Category Archives: Cloud Servers
Nearly a Half Million Servers May Power Amazon Cloud
Although most end users never get a clear view of the infrastructure underlying the services they consume via Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Accenture Research Manager Huan Liu recently estimated that a whopping 454,400 individual blade servers are currently being used to power that product.
RELATED: Are you paying too much for cloud services?
In a post to his personal blog, Liu said that he used a combination of publicly available data and DNS queries within EC2 to arrive at the total number of server racks in use by the cloud service, then multiplied that by the number of individual servers in each.
However, the researcher said, there are a couple of obvious caveats to his investigation. The total number of servers in each rack is an estimation on his part, and Amazon may well configure its systems differently than he imagines. What's more, any rack without an active instance running on it would be impossible to count, throwing off Liu's accuracy.
Nevertheless, there has been no shortage of media reaction to his post, thanks in part to the fact that it represents one of the best estimates yet of the Amazon cloud's size. The company does not divulge much information on EC2, making such educated guesses necessary.
For more information about enterprise networking, go to NetworkWorld. Story copyright 2011 Network World Inc. All rights reserved.
Original post:
Using Porticor to protect data in a snapshot scenario in AWS – Video
15-03-2012 04:19 Here's an interesting infrastructure as a service scenario: A malicious user gains access to your cloud console by stealing your credentials (or by exploiting vulnerabilities in the cloud access control infrastructure), allowing him access to your cloud servers. Once in, a simple snapshot will move your data to a deferent location of his choice. This risk is in our opinion the most obvious reason for cloud encryption, but surprisingly enough, not all cloud customers are aware of the threat, hence exposing their cloud residing data to a significant risk. This video demonstrates how the Porticor Virtual Data System can protect snapshot images in an encrypted form
Go here to see the original:
Using Porticor to protect data in a snapshot scenario in AWS - Video
CDW – Charles Barkley – New Office – Video
08-03-2012 14:15 cdw.com When Charles Barkley is shown to his new workspace, he can't help but think it looks like something else entirely. CDW and their implementation of the HP Cloud System allowed Gordan & Taylor to increase their usable space, while saving resources, and develop a practice area for their new IT ringer.
Continue reading here:
Cloud Web Hosting Reviews – Australian Cloud Hosting Providers – Video
16-03-2012 04:35 cloudhostingproviders.com.au Cloud Hosting Providers reviews top Australian Cloud Web Hosting companies to help you find the best host for your site. Cloud Hosting providers offer a new approach to hosting your web site instead of hosting it on a single computer (usually shared with hundreds of other sites in shared or reseller hosting), cloud web hosting means your site it hosted "in the cloud" a massive virtual computer comprised of 1000s of powerful servers. This means that there is no chance of a your site crashing when the server crashes, as in the event of problems other servers take up the load. For more information, including reviews of cloud hosting providers and a cloud web hosting comparison tool visit cloudhostingproviders.com.au
View original post here:
Cloud Web Hosting Reviews - Australian Cloud Hosting Providers - Video
HP trots out new line of “self-sufficient” servers
Our insatiable demand for cloud computing services may have created a data centre boom , but cloud service providers and enterprises are still figuring out ways to build cheaper and more efficient data centres.
Indeed, the rising cost of power, cooling equipment and other data centre facilities has been plaguing the IT industry for years. According to Gartner, an average of US$8 million a year is spent on manual IT operations such as installing server updates. Additionally, the tons of energy needed to power the servers and keep the lights can cost companies up to US$29 million over three years.
Earlier this Friday, HP took the wraps off ProLiant Gen8 , a new line of servers designed to slash the cost of data centre operations. The servers are touted to be self-sufficient, which means the machines can take care of themselves by monitoring over 1,600 system parameters and fix problems when necessary. The servers were developed under a two-year US$300 million program dubbed Project Voyager , which HP hopes will redefine data centre economics by automating every aspect of the server lifecycle.
Much of the automation is carried out by a dedicated ILO (integrated lights-out) processor with minimal overheads in system performance, HP executives said during a media briefing in Beijing. The chip will read data from sensors embedded within the system, and notify administrators of impending faults before they occur. That means you could quickly identify, say, a faulty network card without running a whole bunch of diagnostics to find the root cause of your problem.
Besides highlighting system problems, Proliant Gen8 servers can be housed in HPs new intelligent racks that allow data centre administrators to monitor the energy consumption of each server, plus track and manage server inventory on a dashboard. The server uses metallic connectors at its edges that snap into an intelligent rack to relay status data.
The servers, which run on Intels Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors , are available in blade, tower and rack server configurations. They come with PCI Express 3.0 slots, as well as HPs SmartDisk controller tuned for speedy solid-state drives with three-disk mirroring. Upgrading to the latest hardware drivers software updates is also a breeze with HPs Smart Update technology that takes the task off administrators.
When combined with the latest processor technologies, HP claims the Proliant Gen8 can speed up performance of applications such as databases and video streaming by as much as 50 percent. But at least one analyst believes HPs confidence in identifying patterns on how applications are working and applying that insight to optimise performance is overstated.
There is neither the data nor the architecture to provide true application SLA (service level agreement) monitoring, said David Foyer, an analyst at Wikibon , an open IT advisory service. Wikibon believes this should be a strong focus for ProLiant Gen9. Server administration will need to migrate to management of virtual machines and applications.
Enterprises that need a little more help with managing the Gen8 machines can turn to HP Insight Online, a new cloud-based, IT management portal that offers support services from HP Insight Remote Support and HP services.
HP says the new support portal will improve IT productivity by automatically retrieving and managing system health, asset and warranty information, eliminating as much as 90 percent of the time used to track contract and warranty details, and 85 percent for asset configuration data.
Continued here:
Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers
Summary: Recent research indicates that Amazons EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million serverseach of them running a variation of Red Hat Linux for their base operating system.
Almost half-a-million Amazon cloud servers run Linux every day.
We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadnt know that Amazons Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.
Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.
While Amazon has never officially said what its running as EC2s base operating system, its generally accepted that its a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On top of that, for the virtual machines, Amazon uses the Xen hypervisor to host Linux; OpenSolaris; Solaris; Windows 2003 and 2008; and FreeBSD and NetBSD virtual machine instances.
Amazon also doesnt talk about how many servers their popular cloud is made up of, so Huang had to work it out. He explained, Figuring out EC2s size is not trivial. Part of the reason is that EC2 provides you with virtual machines and it is difficult to know how many virtual machines are active on a physical host. Thus, even if we can determine how many virtual machines are there, we still cannot figure out the number of physical servers. Instead of focusing on how many servers are there, our methodology probes for the number of server racks out there.
Huang continued, It may sound harder to probe for the number of server racks. Luckily, EC2 uses a regular pattern of IP address assignment, which can be exploited to correlate with server racks. We noticed the pattern by looking at a lot of instances we launched over time and running traceroutes between our instances.
Then Understanding the pattern allows us to deduce how many racks are there. In particular, if we know a virtual machine at a certain internal IP address (e.g., 10.2.13.243), then we know there is a rack using the /22 address range (e.g., a rack at 10.2.12.x/22). If we take this to the extreme where we know the IP address of at least one virtual machine on each rack, then we can see all racks in EC2.
By itself, though, thats not enough. You could use try to use port-scanning to work ot how many servers there are, but that would violate Amazons terms of service. So instead, since each Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance also has an external IP address. we can leverage DNS translation to figure out the internal IP addresses.
With that data, he was able to work out the number of server racks. With this he then just multiplied by the number of physical servers on the rack. Unfortunately, we do not know how many physical servers are on each rack, so we have to make assumptions. We assume Amazon has dense racks, each rack has 4 10U chassis, and each chassis holds 16 blades for a total of 64 blades/rack.
Read the rest here:
Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers
Cloud Desktop from Compute Blocks – Video
27-02-2012 17:45 Cloud Desktop technology is an innovative new method for delivering desktops to end users. From the end user's perspective a Cloud Desktop looks and behaves exactly like a traditional PC, but instead of residing locally, all software and data are housed in our state-of-the-art Tier-3/4 datacentres. A Cloud Desktop solution from Compute Blocks offers numerous advantages in terms of security, cost, resilience, flexibility and simplified management. Compute Blocks is a white label cloud service provider which enables independent IT service providers to compete within the cloud services market space and develop their own profitable recurring revenue stream. We enable our partners to deploy ready to use Compute Blocks services in order to target their specific market sectors. Visit Us here: http://www.computeblocks.com Our services Include Cloud Desktop Cloud Servers Cloud Exchange Mail Cloud Back-Up Virtual Private Cloud Dedicated Private Cloud
Link:
Linux servers keep growing, Windows & Unix keep shrinking
Summary: 2011 saw, according to IDC, Linux servers grow while Windows and Unix servers numbers shrank. In 2012, Linuxs server future looks brighter than ever.
Linux servers are soaring.
In 2011, we saw, according to IDCs latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew for Linux while it shrank for Windows and Unix. What I find especially interesting about this is that IDC doesnt measure when you or your company install Linux on a bare-metal server or a re-purposed server, which is historically how Linux got into companies, but only servers with Linux already pre-installed.
That means more and more customers are asking IBM, HP and Dell, the big three server hardware vendors, for Linux on their hardware. Specifically, IDC found that Linux server demand was positively impacted by high performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments, as hardware revenue improved 2.2% year over year in 4Q11 to $2.6 billion. Linux servers now represent 18.4% of all server revenue, up 1.7 points when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.
Its competitors? Windows server demand subsided slightly in 4Q11 as hardware revenue decreased 1.5% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $6.5 billion for Windows servers represented 45.8% of overall quarterly factory revenue, up 2.6 points over the prior years quarter.
As has long been the case, Unix is the server operating system that really got knocked around. Unix servers experienced a revenue decline of 10.7% year over year to $3.4 billion representing 24.2% of quarterly server revenue for the quarter. IBM grew Unix server revenue 2.5% year-over-year and gained 7.9 points of Unix server market share when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.
What that translates into is fourth-ranked Oracle experienced a year-over-year revenue decline of 11.5% in 4Q11 to a 5.2% share of market while Fujitsu, ranked number 5, experienced a 10.5% decrease in factory revenue holding 3.4% revenue share in 4Q10. While Oracle also has a Linux distribution for IDCs hardware server measurement purposes, Oracle and Fujitsu saw their income go down as their Solaris Unix-powered systems continue to decline.
As Jim Zemlin, chairman of The Linux Foundation observed in his blog, IDC attributes some of that Linux success to its role in what the analyst firm calls density-optimized machines, which are really just white box servers, and are responsible for a lot of the growth in the server market. These machines have gained popularity in a space still squeezed on budget and that continues to be commoditized. But there are other factors at play for Linuxs success over its rivals.
These are, Zemlin wrote, Our latest survey of the worlds largest enterprise Linux users found that Total Cost of Ownership, technical superiority and security were the top three drivers for Linux adoption. These points support Linuxs maturity and recent success. Everyone is running their data centers with Linux. Stock exchanges, supercomputers, transportation systems and much more are using Linux for mission-critical workloads.
In addition, Linuxs growth owes a lot to the accelerated pace by which companies are migrating to the cloud. Long a buzzword, the cloud is getting real, right now. While there is still work to do for Linux and the cloud, there is no denying its dominant role in todays biggest cloud companies: Amazon and Google to name just two.
Read the original:
DotNetNuke Tutorial – Great hosting tool – PowerDNN Control Suite – part 2/3 – Video #311 – Video
10-03-2012 11:54 http://www.DNNHero.com - This video will go through the ins and outs of hosting a DNN site on PowerDNN cloud servers. It will also demonstrate their own server tool called PowerDNN Control Suite which helps people get up and running quickly with their DNN sites. This is part 1 of 3.
See the rest here:
DotNetNuke Tutorial - Great hosting tool - PowerDNN Control Suite - part 2/3 - Video #311 - Video
Saving File On Internet – Cloud Computing – Video
15-03-2012 03:10 How to save file on internet ? What is Cloud Computing ? Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).[1] Cloud computing provides computation, software applications, data access,data management and storage resources without requiring cloud users to know the location and other details of the computing infrastructure. End users access cloud based applications through a web browser or a light weight desktop or mobile app while the business software and data are stored on servers at a remote location. Cloud application providers strive to give the same or better service and performance than if the software programs were installed locally on end-user computers. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of infrastructure convergence (or Converged Infrastructure) and shared services.[2] This type of data centre environment allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with easier manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to more rapidly adjust IT resources (such as servers, storage, and networking) to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.[3][4]
Read more: