us know in a comment.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services
2. The Open Group Publishes Standards for SOA and Cloud Computing

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-host-elastichosts-offers-ssds-at-all-server-instance-sizes

Like it or not, it's time to get a cloud strategy

Regardless if you are for or against adopting the cloud as part of your organization’s computing infrastructure and/or as a replacement for that tired, multitenant software architecture of yours, as an IT professional or executive, you need a cloud strategy!

Do you think I sound like a snake oil salesman? Already coming up with the same old excuses as to why the cloud isn’t a viable alternative to your on-premise data center? Well, you need to start to get over that bias of yours as you can’t argue with a multi-billion dollar industry that is progressively occupying a bigger portion of the technology provider-type market share. (Need evidence of this? Just take a look at Salesforce.com’s/NYSE: CRM’s last income statement.) Additionally, if your competitors haven’t already considered an adoption strategy, they’re most likely currently in the process of migrating toward at least a hybrid approach toward cloud computing. It’s time to do your diligence and draw up a new SWOT analysis matrix, because your organization will inevitably pay more when it’s forced into the cloud years down the road, or lose business to competitors when they’re able to capitalize on your indifference.

As alluded to before, there is still quite a bit of distrust and cynicism when it comes to the cloud, especially from IT professionals who’ve gone complacent and nested themselves between power hungry server racks. I don’t mean to sound cynical myself, but the truth of the matter is that on-premise environments actually hinder an organization’s ability to scale their technology according to operational business values, or with product or service development. Furthermore, the more an organization concerns itself with the details of running IT services in house, instead of on-demand, the more stretched an already bloated IT budget will become. Not to say that formulating a cloud adoption/migration strategy can’t become problematic and expensive (especially for organization’s with legacy systems), but those who have the power to make these types of decisions need to start asking themselves how much of their IT budget is dedicated towards application development, and how much is spent on supporting the hardware and software needed to run them.

The same platitudes regarding the dependability, cost and security of cloud-based services just won’t cut it these days. If you’re an IT professional who reports to an executive and you’re throwing a barrier between cloud adoption and your firewall, or you’re an executive who usually delegates these types of decisions to “the professionals”, stop! The cloud offers a profitable way, in monetary terms, as well as in terms of the unexpected benefits an organization can achieve by adopting what is actually a more reliable and, plausibly, just as secure approach to computing.

In the coming weeks, I plan to make a concerted case for the cloud, and prove how the benefits can vastly outweigh any presumed risks. I’ll do this by discussing topics like how IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) on-demand software/platforms can bring about change in both your IT and non-IT related staff alike. Hopefully, in the end, you’ll get the sense that by formulating a well-intentioned cloud strategy, your organization will become more productive, cost-effective and capable of allocating your IT resources to scale with organizational goals.

Source : http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/like-it-or-not-its-time-to-get-a-cloud-strategy/5770