John Treadway

Today RightScale did a webinar on their Cloud Business Intelligence offering with Talend, Jaspersoft and Vertica.  One of the bigger objections to cloud BI in the past has been security — how can I move all of this mission critical data to a public insecure cloud? With Amazon VPC now in the picture, the BI datasets are now as secure at Amazon as they are in your data center.  Why wouldn’t you use the cloud for your BI needs? ... (more)

Amazon Named ‘CloudBzz Innovator of the Year’

Innovations Software Technology on Ulitzer 2009 has certainly been a cloudy year.  The sheer volume of real innovation somehow makes all of the hype worthwhile. While there were many companies doing interesting and innovative things in the cloud – Microsoft Windows Azure could be a strong 2010 contender – the decision on who wins for 2009 is no contest. Amazon gets the CloudBzz “Innovator of the Year” award with a never-ending stream of great stuff that only seemed to accelerate as the year progressed. Here are just some of the great announcements out of the big river in 2009: ... (more)

Predicting the Great Cloud Shakeout – Don’t Become CloudKill

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer Setting aside the shameless cloud-washing that’s going on from some vendors, there are a lot of cloud service providers (CSPs – providers of cloud) today. Many of those listed in SYS-CON’s Top 150 report are CSPs, while others are providing extensions, tools or services for clouds. Everybody’s a cloud provider these days – and as Larry Ellison recently said “All boats are cloud boats.” Every telco, every hoster, every data center outsourcer, most systems providers and many, many startups are becoming CSPs.  After all, there have been thousands of hosti... (more)

Amazon RDS vs. SQL Azure

Amazon Cloud Journal Back in July I wrote my post about databases in the cloud.  The big surprise that I discovered at the time was that the only “Native” RDBMS offering in the cloud came from Microsoft. Microsoft SQL Azure (launching formally at the PDC in a few weeks) is a mostly-compatible SQL Server as a Service release complete with support for Transact SQL/TDS.  SQL Azure is a multitenanted DBMS with several customers running databases up to 10GB in size on a single server.  Their target is the 95% of business applications running in the enterprise that have databases with... (more)

Private (Internal) Clouds

I’ve been doing a lot of work on private (internal) clouds lately – it’s a result of my new job with Unisys.  Part of that work has been spending time with customers on their plans for cloud computing — internal and external.  There’s some very interesting work going on in the private cloud space, and the solutions available to enterprises to build their clouds are many. Note – I make the (internal) distinction for a reason.  The term “private cloud” is now starting to morph from purely internal, to internal and external clouds controlled closely by IT.  Amazon’s Virtual Priva... (more)