Prakash Advani's Blog » General

Insight into Enterprise Cloud Storage

Prakash — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:14:22 +0000

It may be known to some as the Dropbox-for-the-enterprise, but Box.com could be forgiven for insisting on its own identity. With more than 120,000 customers, including 82 percent of the Fortune 500, the company has made a name for itself as one of the leaders in the enterprise cloud storage and data management space.

How HP Cloud Will Differentiate from Amazon, Rackspace

Prakash — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:13:39 +0000

HP has now jumped on the bandwagon as a cloud service provider with HP Cloud. Here is an excerpts from Senior VP of HP Cloud services:

On When OpenStack Reached Its Tipping Point: My thesis: The day Canonical shifted Ubuntu’s cloud bet from Eucalyptus to OpenStack, it was a wake up call for small vendors that were still getting ready to make their bets. “I would completely agree,” replied Singh. “A bunch of private cloud guys have been at it [trying to develop platforms] for awhile but OpenStack caught up and passed them. We’ve been impressed with CloudStack and we’re glad to see it moving along, and we’re happy to see Eucalyptus working with Amazon. But look at the ecosystem and OpenStack looks impressive.”

On How HP Will Differentiate from Other Cloud Providers: “With all due respect to Rackspace, we’re a little larger and we have a global reach. And we’ll address that reach in the cloud as well.”

In terms of HP’s secret sauce, “Nobody is ever going to turn away from a secure, business-driven, SLA_driven cloud service,” said Singh. “I challenge you: Who is delivering that type of cloud today? Amazon Web Services has a lot of stickiness but folks are saying ‘I need more tools and I need good, old fashion service.”

HP will differentiate above the IaaS level, focusing on platform as a service, database as a service, and analytics as a service, he added. “Standing up VMs is so 2009. It’s time to stand up quality clouds, tools, APIs, and service that scale. We’ll offer a complete stack of services, and we’ll give you a complete [cloud] marketplace on top of that.”

Read more of the interview of Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, senior VP and GM of HP Cloud Services.

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Microsoft, Google in open war in India

Prakash — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:45:14 +0000

Google and Microsoft, two of the world’s largest technology firms, are raining blows on each other as they hard sell their so-called cloud services and vie for dominance in a market estimated to grow to $15-18 billion by 2020.

“Google is the largest cloud services company in India,” claimed Rajan Anandan, Google’s India head since January 2011. “We have 2,00,000 businesses that use Google cloud solutions. We have orders of magnitude bigger than Microsoft,” added Anandan, who used to head Microsoftin India before he took up the Google job.

The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time

Prakash — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:46:37 +0000

In my experience if you can absolutely focus on getting one thing done, you can get it done really fast. Now Harvard Business review has a nice article on this. Here are some useful suggestions from the article.

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you’ll be. When you’re done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don’t, you’ll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find a different environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that’s relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you’re off, you’re truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you’ll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

Read the complete article.

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Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted?

Prakash — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 04:54:17 +0000

Gigaom has a nice article comparing the costs of hosting your website on Amazon Web Services or self-hosting your own site.

Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions.

MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip

Prakash — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 02:30:30 +0000

Anand Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. His company Tilera sells chips with 16, 32, and 64 cores, and it’s scheduled to ship a CPU with 100 cores.

It is green cause its power efficient. A 400-watt Tilera server provides as much processing power as eight x86 servers that draw 2,000 watts.

HTC Inspire 4G a good budget phone

Prakash — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 03:02:16 +0000

HTC Inspire is a good budget phone, however I don’t know when HTC will launch this in India. It’s currently available in US from AT&T.

Here is what is cool.

4G Capable HSPA+
Android 2.2 upgradable to 2.3
4.3″ Display
8 Megapixel Camera, 720p video recording.
Dolby Surround sound
Scratch proof, Gorilla Glass screen
4 GB Built in with expandable microSD memory card slot.
1 GHz processor

Whats the limitations

1 GHz processor sounds a little low as compared to the new generation dual and quad core phones. However for people just wanting to use the phone features this is enough unless you want to play games. By choosing a single core processor, HTC is able to keep the price affordable for this phone. Unlocked phones are available for around $300 on Amazon.

No Front facing camera, this in my opinion is a need for people wanting to do video calling over 3G or skype.

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Cloud Demystified

Prakash — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:00:28 +0000

Cloud is the buzz of today and many people are getting very confused on what is the cloud. To put is in simple way, Cloud is any service delivered on the Internet. Cloud based hosted services have been around for 10 years however now people are calling it Cloud.

Lets take an example, if a university offers it courses only in the class room, and now wants to offer online classes, then it is the Cloud. Similarly if you are running a business and you want to start selling online then you are moving into the Cloud.

Once you have decided to move your business online, you can select some of the current Cloud technologies which will allow you to scale very well such that your website/webstore will be able to handle high traffic very well at the same time optimise your resources when the traffic is low. These are Cloud technologies or building blocks which is not be confused by Cloud services. You could still offer your services in the Cloud without using any Cloud Technology. However if you use Cloud Technologies you can scale well and optimise your resources well.

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Open Source solution to Microsoft Azure

Prakash — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:52:02 +0000

Build on VMWare CloudFoundry, IronFoundry offers .NET support in the Cloud. Cloud Foundry is VMWare’s PaaS solution which is open sourced. Tier 3 (the company behind IronFoundry) has take the code and added support for .NET. Related posts: HP should open source webOS Looks like HP is going to kill webOS. HP webOS... [...] Related posts:

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Why OpenStack is important

Prakash — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:25:09 +0000

OpenStack is the future of Cloud computing. Founded by NASA and Rackspace it aims to provide a fully scalable open source cloud infrastructure. This can be deployed to build a public cloud or your own private cloud.

Here are the reasons why I believe OpenStack will be successful.

Its completely Open Source, hence it is continuing to develop at a rapid space. Being open in nature, the project will never die down.
It is designed to scale up very well.
Its highly flexible you have a choice of Hypervisers including ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, LXC, QEMU, UML, Xen, and XenServer.
Over 2000 Developers and 144 companies are behind OpenStack making it an Industry Standard.
This includes the who’s who of Cloud computing:

Cloud Vendors: Citrix, Cloud.com, Nebula
OEMS: Dell, HP, NEC
Chip makers: Intel and AMD, Broadcom
Storage: Netapp
OS Vendors: Canonical (Ubuntu), SUSE
Telco: NTT Docomo
Networking vendor: Cisco
Service Provider: L&T Infotech

Some website stats shared by OpenStack.

People in over 13,000 cities from over 200 countries visited OpenStack.org in 2011
Ttotal of 750k+ visits from 430k+ unique visitors.
The most popular city was Beijing, followed by Seoul, London, and Bangalore
China was #2 after the U.S. as a source of visitors to openstack.org

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