Prakash Advani's Blog

Free online courseware is the best thing to have happened to learning. Many leading universities have started offering their courses online, mind you these are high quality content from leading institutions around the world.

If you are motivated enough and have the time, there is no limit to your learning.

onlinecourses.com  makes it easy for you to search for you favourite courses across Yale, MIT, Stanford, Harvard and others. It also allows you to track your progress.

Businesses will double the amount of data they send across networks in the next few years. In the US, that means greater use of managed IP. Australia, though, like a lot of countries, is heading in the opposite direction.

Cisco’s Virtual Networking Index provides sophisticated forecasts of how we will use networks over the next few years. It estimates that the amount of data transferred by businesses will increase from 6 trillion gigabytes last year to 12 trillion by 2016. Or, if you prefer, 12,051 petabytes.

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Right after CES, Asus has announced a 7″ Tablet for US$ 150 called MemoPad. Here are the features.

• 1 GHz Single core processor: Wondermedia WM8950 (VIA)
• 1 GB RAM
• 7″ Screen with 1024×600 screen
• 16 GB memory with SD card slot
• MicroUSB
• WiFi Only

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Netflix is at it again, this time showing off its homemade architecture for running Hadoop workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud. It’s all about the flexibility of being able to run, manage and access multiple clusters while eliminating as many barriers as possible.

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At Netflix we need to be able to quickly query and analyze our AWS resources with widely varying search criteria. For instance, if we see a host with an EC2 hostname that is causing problems on one of our API servers then we need to find out what that host is and what team is responsible, Edda allows us to do this.

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Boris Renski is co-founder of OpenStack integration consultancy Mirantis and he says every enterprise he’s worked with so far has been interested in OpenStack because they view it as an alternative to VMware. The board’s vote earlier this month has now muddled the differences, he says. “If OpenStack isn’t an alternative to VMware, then what the hell is it?” Renski says.

VMware’s entrance into OpenStack has been part of a whirlwind of news during the past few months for the virtualization company and Renksi’s comments may reflect some tension between the two camps.

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Hewlett-Packard released two beta versions of its open source webOS on Friday: one for developers that runs on the Ubuntu Linux desktop, and one for the “OpenEmbedded” development environment, intended to help developers port webOS to new devices.

The August Edition, as the webOS team calls the latest release on the project website, consists of 45 open source webOS components and 450,000 lines of code. The two versions were released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community, the team said.

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The OpenStack Board of Directors met this week and on the agenda was a somewhat surprising action item: Vote on whether or not to accept VMware – once thought to be a competitor to the project – into the increasingly popular who’s-who club of cloud computing.

VMware’s going to have to wait to see if they’ll join the party though.

The OpenStack Board met Tuesday evening but didn’t get around to considering VMware’s application. VMware may now have to wait for OpenStack’s next regularly scheduled board meeting, which is not until Oct. 19. There is a chance the board would reconvene in a special meeting before then, but there are no official plans to do so.

Some expect VMware to be a significant contributor to two areas of OpenStack, including virtual networking – which is being led by engineers from Nicira, which VMware bought – and integration of OpenStack with VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS) tool. The elephant in the room is whether VMware will work to further integrate its ESX hypervisor into the OpenStack project. Doing so could make it easier for VMware users to access non-VMware public clouds, undercutting the vCloud ecosystem that VMware has been developing.

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Market research firm IDC says that data from a new survey shows that “open cloud is key for 72 percent of customers.”

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Rackspace one of the key founders of OpenStack, has finally switched to OpenStack.

These products will be provided to customers in limited amounts over a period of time to ensure a smooth ramp-up.

– Cloud Servers, powered by OpenStack – based on the latest OpenStack compute release, this solution is fast, reliable, scalable and is accessible via the new OpenStack API as well as via an easy-to-use, intuitive control panel. Limited availability sign-ups are open now and Rackspace will begin providing access on May 1.

– Cloud Control Panel – the new Control Panel was built from the ground up and with the customer in mind.  It is simple, fast, intuitive and flexible. The new control panel also features multiple enhancements, including server tagging and multi-region capabilities.

The following products are in “early access”, as they are production workload ready but have limited support available, no service commitments and no billing.

– Cloud Databases, powered by OpenStack –gives customers API access to massively scalable, high availability MySQL database that is based on SAN storage for high performance and provides automated management of common database tasks.

– Cloud Monitoring –helps customers easily monitor their infrastructure and applications proactively, including OpenStack Clouds.

The following products are in “preview”, as we are currently inviting customers to test the early version of these products.

– Cloud Block Storage, powered by OpenStack – this new solution is designed to give customers highly elastic raw storage and a choice between a high performance (leveraging solid state disks) or a standard lower-cost block storage solution.

– Cloud Networks, powered by OpenStack – this solution is designed to allow customers to manage logically abstracted network services programmatically. Software-defined virtual networks provide flexibility and agility in addition to enhanced security via network isolation and port filtering.

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Is cloud storage really more power efficient?

There is, however, an often-touted benefit of using the cloud for data storage and that is power savings. Broadcasters are only now becoming aware of the importance of controlling power costs. Moving forward, technical managers can expect federal, state and local government bureaucrats to increasingly drive companies to use less electricity. One proposed way to reduce electrical costs is to move large-scale data storage off site to a server farm.

A huge server farm may be more efficient, have newer servers consuming less power and operate with lower costs than can a local production or broadcast house—right? Cloud storage providers may tell you so, but the real answer requires a bit of investigation.

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Google will be launching 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) Internet connection in Kansas City, US.

• This will be run over fiber
• Will offer 2 TB of space
• Will offer HD video from Netflix and YouTube
• No more buffering and waiting
• This will drive a lot of cloud applications as network speed is the key bottleneck for cloud adoption today

This will be a huge jump from the current average speed of 5.8 Mbps in the US.  Just hope this spreads to other places soon.

In India the average speed is 0.9 Mbps. Now when will this come to India ?

Cloud computing is more than just a new set of technologies businesses can utilize — it is a new way of thinking about technology. As a result, businesses are being challenged to transform every single practice and policy they are using to govern how IT systems are managed and deployed. This IT/business evolution spotlights the need for a more business-minded executive to oversee the dynamic issues introduced by the cloud. The time of the chief cloud officer (CCO) is upon us. Someone who will advise and manage a company’s approach to the cloud (community, hybrid, private, public) and who will maximize the opportunities it offers in a variety of lines of business, while mitigating the complexities or concerns introduced.

If cloud computing plays a significant role in your business or you expect it to in the near future, consider these 10 critical job functions, which a CCO could handle for your organization.

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XBMC Media Center is a very popular free and open source cross platform media player application that is developed by the XBMC Foundation. Being an open source application, XBMC media center software is available for multiple operating-systems and hardware platforms.

It has been a popular alternative to Windows Media Centre and likes, and now the popular platform is finally going to be available for Android.

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David Levy, a computer scientist and professor with the Information School at the University of Washington, found that those who had meditation training were able to stay on task longer and were less distracted. Levy and his co-authors discovered that meditation also improved test subjects’ memory while easing their stress.

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The Cloud Faceoff!

The stage was set for a lively debate between public cloud rivals at GigaOM Structure in San Francisco Thursday – representatives from Citrix, Eucalyptus and the OpenStack project certainly delivered. Nebula CEO and OpenStack co-founder Chris Kemp didn’t even get past the introductions before he challenged his fellow panelists on their “closed” cloud implementations and embrace of Amazon Web Services’ API, which he compared to the Walmart of infrastructure.

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Does the rest of the cloud computing world really need to clone Amazon Web Services in order to succeed?

Probably not, says Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas, company that plays second fiddle to Amazon in the cloud game. According to him, some customers want companies like his to clone all of Amazon’s Application Programming Interfaces, the coding standards that let a program interact with Amazon’s cloud. But he thinks it’s a bad idea that isn’t going to work out.

Rackspace is also moving to OpenStack on August 1st! wow!

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From TG Daily..

UK carrier Vodafone has confirmed that it has received more pre-orders for the device than any other Android phone in history.

Finally Samsung has an Apple killer!

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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.

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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.