Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Amanda Kondolojy. When you think of high cloud energy consumption, the image of the crowded and stuffy data center likely comes to mind. However, new research from AT&T's Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne has revealed that traditional data centers only account for 9 percent of the cloud's overall energy consumption, which is in stark contrast to conventional wisdom and the push by some environmental groups to minimize data centers because of their energy consumption. However, looking at the whole picture of cloud computing energy consumption, data centers definitely are not the energy beasts they were once thought to be. So where is all the cloud energy going? ZDNet Reports that 90 percent of the overall cloud energy consumption is taken by wireless access network technologies. In fact, on average, wireless networking, including Wi-Fi access and 4G connections, takes up a whopping ten times more power than data centers... |
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Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Keao Caindec. Cost savings, convenience, speed-to-market and freedom from technology lock-ins are all benefits of migrating business applications to the cloud, and many that have already adopted cloud strategies have indeed realised significant cost savings and productivity gains. However, some have also experienced performance and availability issues that have led to resistance to migrating business-critical functions. As a result, the bulk of successful cloud projects to date have been departmental and not ‘mission critical’ core systems which have significant requirements for resource-intensive functions such as database replication, file synchronisation, backup and disaster recovery between data centres. Part of the problem is that the public cloud ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) market is evolving more slowly than other areas such as ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). Providers are only beginning to recognise the level to which performance levels need to be increased and the capabilities their offerings need to make them a viable platform for mission critical purposes. |
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Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Paul Korzeniowski. The emergence of cloud computing has given InfiniBand a boost in acceptance. Touted as the high-performance networking option of choice at its inception at the turn of the millennium, InfiniBand struggled to gain wide acceptance in the enterprise -- but it did find niche acceptance. The networking option has established itself as the interconnect of choice in many high-performance computing applications, replacing propriety technologies, such as Quadrics and Myrinet. The need for similar capacity has emerged in the cloud market. Typically, cloud data centers consolidate server, storage and network functions in central locations. As system configurations become denser, the need for higher bandwidth network connections -- especially from server-to-server and server-to-storage -- becomes clearer... |
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Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.
Built on the Vblock platform, which combines virtualization software from VMware, unified networking, security and computing from Cisco, and storage, security and management technologies from EMC, CloudCompute offers businesses secure, private network access and connectivity from the subscriber’s business into the IaaS environment through a scalable and flexible network... |
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Built on the Vblock platform, CloudCompute offers businesses secure, private network access and connectivity from the business to the IaaS environment. Network operator Sprint announced the launch of CloudCompute, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution that integrates CSC’s virtualized, utility-based cloud computing solution with Sprint’s cloud-aware Global MPLS network.
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: David F. Carr. Software-defined networking (SDN) has been in the "coming soon" category for many years, but an Interop keynote panel discussion on the topic showed room for debate over what it ought to look like when it finally gets here. SDN is too often spoken of as a single event that will wipe away all current networking technologies, when in fact "the underpinnings are already in place," said moderator Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research. The point of SDN is to make networks easy to configure and reconfigure in software rather than hardware, with many more networking functions migrating from being embedded capabilities of a network appliance to being defined in software. Network systems are migrating incrementally in that direction as networks follow the same path toward virtualization as servers and storage, he said. Ultimately, the goal is to provide every data center with the flexibility associated with cloud computing... |
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Grazed from InforTrend. Author: PR Announcement.
The EonStor DS G7i Series is designed specifically to match the needs of aggressive and complex applications housed in Tier III data centers. VMware VAAI-Ready and boasting high-availability product design features such as RAID controllers, CacheSafe technology, and hot-swappable components ensure that stored data is safe in the event of an untimely power outage or drive failure. The "scale as you grow" flexibility of the G7i series allows companies to scale up to 240 disk drives through high-density expansion enclosures, including Infortrend's 4U/48-bay JBOD... |
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Infortrend Corporation today announced the new EonStor DS G7i Series' dedication to mission-critical Tier III data centers. The G7i SAN storage solution delivers high-availability RAID storage to SMBs and enterprises whose business operations heavily depend on the reliability of their IT environments, such as companies who generate their revenue through online business models. Providers of cloud services and software as a service (SaaS) place heavy emphasis on the security and dependability of their storage, which is why their IT departments rely on the 99.982% availability of Tier III data centers, as opposed to Tier I and Tier II options, which have numerous points of failure and require shutdowns for maintenance.
Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.
According to Brocade, the benefits of VCS on OpenStack are related to its technology's network automation, efficiency and elasticity combined with the ease of provisioning provided on OpenStack. The goal is enable customers to deploy network capacity and services in cloud-based data centers more quickly than with legacy network architectures and provisioning tools... |
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OpenStack clouds and network management capabilities are converging. An example: Brocade has released a VCS fabric plugin, providing on-demand fabric provisioning capabilities to OpenStack-based clouds. Launched as a component to OpenStack Grizzly, the plugin was designed to expand on the native attributes of Brocade's VCS Fabric technology.
Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Ariel Shuper. The immense growth of IaaS cloud computing has given rise to a need for highly scalable and secure virtual networks, without requiring significant investment in replacing or adding to the existing infrastructure. One virtual overlay technology that has emerged to address this is VXLAN, which uses MAC-in-UDP tunneling to capitalize on the best aspects of existing layer 2 infrastructure and the advantages of layer 3 transport. However, while VXLAN seems an ideal solution, this article points out performance challenges that arise with its usage, which must be addressed for its benefits to be fully realized. Background: The Need for Virtualized Overlay Networks Over the past few years, cloud computing has grown at a tremendous rate, with worldwide spending on IT cloud services tripling since 2008 and expected to reach over $100 billion in 2014.1 More specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market, having grown over 45% in 2012 alone... |
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Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.
ConnectX-3 Pro, the industry's first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. (Photo: Business Wire)... |
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Mellanox(R) Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) (TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced ConnectX-3 Pro, the industry's first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. With hardware offload support for VXLAN and NVGRE, ConnectX-3 Pro enables cloud providers to build large-scale infrastructures with industry-leading performance and dramatically lower CPU overhead, thus reducing cloud application cost and increasing cloud ROI.
Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.
"We are excited to disrupt the market and offer the industry general access to our MidoNet network virtualization technology," said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. "Unlike other solutions out there, MidoNet pushes intelligence to the edge of the network, as it takes an overlay-based approach to network virtualization and sits on top of any IP-connected network. Given this, MidoNet makes it easier for enterprises to build fully featured, secure and scalable clouds."... |
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Midokura, a global startup focused on network virtualization, today announced the general availability of MidoNet. MidoNet virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms, such as OpenStack. First introduced last Fall to the U.S. market, this solution has been in development for three years. MidoNet is a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution specifically designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Midokura's approach not only adds automation that significantly reduces the human cost (OPEX) of managing the network, but also impacts the overall economics of cloud computing (CAPEX) by simplifying network requirements.