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The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest $537 million in cloud computing for 2011. That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it's not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector. According to The Nikkei and Reuters , the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore. Sponsor Fujitsu is not a name that is often thought of in terms of cloud computing. But it is one of the largest IT management services companies in the world, competing with the likes of companies such as CA and Microsoft, two providers with deep investments of their own in cloud computing. A little more insight into the investment came at the Symantec conference last week during an interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr. Joseph Reger. According to TechPulse 360, Reger said that relationships are developing, so to speak. "The IT industry and the cloud thing are in the dating stage... Dating is when you see only the bright side, the opportunities and you don't sit down and worry about what could be the issues." And like a lot of enterprise technology companies, Fujitsu is pushing for is own cloud stack for he enterprise: "It is a step away from current IT but it needs to be connected to the current IT: so private-public cloud. We're thinking about trusted boundaries, the security perimeters and so on. And we are seriously hoping that the cloud will be just another incarnation of IT, not a total different thing. Meaning that there will be a cloud stack where everybody can contribute... Because if the cloud is like an end to end proprietary big heater proposition, that's not good for us, for you [Symantec] and for our customers either." Open standards, anyone? Discuss

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Fujitsu Making $537 Million Investment in Cloud Computing

The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud. So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google's chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact. Sponsor He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact? It's a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise. In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality. In an interview with eWeek , Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS outlined their views: "....Moreover, Selipsky said what people are calling private clouds come with the following drawbacks, where the customer will: · Still own the capex...and they're very expensive (big fixed investments) · Not pay for what you use · Not have true elasticity...when groups relinquish their servers, the company still owns the datacenter space and servers...and will also find that managing this supply chain will present a dilemma...will either have to significantly overprovision which is wasteful or become really expert at managing just-in-time supply-chain so there are no long waits for servers...managing a supply chain like this is really hard and takes a lot of effort and refining and keeping the status quo of long time to market is not so appealing either · Still own the headache of managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting" And so, the debate continues. Discuss

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Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds

Microsoft revealed a bit more about its container system for data centers, giving us some pause about it as a symbol of the cloud itself. These boxes represent the future of cloud-based infrastructures for both shared and dedicated networks. Microsoft, Amazon, HP and a number of other vendors use these containers to operate cloud networks. They are becoming fully automated systems that physically represent how we are seeing a fundamental shift in how IT services are managed and deployed. Sponsor In his keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit, Executive Bob Muglia featured the company's container system used at its Chicago data center, illustrating the company's new datacenter and cloud management capabilities for mass deployment of virtualized technologies. Muglia said the new container system is 10x less expensive than traditional data center infrastructures and 10x faster, too. "Everything moves faster in the cloud,"Muglia said. The container is an independent, high-speed network optimized with virtualization technology. Muglia said every piece of the data center is tightly fit, almost bound to make one network that stores data and provides raw processing power. The news serves to represent Microsoft's ability to model and deploy applications across platforms. Microsoft owns the management tools, the developer tools, the applications, OS and the cloud platform. That's Microsoft's value statement to data center operators and the new generation of IT professionals and developers who will become wizards of sorts in these new environments. It also shows the move to automate IT. Bing, for instance, has a few hundred thousand servers that are manned by a handful of people. Bing servers do not get patched. Instead, IT will deploys an updated OS image with the apps pre-installed. It also highlights some key trends in cloud computing and data center environments. As Mike Kirkwood wrote in his post today about Hitachi , server management is moving from three steps (OS, network and storage) to one system to orchestrate them all. Microsoft is providing both shard and dedicated services. It's the container model, though, that makes this interesting for us. By offering an automated data network, it opens up in some respects the data center market. It's an OEM environment that can be plugged in to a data center for offering virtualized and cloud-based services. Companies like Hitachi, Microsoft and Eucalyptus are defining a new container model that binds "compute, storage, network" with templates that can allow resources to move quickly. These types of systems will become predominant as virtualization gains mass acceptance. Discuss

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Microsoft: Everything Moves Faster in the Cloud

Twitter is moving to its own data center, showing that sometimes the cloud is not ideal for the real-time web. This may seem ironic as cloud computing is largely credited for giving application developers access to commoditized server networks that they can scale up or down. Cloud services make it realistic for developers to create real-time services in the marketplace. Sponsor But at some point, the cloud is not ideal for a real-time web service provider. Twitter is a good example. And, so, we use this news to present our weekly poll: "Is the Cloud Suitable For Scaling Real-Time Applications?" Is the Cloud Suitable For Scaling Real-Time Applications? online survey According to Data Center Knowledge , Twitter now uses a managed hosting service from NTT America where it has a dedicated space. Twitter also uses Amazon Web Services to serve images, including profile pictures. Twitter parted ways with Joyent in January 2008. The move NTT America came in response to latency issues. Latency is not a major issue for small application developers that use a service like Rackspace or Amazon. But when a service scales, the issues become increasingly significant. John Adams of Twitter discussed scaling issues last week at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference. Chirp 2010: Scaling Twitter Latency issues pose a significant challenge to cloud computing services that serve real-time applications. It raises questions about how a service can scale in a cloud computing environment. In Twitter's case, the cloud did not do the job. Will the problem get worse? Raghavan "Rags" Srinivas thinks it could: "One of these fallacies is that "Latency is zero". In traditional computing, the compute and data was typically hosted on the same system and the data latency was determined by the storage disks and the data bus speeds. It was a simple matter of buying better hardware to overcome data latency if it was ever an issue. In cloud computing and especially when we get to network of clouds with data expected to flow around different clouds, latency (however minimal it is) could be an issue depending on the data being manipulated, the network speeds and so on. Add to this the fact that the entire data or part of the data should be encrypted and decrypted when it moves around unreliable and public networks, and the fact that data needs to be streamed, latency will soon add up and could become a serious issue." What do you think? Will latency emerge as one of the major issues for cloud computing service providers? Discuss

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Is the Cloud Suitable for Scaling Real-Time Applications?

The biggest cloud network in the world is owned by the mob. While you may think that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the world's largest cloud providers it's really the Conficker worm that has helped criminal networks spawn a botnet of mass proportions. Sponsor How does Conficker meets the definitions of a cloud? According to the Spectre Group ,a veteran technologist explained the connection last week at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Ca.: "Conficker controls 6.4 million computer systems in 230 countries at 230 top level domains globally, more than 18 million CPUs and 28 terabits per second of bandwidth, said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar. The biggest cloud on the planet is controlled by a vast criminal enterprise that uses that botnet to send spam, hack computers, spread malware and steal personal information and money, Joffe said. In other words, the cloud is mobbed up." The Spectre Group further explains how, Conficker meets the definitions. The botnet cloud is available for rent and and is just about anywhere in the world. It can be used for a variety of purposes, be a denial-of-service attack, spam distribution or data exfiltration. In fact, all that comment spam that plagues blogs could easily be spawned from the Conflicker cloud. Joffe used the presentation at the conference to illustrate the dangers of Conficker and and how it poses a threat to legitimate cloud computing providers. He said at the conference that Conficker has not been as active as it once was, but is still a threat. The Manchester, UK Police Department was hit in February. And it has a huge footprint, all over the world. The operators have a lot of experience, too, dating back to 1998. The Spectre Group says in comparison the legitimate players in the market are far smaller: "By the way, the biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google, based on Joffe's information, made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps." The Conficker cloud demonstrates the illusions that have to be considered when thinking about cloud computing. It's not just the danger of a a PC being infected by a virus. It's the danger of another computer entering the criminal enterprise. Discuss

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The Largest Cloud in the World is Owned By A Criminal Network