This Week in Cloud, October 25, 2012: Amazon outage, OpenStack Cloud Block Storage, New cloud hardware can reduce costs by 30%. And more…

By CloudCommons 2012	Article Rating:
October 25, 2012 10:32 AM EDT	Reads:	1,594

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Watch the October episode of CloudViews Unplugged – a monthly video blog analyzing the top cloud news stories.

Cloud News

Amazon’s east coast data center experienced another outage this week that brought down many popular websites, including Reddit, Heroku, and Foursquare, according to this ZDNet article. In this GigaOM blog, Barb Darrow details the outage and wonders why sites like Heroku aren’t distributing their workloads among geographic locations and availability zones.
Rackspace announced Cloud Block Storage for its OpenStack cloud this week which will allow users to decide on the size and type of block storage for their compute instances, according to this GigaOM article. The new offering, which competes with Amazon Elastic Block Storage, allows users to choose between SSD and traditional disk-based storage.
The hardware behind the cloud can make a big difference in speed and cost, according to this BBC article. Researchers at Deutsch Telekom Laboratories discovered that the difference between fast and slow instances of Amazon EC2 can vary in speed by as much as 40% and since Amazon charges by the hour, users can cut up to 30% of their bill by choosing faster instances. You can read the results of the experiment in this report.

Featured Content

IDC Report: Cloud Systems Management 2011 Vendor Shares: Market Moves Beyond Self-Service

A new report from IDC examines the growth of the worldwide cloud systems management software market and ranks the current vendors, including CA Technologies, VMWare, BMC, HP, and IBM based on their 2011 cloud systems management software revenue. You can read the full report on CA.com.

Feature Article

The #1 Best Practice For Cloud-Based Innovation

By Adam Famularo, CA Technologies

Adam Famularo

Here's one thing everyone in IT can agree on: nobody agrees on best practices for cloud-based innovation. There's an ongoing debate about how to use the cloud, and what role it should play in the enterprise to foster innovation. That shouldn't be surprising, since we're still debating how to define the cloud itself, despite the fact that the term has been in use, technically, since at least the early 90s, and probably longer.

Part of this is due to the fact that the cloud is still evolving, and rapidly so. Vendors, analysts, consultants, and IT leaders alike continue to coin new buzzwords to describe some nuanced view or technical model for the cloud ("hyper-hybrid cloud," anyone?). And vendors specifically are slapping the "aaS" moniker on more offerings every day, to the extent that I expect to soon see Acronyms as a Service. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

Are cloud standards important? Join us for a @CloudCommons #CloudViews cloud standards tweetchat on Tuesday, October 30th at 2 PM ET. You can preview the questions on Smart Enterprise.
What are the three biggest cloud computing terrors? In this InfoWorld blog, David Linthicum describes how lack of security planning, the absence of service governance, and public cloud performance issues can turn your promising cloud deployment into a nightmare.
Gartner outlined the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando this week, according to this Forbes article. The article details the top 10 trends, including personal cloud, hybrid IT and cloud computing, mobile device battles, and strategic big data.

MSP Corner

How can channel partners get ahead of the competition and stay relevant in hard economic times? In this ComputerWorld blog, Hafizah Osman shares advice from channel experts and analysts to come up with nine ways that channel businesses can grow in the current market.
Do MSPs need to focus more on innovation and less on IT maintenance? In this MSPMentor blog, Joe Panettieri suggests that MSPs should start spending less time on IT maintenance and support and instead start their own cloud application and software development.