EyeOnTheCloud

Convergence of Cloud and Web 3.0 is Coming; Getting there Will be a Bumpy Ride.

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:33:00 +0000

Ted Hoy, vice president of product at Digital River, a leading provider of global e-commerce services, has a nice post on Adotas about how Web 3.0 and the Cloud are converging. "Imagine," he says, "getting a new laptop computer during the holidays, starting it up and automatically having your personal files, pictures and address books at your fingertips without ever having to transfer or load a single application or document. With a few clicks and a single login, your information is right there." Concepts like this "will be pervasive in a few years with the evolution of Web 3.0 and cloud computing. The implications of this shift are far reaching for not only consumers but also businesses, especially software publishers and other high-tech companies that have a significant Web presence. In fact, the paradigm for e-commerce and the business models that support it have already started to change.

However, the path to Web 3.0, like its predecessors, is going to be more of journey rather than an event."

EyeOnTheCloud couldn't agree more. Read Hoy's entire post on the Adotas website.

EyeOnTheCloud believes that this convergence will have a more profound effect on society than even the PC and Internet revolutions that preceded it, and will fundamentally change behavior of both businesses and users in ways that we are only beginning to imagine and which we can't fully comprehend.

So hang on. It's going to be a fun ride.

Indicee - Business Intelligence in the Cloud - Raises $6 million

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:06:00 +0000

Business intelligence is crucial to both big and small companies. Indicee is a startup that that helps users easily combine data from their business applications and generate reports using Indicee’s cloud-based service. It essentially wants to bring bring reporting and analysis to the “masses” with a cost-effective solution to mashup business data.

Indicee, based in Vancouver, BC just completed a $6 million Series A round from Granite Ventures andYaletown Ventures. Their technology taps into data from business applications and content from productivity software such as Excel, and others and automatically builds reports and analysis for this data in the cloud. Users can ask business questions in plain English, which Indicee then responds with reports and visualizations that are produced from on-demand from data uploaded to the cloud.

Indicee users also share data securely with colleagues or associates in an online community/social exchange. The software was recently released to beta testers, including Mary Kay Cosmetics, Alco Ventures and Sage Software.

Read more at http://www.ccortez.com/Z/?N=38860.

Indicee is on the web at http://www.indicee.com/

Rackspace Experiences Power Outages and Growing Pains; to Present at Goldman Sachs Conference

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:18:00 +0000

Rackspace, a public company (NYSE: RAX) that is a leading provider of hosting services and also aims to be a substantial provider of Cloud Computing hosting infrastructure, has experienced some growing pains. According to Network World, it needed to apoloze again for a power outage in its Dallas-Fort Worth data center that required a "hard re-boot to occur on a portion of our cloud infrastructure," Rackspace said. Rackspace previously suffered outages in June and July. Going forward, Network World said Rackspace is reviewing its policies for maintenance notifications, and reviewing procedures and systems to ensure quick resumption of service in case of events like the one this week."We have invested massively in the DFW facility to ensure it delivers at a level you expect from Rackspace," "Despite last night, we feel very good about our plan and have high confidence in the DFW facility – clearly we have to prove it," the Company said in a letter to customers.

As migration to highly scalable cloud computing services steps up, users are increasingly concerned about reliability and security in the Cloud.

Separately, Rackspace announced that Lew Moorman, President of Rackspace’s Cloud business and Chief Strategy Officer, will present at the Goldman Sachs Data Center Techtonics Conference in New York City on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 10:15 a.m. EST.

John Engates, Chief Technology Officer, will present on a cloud computing panel at the Thomas Weisel Partners Emerging Communications Conference in New York City on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. EST. Audio webcasts of the events will be made available on Rackspace’s website, located at ir.rackspace.com.

Thanks to my editor, Theron Shreve for drawing the outage to my attention.

Gartner Group Projects $150 Billion Cloud Computing Market by 2013

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:57:00 +0000

eWeek, in its coverage of the well-attended Cloud Computing Conference & Expo reports that Cloud Computing is projected to become a very big business very soon. Gartner analysts in March 2009 said global cloud services revenue could move beyond $56.3 billion this year—from $46.4 billion in 2008—and grow to $150.1 billion in 2013. IDC was more tempered in its projections, calling for worldwide spending on cloud services to reach $42 billion by 2012.

Microsoft Azure to Run Microsoft's Own Cloud Applications

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Ray Ozzie, the developer of the much heralded Lotus Notes and now Bill Gates' replacement as chief software architect at Microsoft has a lot riding on Microsoft Azure. So does Microsoft. Azure's debut is a critical step for Ozzie and for his employer. Ozzie sees Azure as a chance to remake Microsoft's businesses for years to come, changing the way it produces software and is paid for its products. Ozzie announced Azure a year ago and reportedly has been little seen since. Supposedly, he is now on the road much of the time, lining up corporate customers to use Azure. He will presumably present to developers at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC09) to be held November 17 - 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, even though he is not listed in the public schedule.

Forbes reported that In a suburb outside Chicago, Microsoft has been showing off its latest data center. It says the 707,000-square-foot building will hold, at top strength, 162 sealed cargo containers of up to 2,500 computer servers each, plus thousands more servers in conventional racks. The cost: $500 million. But though Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system is capturing all the attention these days, this bland building might be a place to see the company's future.

All the computers will run on a single operating system called Azure that, eventually, will let big companies run applications like e-mail and house data at this and other Microsoft ( MSFT- news - people ) centers. Azure is the company's main play in the biggest contest in technology, called cloud computing, wherein data storage and computation take place many miles from customers' desks. The idea is to cut the cost of the labor, the hardware and the energy that go into data processing, and to make files accessible to workers who move around a lot. Proponents promise cost reductions between 30% to 90%. At the Chicago center only three Microsoft employees and a few contractors can run over 400,000 servers catering to more than 670 million e-mail and instant messaging accounts and drawing 60 megawatts of electricity.

Microsoft has a principle of "eating its own dog food," so it will initially use this center to run 250 of its businesses, including the Bing search service and the Xbox Live gaming platform. Those now run on servers all over the world. But Forbes says that the real goal is to persuade big companies like Coca-Cola Enterprises ( CCE - news -people ), Fujitsu and Pitney Bowes ( PBI - news - people ) (which have taken a peek) to trust their data to the megacomputers and then trust Azure to manage it.

Microsoft's "secret sauce" to distinguish it from a growing array of competitors is convincing developers that there is "one way to write for everything: the cloud, the server, the desktop, mobile," says Timothy O'Brien, senior director for platform strategy. "That is a really big deal."

In a test Azure offered rental prices of 12 cents an hour for use of one computer processor and 15 cents a month for a gigabyte of storage.

That is cheap, half what Amazon charges for some of its cloud computing. Amazon says, however, that the majority of its prices are much lower than what Microsoft initially charged. The company has a history of lowering its prices, too, and competing on very thin profit margins--in other words, bring 'em on. Can Microsoft get the same kinds of margins it is built on by charging 12 cents an hour? The company says it can. Microsoft thinks a server with a two- to five-year life span could pay for itself in a couple of months if it were running full blast. And since Azure works in concert with PCs and corporate servers, the company hopes to sell plenty more operating systems down the road.

Forbes say that Microsoft does not expect wholesale corporate adoption at first. Businesses will start with just a few components, like sending a portion of e-mail or little-used data off to Microsoft's care. As it builds trust, Azure will grow in size and complexity, says Arne Josefsberg, Microsoft's general manager of infrastructure services: "It's going to be a negotiation every day." But Josefsberg insists that if Azure absorbs both Microsoft's online empire and a fair amount of corporate assignments, it may be the Internet's largest single piece of software, in terms of the amount of data it runs, within a year.

Security is a key issue for prospective users of Cloud Computing. Microsoft argues that its Azure system is more secure than current corporate software, since it can spot attacks and patch flaws in the system from a central location.

Not everyone has jumped on the bandwagon. IDC seems to be a skeptic.. "You don't see a lot of businesses now with spare technicians to migrate their software over [to the cloud]," says Michelle Bailey of analyst firm IDC. "Anything with real business value won't be on the cloud for years." She figures this business needs ten years to kick in, maybe less in developing nations with looser laws.

Microsoft and the Cloud Computing industry all hope she is being overly pessimistic.

Gladinet Offers Simple Cloud Storage Access to Smaller Businesses

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:36:00 +0000

Gladinet (http://www.gladinet.com) rolled out Gladinet Cloud Gateway v1.0 and Cloud Desktop v1.3 on October 26, 2009. Both are designed to meet the cloud computing needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

The concept is an elegant and simple extension of the widely-used Network File System protocol( NFS) or Network Attached File Storage (NAS) to the Cloud.

Cloud Desktop lets a user access Cloud Storage such as Amazon’s EC2 or AT&T’s Synoptic Storage as a Service as though it were a local or network-attached disk drive. Google is reportedly headed in the same direction with the long-rumored GDrive which is expected to be launched this year, according to the technology news website TG Daily, which described it as “the most anticipated Google product so far”(See http://tinyurl.com/d749ym.)

Cloud Gateway extends the concept to all users in a network. It acts as a file server connecting individual desktops to cloud storage through one access point.

“Cloud Gateway acts as a liaison between Cloud Desktop and cloud storage,” explained Gladinet co-founder Jerry Huang. “Before, if a company had 100 employees using Cloud Desktop, they needed 100 connections to Amazon S3, Google Docs or whatever services their employees were using. With the Gateway, that’s all changed. Now SMBs only need Cloud Gateway to connect to cloud services, regardless of how many different interfaces or accounts they may have. The Gateway acts as a file server to the Desktops, which simply connect to it over their LAN.”

In fact, Cloud Gateway allows one server to support many individual desktops. In doing so, the application gives SMBs the freedom to scale back their own data storage capacity while providing reliable, centralized administration and backup capability. Files stored at various offsite data centers are as easy to access as if they resided on the user’s hard drive. Thanks to Cloud Gateway’s use of smart caching, copies of files stored with cloud services are quickly accessible on local desktops - eliminating the problem of lost data in the event of cloud service business closures.

Though robust and highly scalable, Gladinet Cloud Desktop and Cloud Gateway are extremely user-friendly even for technophobes. Once configured by an administrator, Cloud Gateway is available to every Cloud Desktop user in a company and requires no account information to be entered by individual users, no matter how many different cloud services they’re using.

Gladinet, founded in 2008, launched its cloud services to the industry in spring 2009 with the release of Gladinet Cloud Desktop 1.0 and v1.1.

To EyeOnTheCloud, it’s a company worth watching.

Forbes Gives its Blessing to Cloud Computing

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:40:00 +0000

Lee Gomes, who writes about virtualization for Forbes, gave his blessing to C loud Computing in a recent post.

He notes,

[N]ow, any number of start-up companies are selling off-the-shelf versions of (their) management tools. That would mean, for instance, that a company could easily turn a small collection of servers in the basement into a "private cloud" that gives it all of the advantages of cloud computing, especially the quick, ad hoc way that machines can be set up and taken down, but with none of the risk.

It also means that a company could build the software and become a cloud computing provider itself, competing with the likes of Amazon in the same way that a legion of companies compete in the Web server business.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos, who follows cloud computing at Nemertes Research, envisions another way the field might evolve: Specialized clouds. This would involve, for example, a cloud supplier targeting a specific field, such as finance or medicine. Instead of generic, low-cost computing services, these niche clouds would offer extra reliability and security, but would of course be priced to match. Companies would happily pay more for the extra features, he says.

Our recent post about Nvidia's Cloud Server for high-quality graphics (see here) is an example of the kind of specialized clouds that will likely appear in the very near future.

The concepts of Cloud Computing are sound, he found..

"The idea is that computing will become like electricity, a commodity that people needn't bother to make themselves. A few big companies will run data centers that everyone else will tap into via the Internet. Amazon's Web services were one of the first in this market, and it's what many point to when discussing the topic.

The basic idea behind cloud computing is sound. Why should a company go through the expense and bother of buying a piece of hardware when it could rent a machine online? In large part because of virtualization technologies, a company like Amazon can now take its unused computer capacity, slice it up into virtual machines and then sell access to those machines. Users can buy as much or as little computer storage and networking as they need, for only as long as they need. It can be a one-week pilot project or a Web server running for two years, a virtual machine can easily handle the task.In fact, changes are occurring in the way companies use computers, even if they have nothing to do with an Amazon-style cloud.

Amazon's Web services have been a hit among a new breed of Internet entrepreneurs, who can get a site up and running without needing to make capital investments in a data center, even one stuck in the corner of their apartment."

Companies like Zetta and Parascale have, in different ways, made it much easier to have Network Attached Storage operate seamlessly from the Cloud.It is nice to see mainstream business magazines like Forbes recognize the advantages of Cloud Computing.

Review of Zeta Available

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:01:00 +0000

For a nicely done review of Zeta, see http://cloudhosting.ulitzer.com/node/1156693

ZETTA’s On-Demand Cloud Storage Is Available; Claims Cost Breakthrough

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:55:00 +0000

October 21, 2009 – SUNNYVALE, Calif. - Cloud Storage service provider Zetta, Inc announced the commercial availability of its enterprise-class on-demand NAS, providing another solution for enterprise IT storage buyers. It claims its On-Demand NAS for Tier-2 unstructured data can reduce burdened (fully-loaded) storage costs by as much as five times

Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage is the first service of its kind, purpose-built to be a primary storage platform for businesses with growing data storage needs. Unlike many first-generation cloud storage services with object store orientations, Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage offers:

Standards-based, plug-and-play integration — no need to reprogram your storage interfaces, existing applications already work.

Best-in-class data protection, integrity, security and privacy — by default, Zetta provides data encryption, logical service segregation and data thumbprints.

Better-than-enterprise data availability — three-way data parity protection and multiple levels of integrity checking provide four to five orders of magnitude better data protection than on-premise equipment.

Guaranteed quality of service — service and data availability and performance are guaranteed with remedies.

Full featured snapshots — for point-in-time data versioning and recovery from accidental changes or deletions.

Scalable connection options — choose between WAN, dedicated private circuits and in-datacenter cross-connects to match bandwidth and latency requirements.

Zetta provides all of this in a cost-efficient, pay-as-you-use model.

One customer is LiveOps which provides cloud computing-based contact center platform and services to hundreds of companies in both direct response and enterprise markets that rely on the company's technology for delivering a superior customer service experience. “One of the value propositions of the cloud computing model is scalability, which is why we decided to work with fellow cloud computing company Zetta on this pilot project to address some of our current needs for on-demand video storage,” said Gary Slater, VP of Network Operations at LiveOps. “Zetta's cloud storage is highly complementary to our own cloud based applications giving us flexibility and performance to best serve our customers while saving us the overhead of in-house storage hosting and management.”

Zetta has developed its technology and service infrastructures to solve the problems of delivering data integrity, performance, and security at massive scale. Over the past year, Zetta says it has hosted three oversubscribed rounds of successful private beta tests and has stored and served data across multiple industries including manufacturing, media, technology, education, legal and financial services and across multiple applications including primary data, archiving, and backup.

The company cites a recent cloud storage survey of enterprise customers with multiple terabytes of data to mange shows that over half either already are or are anticipating implementing cloud storage. Perceived barriers, however, have made users cautious. The most commonly cited concerns are: security and privacy (49%); unpredictable costs (31%); data integrity and protection (28%); and reliability and availability (26%). Zetta claims it is able to directly address these issues and in most cases provides solutions that are better than an enterprise could ever afford to do on its own.

“Enterprise organizations are grappling with an ongoing explosion of unstructured data. This growth, combined with increasing pressures to reduce capital and operating expenses, are leading many enterprise customers to take a serious look at online storage options,” said Brad Nisbet, program manager, storage and data management services at IDC. “Zetta's Enterprise Cloud Storage offers a solution that can augment, and in some cases, even replace the function of on-premise primary storage for tier-2 unstructured data with the business advantages of an on-demand model.”

The burdened cost of owning and operating enterprise-class storage far exceeds the initial purchase price. When costs to research, negotiate, buy, install, provision, manage, power and cool, support, and backup and protect data are all taken into account, the monthly burdened cost of enterprise storage can range from several dollars per gigabyte per month(GB/month) to as much as three or four dollars per GB/month for a comparable level of data protection, security and availability. Starting at only $.25 per GB/month with discounts for longer term or additional space commitments, the economies of Zetta’s full-

service enterprise-class offering are claimed to be a game changing reduction. A cost comparison is available at http://www.zetta.net/tcoCalculator.php.

“Our customers are looking for our guidance and a cost-effective, easy-to-implement cloud storage solution for their traditional IT data,” said Dean Cappellazzo, CEO Bedrock Technology Partners. “Zetta has made cloud storage easy for our enterprise customers and easy for us as their partner.”

Driving the initial requirements for and acceptance of on-demand enterprise storage are consistent and increasingly common challenges facing IT departments including datacenter capacity limitations; complex and costly migrations; and inefficient data protection processes and technologies. These challenges lead to increased costs, increased IT workloads and ultimately to the risk of data unavailability and increased potential for data loss. Customers are striving for ways to solve these challenges that can fit into their existing IT infrastructure with no additional investment and no change to their applications, processes or growth plans.

At a fast-growing Internet service company, customer data growth far exceeded their plans. While good news for their business, it radically accelerated their data center infrastructure expansion needs. Rather than building a new data center or contracting for new managed space, both lengthy and expensive alternatives, they looked to Zetta to store nearly three quarters of a petabyte of primary data in a storage bursting or overflow application. Two features were especially critical to making this rapid move. One was the ability for Zetta to seamlessly interface with the customer’s existing storage protocols so no application reprogramming was required. The second was the ability to establish a high-speed connection supporting multi-terabyte per day data uploads to the Zetta cloud.

Higher educational institutions, research organizations and other information intensive organizations, often faced with capital constraints, can find a quick, cost-effective solution with an on-demand service. And with enterprise features and compatibility supported by Zetta, workloads can easily be moved to the Zetta cloud. At UCLA Computer Science department, an antiquated tape-based backup infrastructure is being replaced by an active archive of their data to the Zetta cloud. The new functionality was straightforward to implement with Zetta’s standard file transfer (FTP) and file access (NFS) protocols.

At one of Silicon Valley’s largest law firms, migrating more than 25 terabytes of data off an old WORM archive system to a newer more flexible online storage infrastructure was the imperative. After examining both on-premise and other cloud offerings, it became apparent that the Zetta cloud delivered both the reliability and off-premise security as well as the standard IT interfaces and access protocols required to migrate, store and protect the firm’s data.

“Once customers understand the features we’ve built into the Zetta cloud, they really start to lean forward,” said Jeff Treuhaft, CEO of Zetta. “They get near instant access, using their existing protocols, to petabytes of enterprise storage with equal or better protection and security features than are generally available in their own data center. They can focus on unlocking the value of their data not just protecting it and can redeploy scarce capital assets to other projects.”

Zetta’s innovative cloud storage architecture was conceived and developed by Zetta’s founders, a unique blend of experienced storage infrastructure operators and distributed computing IP developers. The Zetta team has prior experience building and operating multi-petabyte enterprise storage infrastructures. They have also been responsible for early commercialization of the web through some of the Internet’s best known distributed computing standards including: HTTP Cookies, SSL, HTTP Proxying, Server Push and Global Load Balancing.

Availability and Pricing

Now commercially available to businesses, Zetta has been live and operational, storing real world data since late 2008. For more information visit www.zetta.net.

At a fraction the cost of buying, installing, managing, supporting, and protecting on-premise storage, Zetta pricing begins at $.25 per gigabyte per month for a minimum of one terabyte with discounts for longer term or additional space commitments. Multiple bandwidth options are available, including a simple $0.10 per gigabyte transferred or a 95th percentile metered rate of $9/Mb. There is no charge for moving new data footprint into the Zetta Cloud.

About Zetta, Inc.

Zetta, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise cloud storage solutions. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Zetta Inc. was established in 2007 by successful serial entrepreneurs. The company has raised $11 million to date. Zetta is backed by Sigma Partners, Foundation Capital and its founders. For more information, please visit www.zetta.net.

NVIDIA RealityServer Offers 3D Cloud Computing Using GPUs

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:09:00 +0000

First of Its Kind GPU-Based Cloud Computing Solution Provides Interactive, Photorealistic 3D Applications Accessible From Any Web Connected DeviceSAN FRANCISCO, CA, Oct 20, 2009 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Web 2.0 Summit -- NVIDIA, inventor of the graphics processing unit (GPU), and mental images, world leader in rendering technologies, introduced today the NVIDIA(R) RealityServer(R) platform for cloud computing, a powerful combination of GPUs and software that streams interactive, photorealistic 3D applications to any web connected PC, laptop, netbook and smart phone.

NVIDIA RealityServer -- the culmination of nearly 40 collective years of hardware and software engineering by NVIDIA and mental images -- enables developers to create a new generation of consumer and enterprise 3D web applications, all with remarkable levels of photorealism.

Automobile product engineering teams will be able to securely share and visualize complex 3D models of cars under different lighting and environmental conditions. Architects and their clients will be able to review sophisticated architectural models, rendered in different settings, including day or night. Online shoppers will be able to interactively design home interiors, rearrange furniture, and view how fabrics will drape, all with perfectly accurate lighting.

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform is comprised of an NVIDIA(R) Tesla(TM) RS GPU-based server running RealityServer software from mental images. While photorealistic imagery has traditionally taken hours or days to create, this first-of-its-kind, integrated solution streams images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.

"This is one giant leap closer to the goal of real-time photorealistic visual computing for the masses," said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA. "mental images fully embraced the concept of GPU co-processing to enable Interactive photorealism anywhere, any time -- something that was science fiction just yesterday."

RealityServer software utilizes mental images iray(R) technology, the world's first physically correct ray-tracing renderer that employs the massively parallel CUDA(TM) architecture of NVIDIA GPUs to create stunningly accurate photorealistic images by simulating the physics of light in its interaction with matter. Because ray tracing is one of the most demanding computational problems, iray technology is designed to take advantage of the parallel computing power of NVIDIA Tesla.

"Everyone should experience the web the way they experience the world, in 3D," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "RealityServer offers extraordinary opportunities and far-reaching implications for businesses and consumers, enabling us to interact with 3D content in the form and manner that our brains expect."

Customer Quotes

"NVIDIA RealityServer can revolutionize marketing and sales via the web by enabling the world to interact with virtual products in a more realistic and unconstrained way," said David Kelly, CEO of mydeco.com , a U.K.-based designer furnishing site. "Our interactive 3D planner, which uses RealityServer, is what attracts customers to mydeco, and the immersive, real-life experience it delivers keeps them engaged."

"Some of the biggest problems we face in aviation research involve managing and visualizing massive datasets while keeping that data secure," said Fernando Toledo, Manager, Virtual Reality Center, National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University. "Using NVIDIA RealityServer for virtual prototyping, design reviews and remote visualization solves those issues. We are extremely impressed by its performance and ability to realistically render our large 3D CAD models over the web without exposing our IP."

"NVIDIA RealityServer is an integral part of our 3D Scenes application on Facebook," said Mark Zohar, CEO, SceneCaster. "This unique and powerful GPU-based Cloud computing solution offers exciting opportunities for the delivery of realistic 3D applications and services."

Product Information

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform will be available November 30, 2009. Tesla RS configurations start at eight GPUs, and scale to support increasing numbers of simultaneous users.

A developer edition of RealityServer 3.0 software will be downloadable free of charge, including the right to deploy non-commercial applications November 30, 2009.

For more information about NVIDIA RealityServer, please visit www.nvidia.com/realityserver or www.realityserver.com.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) awakened the world to the power of computer graphics when it invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999. Since then, it has consistently set new standards in visual computing with breathtaking, interactive graphics available on devices ranging from portable media players to notebooks to workstations. NVIDIA's expertise in programmable GPUs has led to breakthroughs in parallel processing which make supercomputing inexpensive and widely accessible. Fortune magazine has ranked NVIDIA #1 in innovation in the semiconductor industry for two years in a row. For more information, see www.nvidia.com.

About mental images

mental images, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corp. with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

Copyright 2009 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, Tesla, and CUDA, and are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. mental images, iray, and RealityServer are registered trademarks of mental images GmbH, Berlin, Germany, in the United States and/or other countries. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, features, impact, performance and capabilities of mental images RealityServer, mental images iray technology and NVIDIA GPU technology are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: development of more efficient or faster technology; design, manufacturing or software defects; the impact of technological development and competition; changes in consumer preferences and demands; customer adoption of different standards or our competitor's products; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission including its Form 10-Q for the fiscal period ended July 26, 2009. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on our website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

SOURCE: NVIDIA

Cloud Computing - Is It Old Mainframe Bess in a New Dress?

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:33:00 +0000

When the first data base management systems (dbms) started to emerge (Cullinane's IDMS, Software AG's Adabase, etc.), they replaced old-fashioned indexed-sequential files (ISAM) which had limited indexing capabilities. Any vendor lacking a dbms felt at a competitive disadvantage. What did the hapless “have nots” do? They tinkered slightly with their products and rechristened them a DBMS.

So too with Cloud Computing. Anyone running a hosted service of any description is tinkering with it slightly and renaming it as an SaaS service that is delivered as a Cloud application. Put out a press release. Crank up the hype. Tell the stockbrokers. They've got a Cloud Computing application.

Cloud computing is not any old Internet application running on a rackserver someplace. Rather, it’s designed to handle many different clients at once, and to scale (in both directions) in minutes not months. This requires a different mindset and a different approach to writing code. And right now, let's be honest about it, the tools aren't all there yet.

Remember when most websites were developed directly in HTML? It was difficult, tedious work, and the sites were mostly static "brochureware." Well, it took a few years, but now "any dummy" (meaning me) can create decent-looking, updatable, interactive sites. E-commerce can be added with a few clicks.

Well, Cloud Computing today is roughly at the stage that the web was at 15 years ago, but it's maturing at an even more rapid pace.

“Cloud computing is all the rage,” wrote InfoWeek in April 2008. Indeed it is.“Some analysts and vendors,” they say, “define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing that “anything you consume outside the firewall is ‘in the cloud,’ including conventional outsourcing,” Naturally, those who don’t have a real Cloud computing offering (the “have nots”), but still want to be considered chic go with the InfoWeek’s broader definition.

The GoogleGazer prefers to define Cloud computing as highly scalable, reliable, distributed services, available on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, what we like to call “Rent-a-cloud.”

The notion of Cloud computing is certainly not new. In his biography, Dr. Jack B. Dennis, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT (and MIT Class of ‘53), and a pioneer in the development of computer science wrote in 2003:

“In 1960 Professor John McCarthy, now at Stanford University and known for his contributions to artificial intelligence, led the ‘Long Range Computer Study Group’ (LRCSG) which proposed objectives for MIT’s future computer systems. I had the privilege of participating in the work of the LRCSG, which led to Project MAC and the Multics computer and operating system, under the organizational leadership of Prof. Robert Fano and the technical guidance of Prof. Fernando Corbat.

At this time Prof. Fano had a vision of the Computer Utility, the concept of the computer system as a repository for the knowledge of a community data and procedures in a form that could be readily shared a repository that could be built upon to create ever more powerful procedures, services, and active knowledge from those already in place. Prof. Corbat’s goal was to provide the kind of central computer installation and operating system that could make this vision a reality. With funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the result was Multics.”

For those under sixty, and probably not old enough to remember, MULTICS, an acronym for Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, was an extremely influential early time-sharing operating system, started in 1964. It proved that [mainframe-based] computing could serve many people in remote locations at the same time. It set creative minds to thinking about a generally available computer utility, connected to your house through a cable, and was operational right up to the dot.com era. The last Multics system was shutdown on 10/31/2000. (Seehttp://www.multicians.org/ for more information).

Multics inspired far-reaching thoughts. The GoogleGazer still has his original copy of Fred Gruenberger’s influential book, Computers and Communications; Toward a Computer Utility (Prentice-Hall (1968), which he read when it first appeared. Back then, the GoogleGazer was an undergraduate and smoking pot, bra-burning and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations preoccupied college campuses. Nearly all computing was still based on mainframes and batch processing; punch cards were the norm for both programming and data entry. Gruenberger, looked at Multics and peered into the future. He posited a “computing utility” which would operate much like an electrical utility, letting you draw as much or as little as you need, while paying only for what you use was articulated in detail.

Back to InfoWeek.

Utility computing, InfoWeek went on to say, “is a [type of Cloud computing that provides a] way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.”

That sure sounds like Gruenberger’s computer utility to me.

This form of rent-a-cloud, is offered commercially by Amazon.com, Google, Sun (zembly.com for creating and hosting social applications, and Network.com for pay-as-you-go computing), IBM, Microsoft (soon, with Azure) and others who now offer storage and virtual servers that IT can access on demand. In InfoWeeks’s view, “Early enterprise adopters mainly use utility computing for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs, but one day, they may replace parts of the datacenter.” However, the GoogleGazer knows better. Many smaller, fast-growing high-tech outfits run their entire businesses off of the “Cloud” of one of these major vendors, and by all reports, reliability exceeds that of most IT shops.

Software as a Service (SAAS) is a type of cloud computing that delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. APIs are also increasingly available in the Cloud that enable developers to exploit functionality of other’s over the Internet, rather than developing, hosting, and delivering it themselves. These range from providers offering discrete business services — such as Strike Iron and Xignite – to the full range of APIs offered by Salesforce.com, Google Maps, Yahoo BOSS. The U.S. Postal Service, Bloomberg, and even online banking and conventional credit card processing services are headed in this direction.

So while the technology may be different, updated, certainly much faster, far cheaper, pervasive, and much more scalable, at the end of the day, Cloud computing is a centralized multi-cpu-like core with distributed nodes, in a prettier, sexy new miniskirt. But hey, the pretty miniskirt looks cute and alluring. The GoogleGazer believes that Cloud Computing not only is not a fad, but it presages a fundamental paradigm shift that will have as powerful an effect on society as the Internet itself, and will turn out to be truly disruptive technology.

“Strong words,” you say? Well, stay tuned for further proof.

Cloud Computing is Here and Now

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:28:00 +0000

Some of the promise of cloud computing is here already. I use it and benefit every day. Consider my little business. Like over a million other businesses, I use the paid version of Google Apps (cloud-based, annual fee - $50 a user), so email addressed to my hshco.com domain is hosted by Google, as is my contact list, calendar and website. I use the Cloud-based Ring Central’s RCfax.com to virtually send and receive faxes (incoming faxes are routed to my email as PDF attachments), and these two SaaS-providers interact flawlessly, without either one having done anything special or necessarily knowing about the other. In addition, some of my books are available for sale as downloadable e-books. My Google Apps-hosted website (Cloud-based) is interfaced with the Cloud-based PayLoadz.com (http://www.payloadz.com) to receive and fulfill orders, which are paid for either using Google Checkout (http://tinyurl.com/krts7f) or Ebay’s PayPal.com (https://www.paypal.com/), both cloud-based services.

If you call my published phone number (201) 490-9623, the call is handled by the cloud-based Google Voice. I can access either the voice message or a transcript through my email on a Blackberry or from any Internet browser.

My accounting is done using the on-line version of Quickbooks (http://oe.quickbooks.com/) which interfaces with the online banking system I use at CapitalOne bank (http://www.capitalone.com/) I could just as well have used NetSuite Small Business (www.netsuite.com). In turn, the bank’s web-based bill paying application interfaces with the cloud-based ACH system for issuing electronic checks to pay my bills. Most of my income is also received as direct deposit ACH payments (see http://tinyurl.com/2lhfst).

I’m not the only one, and there are interesting Cloud services that I don’t [yet] use. Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise) listed ten things that you can do in the clouds in 2009 that you couldn't do a year before. Not surprisingly, he mostly talked about Google-related things, so his list is not complete. Still, Matthew's list is a reminder of how far we've come in a short space of time.

1. Having access to everything on the go - iPhone (Lifehacker has a good description).

2. Being able to search through all my email - (Gmail or Apps)

3. Chatting with customers and partners - in any language - Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat, and once again, Lifehacker has a good description.

4. Easy collaboration with Google products Sites and Docs. Lee Lefavre provides a great explanation.

5. Organizing travel using TripIt, a personal travel assistant.

6. Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers using Google forms

7. Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform with Force.com

8. Using online templates for docs, spreadsheets and presentations.

9. Running fast, secure and stable web apps (Chrome).

10. Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google apps

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with Cloud-based computing today, and the most important and paradigm-changing solutions are still either a gleam in someone’s eye or on his or her drawing board.

The best is yet to come, and hopefully, you will be the one to build the killer applications. The focus of this book is to guide you towards developing robust, scalable, cloud-based applications quickly and economically.

Google's Matthew Glotzbach Cites Progress in Cloud Computing

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:46:00 +0000

Ben Keppes reports in the really fine ReadWriteWeb blog on the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and discusses the progress in Cloud Computing over the past year. One of the highlights he reported on was the keynote address by Matthew Glotzbach (Google Enterprise) who listed the ten things that you can do in the clouds today that you couldn't do a year ago. Not surprisingly, he mostly talked about Google-related things, so the list is not complete. Still, Matthew's list is a reminder of how far we've come in a short space of time.

1. Having access to everything on the go - iPhone (Lifehacker has a good description)
2. Being able to search through all my email - (Gmail or Apps)
3. Chatting with customers and partners - in any language - Matthew gave a very cool live demo of inline translation of chat, and once again, Lifehacker has a good description.
4. Easy collaboration with Google products Sites and Docs. Lee Lefavre provides a great explanation
5. Organizing travel using TripIt, a personal travel assistant.
6. Easily collecting data from co-workers and customers using Google forms
7. Building a scalable business application on the cloud platform with Force.com
8. Using online templates for docs, spreadsheets and presentations
9. Running fast, secure and stable web apps (Chrome)
10. Securely sharing video in apps with Youtube for Google apps

Earlier, Sarah Perez, in the same fine blog, wrote about Adobe Air apps for the Enterprise. (The Googlegazer wrote about Adobe Air and the increasing competition between Google and Adobe, so it's not surprising that Matthew did not mention it).

While the foregoing list still encompasses but a fraction of most people's daily computing tasks, it's certainly suggests that Cloud Computing is very real and growing remarkably quickly.

Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters are "SMBs" (small and medium-size businesses) and pockets of independence in large corporations. Some of the successful cloud applications for SMBs (and scalable to the enterprise) are SalesForce.com and its underlying platform, Force.com, which the GoogleGazer described recently. Intacct, (on-demand accounting and financial management applications and supply chain management), Adaptive Planning (collaborative budgeting and forecasting) and Bill.com (Cloud-based approach for managing accounts payable).

This time next year, the CloudGazer hopes to revisit this topic again, to see just how far the world of Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) has has progressed, notwithstanding Harry Debes' wishful thinking that SaaS is just an ephemeral phenomenon that will collapse within two years. He is CEO of Lawson, which doesn't support SaaS for its ERP services.

So What, Exactly is Cloud Computing, and What Is It Not?

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:19:00 +0000

The CloudGazer remembers when the first data base management systems (DBMS) started to emerge (Cullinane's IDMS, Software AG's Adabas, IBM's IMS/db and a few others). These products replaced old-fashioned indexed-sequential (ISAM) files that provided more limied indexing. Any vendor lacking one felt at a competetive disadvantage. So what did these hapless vendors do? They tinkered slightly with their products and rechristened them as DBMS.

So too with Cloud Computing. Anyone today running a hosted service of any description is tinkering with it slightly and renaming it as an SaaS aervice that is delivered as a Cloud application. Put out a press release. Crank up the hype. Tell the stockbrokers. They've got a Cloud Computing application.

Not so fast. Cloud Computing is not (as pointed out in GoogleGazer) Mainframe Bess in a new dress, and it's not any old Internet application running on a rackserver someplace.

Cloud computing is designed to handle many different clients at once, and to scale (in both directions) in minutes not months. This requires a different mindset and a different approach to writing code. And right now, let's be honest about it, the tools aren't all there yet.

Remember when most websites were developed directly in HTML? It was difficult, tedious work, and the sites were mostly static "brochureware.". Well, it took a few years, but now "any dummy" (meaning me) can create decent-looking updatable, interactive sites. E-commerce can be added with a few clicks.

Well, Cloud Computing today is roughly at the stage the web was 15 years ago, but it's maturing at an even more rapid pace.

We'll plumb the depths of Cloud Computing in future posts.

Welcome to Eye On The Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (David E. Y. Sarna) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:10:00 +0000

As the GoogleGazer blog evolved, I found that many of the posts were dedicated to Cloud Computing and to Software as a Service (SaaS) and were not focused (as was promised) on the specific comings and goings of Google, its friends and its enemies. Yet, these "off topic" posts garnered some of the heaviest traffic on the site, testimony to the great interest in Cloud Computing and SaaS.

Obviously the time has come to create a separate blog devoted to these topics.

Reader participation is welcome. You are welcome to post comments and to write to me with suggestions at cloudgazer@eyeonthecloud.com.