Realcloud Project

CERN, another “big giant” that is going to use OpenStack (currently deploying)

ccebrian — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:00:04 +0000

CERN is another “big giant” that is going to use OpenStack. In fact, right now is deploying the OpenStack cloud this month, and it has already been in use by pilot testers with 250 new VMs being created each day.

The figures are impressive: 150.000 virtual machine, running on 16.000 physical machines distributed in two DataCenters (the oldest in Genève and the new one in Budapest) that will provide IaaS to Nearly 11,000 physicists across the globe working on official CERN experiments would be eligible to use this private cloud: “Scientists will be able to request whatever amount of CPU, memory, and storage space they need. They will also be able to get a virtual machine with the requested amounts within 15 minutes”.

This approach let media publish that:

150,000 cloud virtual machines will help solve mysteries of the Universe

OpenStack, Puppet used to build cloud for world’s largest particle accelerator.

The full new and more details can be read in:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/150000-cloud-virtual-machines-will-help-solve-mysteries-of-the-universe/?utm_campaign=Tweets+Q2+2013&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_content=42817

Tissat becomes part of the “UK CloudStore” (G-Cloud)

ccebrian — Wed, 08 May 2013 18:14:00 +0000

I am absolutely proud of announcing that TISSAT has got into the “UK CloudStore”, a UK Government marketplace designed to make the process of selecting Cloud services easier, simpler and quite cheaper for Public Sector Procurement Officers.

This success becomes more important because the UK Government has just confirmed that it has adopted a ‘Cloud First’ policy (similar to the US one), making it mandatory for buyers of IT products and services in central government to consider purchases through the cloud as their first option: Cabinet Office Minister said that the policy will drive wider adoption of cloud computing in the public sector, boosting business through the G-Cloud programme’s CloudStore, and ensuring the public sector buys IT in a ‘quicker, cheaper, more competitive way’.

This is the TISSAT’s press release:

Tissat, 07th May 2013 – Tissat, Spanish company specializing in the Mission-Critical Outsourcing and Cloud Computing services, has been successful as a supplier under the Governments G-Cloud framework within the United Kingdom. Thus, Tissat becomes part of the UK Cloud Store, a platform for suppliers to offer their services for Cloud computing created by the British government.

Thus, the British government intends to promote maximum transparency in procurement of such cloudservices within the public sector. These enable a channel for the acquisition of products and services, as a catalog “on line” that contains all the information from various providers and the services they offer.

Moreover, being successful suppliers it may be seen as a product and/or service with good value for money, quick and efficient offering quality solutions at reasonable prices.

—————

About Tissat

Tissat, Spanish company leader in asset management technology and provider of Cloud Computing services, ContactCenter and Business Development, possess an excellent position in the provision of services and application development for the end client, under a model of efficiency and management energy management unique at European level. Its new CPD, Walhalla (Tier IV) represents an industrialization model of own designed CPD own ready to host cloud computing services and able to provide international hosting.

UK Cloud Store (G-Cloud Services)

ccebrian — Thu, 02 May 2013 11:14:00 +0000

Roughly a year ago, the UK government opens CloudStore procurement system: a marketplace designed to make the process of selecting Cloud services easier, simpler and quite cheaper for public sector procurement officers. The market place is known both as “UK Cloud Store” and as “G-Cloud Services”, and now the third RFP (Request For Proposals) to become a G-Cloud provider is just finished.

Unfortunately this governmental policy is the only one in Europe, in fact with that step the UK Government seems to me (let me say that I’m Spanish and I’m proud of it, so I’m not biased) to be the only European one that, even earlier to be published, is practicing European Cloud Computing Strategy announced by Ms. Neelie Kroes (the EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda) on September, the 25^th: removing regulatory barriers, building trust in the market, building the business case for cloud adoption, protect consumers’ rights to control their data, promoting standardisation and interoperability, and so on. So, by the way, I cannot understand how UK is place in the 7^th place in Business Software Alliance (BSA) report about “the best 24 countries prepared for the Cloud”; just after other European countries as Germany, France, Italy, and very closely followed by Spain in the 9^th position.

About that kind of governmental policies, let me repeat my very particular opinion: disregarding what other important laws (as the ones stated in the BSA report or in the European Digital Agenda recommendations) and governmental policies (also analyzed by the great Consulting companies), the US Government with its “First Cloud” policy and the UK Convergent with its “UK Cloud Store” that pursue to foster the Cloud market in the US or UK Administration organisms are quite incentive and will help to foster the private Cloud market too. Of course the private initiative is important, but some kind of public incentive will accelerate it specially in Europe (where public sector influence in IT business is more important than in USA.); indeed, the US government is practising that policy, may be for different reasons, or for that ones and others.

G-Cloud sales data is now made publicly available by the Cabinet Office as a spreadsheet, a great example of the transparency agenda within government. The current data covers all G-Cloud sales over the last 13 months. And that data are a probe of my opinion, (please let me mention that I’ve copied some pictures from Andy Powell’s post ):

13 months Summary: from 2012-03 until 2013-03:

Total spend by month:

If we drawn this data, the picture shows a exponential growth curve with a sharp rise in sales during March this year, something that has been blogged about by various people:

Besides the spent by lot has been the following:

That clearly shows a bigger interest in Consulting Services.

Moreover, relating to the most active agents, in one hand, the 10 top buyers (by spend) have been the next organisms:

And, in the other hand, the 10 top providers (by sales) have been the next companies:

The New ECHO platform of Tissat for emergency and citizen security

ccebrian — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:07:00 +0000

The platform is mainly intended for providing an advanced infrastructure for Public Emergency Systems (as the European 112 phone number or the USD 911 and so on) but also appropriate for other kind of emergency or security services (as fire brigades, policy, health emergency, and so forth). The new system incorporates from traditional tools, as identification of the exact place of the incident, as modern ones, as video transmission from the operating brigades or vehicles displaced to the incident place, and favours information exchange between the emergency and security services.

The new technological ECHO platform offers the most efficient management and coordination of all the services intervening in an emergency. The incorporates a georeferencing tool which allows operators to identify the exact location of the incident, wherever the person requesting an intervention may be located, and it speeds up the information interchange between emergency and security services. Moreover, the coordination between the organizations and agencies attending incidents is another of the main aspects which improves the platform; transferring real-time information automatically to the emergency and security services of the various Public Administrations in order to set up a suitable contingent to face the event.

In this way, the participation and coordination between the various organizations involved are reinforced, such as the Local Police, National Police, Civil Guard, Fire Brigades, Heath Emergency, and the Military Emergencies Units, in order to improve operations as much as possible.

In words of Carmen García, the Commercial Director of Tissat, “this platform offers a more agile, flexible tool to manage and follow-up tool the emergency, so the response time is shorter because data transfers become more agile from the time the call is made to when action commences”.

Tissat has translated its more than 15 year experience in maintaining and developing emergency solutions to the development of his system with the idea of “responding to new citizen requirements in this way by modernising and updating emergences management comprehensively in order to achieve better efficiency in rendering this public service”.

This system is also a partial result of the R&D “CERI” project developed by Tissat with the partial funding help of “AVANZA2” programme of the Spanish Government (via the “Ministerio de Industria, Energía y Turismo”) with the collaboration of European Union (FEDER).

This project is still under development, and new results are expected that will let TISSAT to add new features to the system in short , after the appropriate work of debugging, stabilizing, and “productizing” as well as other related tasks, that let us to convert the R&D results in a product/service.

Cloud Movements (2nd part): Oracle’s fight against itself (and the OpenStack role)

ccebrian — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:37:00 +0000

In a last week post (I use, or try, to do one per week, but last week there were a couple, thanks to OpenStack Grizzly delivery) I analyzed last Cloud movements of traditional IT giants; specifically we speak about HP and IBM: both of them just embraced OpenStack (in short, “HP Cloud” was built on OpenStack and IBM announced that all of its cloud offerings would be built around OpenStack). And I promise to speak in a coming post (this one) about the complex and eclectic Oracle’s position about Cloud, that ranges from disdaining Cloud Computing (e.g. Larry Ellison called cloud computing “nonsense” in 2009), to the recent Nimbula acquisition (Nimbula is a company that makes private cloud technology).

My thesis about Oracle position is, I announced in the previous post, that Oracle is fighting against itself: I mean, its traditional and profitable business model is challenged by the Cloud model, and it has been delaying its adoption as much as possible (may be too much?), as IBM did when its mainframes ran mission-critical applications on legacy databases, and a new (by then) generation of infrastructure vendors (DEC, HP, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle) challenged it and disrupted the old IBM model: it was conflicted about selling the lower-priced, lower-margin servers needed to run them. (Note: since this a continuation of a previous post, let me to follow the numeration of that analysis, and start at point three)

3) Oracle and its CEO Larry Ellison used to disdain Cloud Computing (e.g. he called cloud computing “nonsense” in 2009) and there was a god reason to don’t permit Amazon-style metered pricing for Oracle’s mainstream database and middleware: for example, according to prices of spring 2012, a traditional 11g database license then would cost $2.8 million, it would cost less than $9 per hour using Oracle’s mySQL on Amazon. However, in spite of that, its unclear strategy have evolving over time:

Ellison founded NetSuite, one of the earliest SaaS players,
last fall Oracle announced a new an Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing offering to,
and a few days ago Oracle said that it has bought Nimbula that in 2012 joined OpenStack; therefore Oracle, that so far has not been a member of the OpenStack community, will eventually have an interaction with open-source OpenStack project. Nimbula is a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. It’s also interesting that Nimbula was founded by Chris Pinkham, one of the people who created Amazon’s cloud and managed the development of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Besides, Nimbula’s main product is “Nimbula Director”, which allows enterprises and service providers to build large-scale, fully functional infrastructure services from bare metal in a matter of hours, and isolates customers from the operational and hardware complexities associated with deploying a private, hybrid or public cloud. So, at least, by proxy Oracle will have a place set for it at the OpenStack table. They’ll look across at other enterprise giants, such as VMware, which also by proxy joined OpenStack when it acquired Nicira (or IBM, HP, Dell as already analyzed in the previous post). According to oracle “Nimbula’s product is complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings”.
According to Oracle, much of this efforts around cloud computing have been in providing hardware and software to run private clouds, through engineered systems such as Exalogic, and by customizing its databases, applications and middleware to run in cloud configurations (you can see its offer here).
However, in my opinion, contrary to Oracle’s claims, neither its Exadata database machine nor its database appliance is a cloud strategy, because both strategies base their pricing on peak capacity, not on elastic metering (and a typical application runs most of the time at only 40 percent of its peak capacity.
The reason for that is that, although Oracle clearly has the technical wherewithal to compete with the new databases that are powering cloud-based applications (Web 2.0, big data applications and so on), however so far they’re conflicted about how to handle metered pricing in these environments: i.e. changing the resources, processes and values that underpin its business model in order to support metered pricing is immensely challenging because the transition to metered pricing would dramatically erode Oracle’s revenue and 45 percent of its operating profit margins (see George Gilbert’s post titled in Oracle has a cloud computing secret from where I take most of my information and ideas about). That is why Oracle is resisting metered pricing that implies the Cloud model.

In conclusion, the traditional technology giants are under pressure from investors to maintain revenues, and so far license and maintenance revenue have been the main, while cloud revenue services has historically been seen as a depreciation of these revenues. However, according to Gartner, the fastest-growing segment within the IT market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment: cloud compute services were expected to grow 48.7 percent in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011. Therefore the big traditional IT players are realizing that cloud is the way of the future (and the present) and the only way to keep their revenues, as Amazon is continuously showing us.

Consequently, at the last, the traditional technology giants are finally moving away from legacy practices (namely, license and maintenance fees) to the Cloud. So, as derivate consequence, there’s been, and will continue to be, consolidation occurring in the market since this big companies will continue to pick up important cloud pieces out there to build out full and impressive cloud portfolio and offers.

As result of a 517 contributor effort, OpenStack Grizzly is here

ccebrian — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:06:00 +0000

All the following paragraphs are copied from http://www.openstack.org/software/grizzly/

So I recommend you to read it there, but for your convenience they are quoted below.

Note: a short video is available here:

OpenStack Grizzly

OpenStack Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, has more than 230 new features to support production operations at scale and greater integration with enterprise technologies. The OpenStack community continues to attract the best developers and experts in their disciplines with more than 517 contributors making 7,620 updates in the Grizzly release.

New Features in Grizzly

OpenStack Compute

Compute delivers improved production operations at greater scale, with “Cells” to manage distributed clusters and the “NoDB” host architecture to reduce reliance on a central database. Improvements in virtualization management deliver new features and greater support for multiple hypervisors, including ESX, KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V. Additional functionality was added for bare metal provisioning, shared storage protocols and online networking features such as the ability to hot add/remove network devices.

OpenStack Object Storage

Cloud operators can now take advantage of quotas to automatically control the growth of their object storage environments. Additionally, the ability to perform bulk operations makes it easier to deploy and manage large clusters and provides an improved experience for end users. Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enables browser connections directly to the back-end storage environment, improving the performance and scalability of web-integrated object storage clusters.

OpenStack Block Storage

The second full release of OpenStack Block Storage delivers a full storage service for managing heterogeneous storage environments from a centralized access point. A new intelligent scheduler allows cloud end users to allocate storage based on the workload, whether they are looking for performance, efficiency, or cost effectiveness. The community also added drivers for a diverse selection of backend storage devices, including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire, and Zadara.

OpenStack Networking

The leading network-as-a-service platform enables advanced network automation, allowing users to control their networking technology of choice. Those choices grew tremendously with the Grizzly release, with the addition of support for Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet to complement the existing support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow. OpenStack Networking achieves greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services across multiple servers. A new load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) framework and API lays the groundwork for further innovation from the broad base of networking companies already integrating with OpenStack.

OpenStack Dashboard

OpenStack Dashboard brings an improved user experience, greater multilingual support, and exposes new features across OpenStack clouds, like Networking and LBaaS. The Grizzly Dashboard is also backwards compatible with the Folsom release, allowing users to take advantage of additional features in their Folsom cloud prior to a full upgrade to the latest version.

OpenStack Identity

A new token format based on standard PKI functionality provides major performance improvements and allows offline token authentication by clients without requiring additional Identity service calls. OpenStack Identity also delivers more organized management of multi-tenant environments with support for groups, impersonation, role-based access controls (RBAC), and greater capability to delegate administrative tasks.

OpenStack Image Service

There were major advancements in image sharing between cloud end users, and the creation of a set of common properties on images to provide more discoverable images and better performance when retrieving images.

Cloud Movements: HP, IBM, Oracle vs. Amazon (& the CIA private cloud deal): OpenStack role

ccebrian — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:29:00 +0000

Some posts ago I stated that Personal Cloud market is immature: in fact, as although I suggested it in my last post ”the cloud industry is still in its infancy”, and in that analysis found objectively that the Cloud market has a lot of features that show it. However, for example, a very recent fact that add a new point to this “maturity” controversy is that Amazon signed a few days ago a very significant and important deal with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to build the agency a private cloud (a 10-year contract valued at $600 million).

So, let me say that general cloud market is not mature, but I couldn’t say immature (please forgive me for this easy words game): disregarding at the moment other features of this market (as its great dynamism, players are coming from different IT areas, prices policy not easy to compare, different performances, weak SLAs, etc.) I agree that some players are in this market since long time, and one of them, Amazon, with its Amazon Web Services (AWS), holds about 70 percent of the IaaS market (depending on the different reports and analysis) and it’s both the big innovator in this market and its big driver (making it affordable, accessible, and broadly relevant to the current IT market, because it has a well built cloud services catalogue that it’s continuously widen and making benefit from it), but so far (or until very recently) some big IT players as HP, IBM, Oracle and others are outside (or almost) of this market, so mergers, acquisitions and consolidation have been expected to happen not only on Service Providers (as we’ll see further in this post) but also in solution vendors (e.g. a few mints ago VmWare acquires Nicira to adds cloud networking functionalities to its platform as well as very recently acquires Virsto too, to add an object storage solution to its emerging cloud platform built it from its impressive virtualization solution).

Yes, I mention specially those 3 giants (HP, IBM and Oracle) because recently they move and step into this market with a very different policy they have done until then, and I’m going to lightly analyze their last movements:

1) Some months ago, after to have been trying to develop its own solution, HP embrace OpenStack and announced that its “HP Cloud” was built on OpenStack (good for an OpenStack supporter as I am), which could be attractive for enterprise managers worried about being locked into a Cloud Provider or Vendor, but be careful about that: i.e., since HP uses an real Open Platform it bets and offers openness and portability, but since they offer proprietary extras you could fall partially captive of its approach:

HP Cloud IaaS services include, for example:

“HP Cloud Object Storage”, i.e. HP’s version of Amazon S3 (.12 per gigabyte).
Also, of course, HP includes compute resources (the smallest offering delivers 1GB of RAM for .04 per hour, cheaper than RackSpace that charges .06 per hour for a 1GB machine).
HP also offers a CDN (Content Delivery Network) Services (built into this object store, but at .12 per gigabyte)
and “HP Cloud Block Storage Services”.

According to Gartner its SLA (Service Level Agreements) are quite bad, only Amazon have worst SLA, but I don’t doubt the former will improve them as the time (and service) goes by, and the latter when needed (forced by competition, when some company really challenges its market prevalence).
Finally, besides IaaS service, HP also offers PaaS services or border line services as “MySQL as a Service” or a plug-in for moving Drupal installations to its IaaS, and so on.

2) A couple of weeks ago, IBM announced that all of its cloud offerings would be built around OpenStack, once again a great for the fans of this open source cloud platform. According to IBM, they will not offer its own packaged version of the OpenStack (as RackSpace, StackOps or Red Hat are doing), but to include OpenStack in their approaches.

In one hand, unlike RackSpace or HP (mentioning only examples companies that use OpenStack), IBM doesn’t have a Public Cloud yet although is published in its web site, there’s not self-service model (as required by NIST to see Cloud Computing): you have to contact and wait for the phone back to you.
In the other hand, so far IBM has Private Cloud software approach, SmartCloud Foundation, which offered (according to IBM) much the same functionality as OpenStack and they donated functionality from its “SmartCloud Foundation” product to the Folsom release of OpenStack (indeed IBM is the third big code contributor to OpenStack Folsom release), however from now on all future versions of SmartCloud Foundation will be built around OpenStack, but adding features as management, security, orchestration, and more: in fact, the first product to bundle OpenStack is “IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator”, now in beta testing phase, which enables customers to compose cloud services using a drag-and-drop interface. The Private loud seems to me the natural market at the moment for IBM; in fact IBM claims that it had 5,000 private cloud customers as of last year.
Taking advantage of OpenStack interoperability, IBM working toward making workloads portable from cloud to cloud, avoiding cloud lock-in (perhaps the primary inhibitor to public cloud adoption, after security, as already stated in a previous post). By the way, OpenStack includes in its next version, “Grizzly”, scheduled for 4 April 2013, an incubator module called “Heat”, that will provide a Basic Cloud Orchestration & Service Definition, i.e. to orchestrate multiple composite cloud applications via a template format as AWS CloudFormation does. But IBM plans going quite farther even, and it’s fostering an emerging Oasis standard known as Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA): a way of describing a workload application that’s independent of the actual infrastructure that’s running it.

Next post will focus in the Oracle’s changing and maybe misunderstood Cloud position (Oracle and its CEO Larry Ellison used to disdain Cloud Computing, e.g. he called cloud computing “nonsense” in 2009), that in some way reminds me the IBM’s one when its mainframes ran mission-critical applications on legacy databases, and a new (by then) generation of infrastructure vendors (DEC, HP, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle) challenged it and disrupted the old IBM model: it was conflicted about selling the lower-priced, lower-margin servers needed to run them.

Cloud Computing Countries Ranking, or the Cloud Confusion even among market analyses (BSA vs Gartner vs IDC)

ccebrian — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Roughly 1 month ago I read a Roel Castelein’s post about the problem of Cloud Computing in Europe . I copy the first lines of it because I think it’s a good explanation and pretty ingenious metaphor about what it is happening:

When shopping on a fruits and vegetables market, we take many things for granted; like all stall holders speak the same language, we can pay for the goods with the same currency for a fixed price by a standardized measurement and ordering what we want is straight forward. But what would happen if all these conventions were absent? Like when asking for an apple with one stall holder, we need sign language, to point out apples with a stick (sold only by crate), pay in bags of salt. His neighboring stall holder offers apples only by piece, measured by weight, and payable by copper coins, and ordered by crayon drawings. This would be confusing for the consumer, and market growth would be hindered by a lack of standardization and transparency. This is what the Cloud Services Industry resembles at the moment.

It’s a clear evidence of the cloud industry is still in its infancy, and that post follows analyzing the EU Commission policy based on a IDC survey (conduceted in behalf of EU Commission and that you can get it here) that I also analysed so months ago (¿Tienen futuro los servicios Cloud europeos?, ¿y los españoles? and in the post titled ”Cloud Computing and the EU Digital Agenda: A step in the right way“).

But the above Roel’s simile, in my opinion, also reflects what is happening in the area of Consulting companies when they analyze the Cloud market. To explain my point, let me summarize some ideas that I’ve already showed in previous posts analyzing the opinion of DC and Gartner, and contrasting them against the recent ones of BSA:

1) On September, the 25^th, the EU Commissioner for Digital Agenda (Ms. Neelie Kroes) said “Today we launch a significant package of measures to build that trust and boost our economic future. Today we make Europe not just cloud-friendly: but cloud active. And we offer our economy a160 billion-euro boost”. And those words were based in IDC report that analyses the business barriers for adopting the Cloud in Europe: These barriers have not stopped public cloud adoption so far, but have limited the number of cloud solutions adopted.

The IDC recommendations for the most relevant policy actions (which should be included in the European Cloud Computing Strategy to create a “cloud friendly and proactive environment” in the EU and maximize the chances of achieving the benefits identified in the “Policy-driven” scenario) were:

Removing Regulatory Barriers
Building Trust in the Market
Protect Consumers’ Rights to Control Their Data and to Be Forgotten
Promoting Standardisation and Interoperability
Building the Business Case for Cloud Adoption
Contributing to the Business Case for High-speed Broadband Infrastructures

2) Besides of the IDC report, I also analyzed (just a couple of months before the IDC report) a Gartner report titled “Europe behind the US on cloud”, according to Gartner. It stated that “The opportunities for cloud computing value are valid all over the world, and the same is true for some of the risks and costs. However, some of cloud computing’s potential risks and costs – namely security, transparency and integration – which are generally applicable worldwide, take on a different meaning in Europe”. And they present the 4 main problems to justify its statement:

First, the Europe’s diverse and ever-changing data privacy regulations inhibit the movement of personal data to the cloud.

Second, the complexity of business-to-business multi-enterprise integration and processes.

Third, EU policy-making processes and practices can hinder business.

Fourth, the effect on investment of the debt crisis in the eurozone.

3) And, finally, a few days ago I read the Business Software Alliance (BSA) report about the best 24 countries prepared for the Cloud; first of all, I must be honest and recognize that BSA is not my favourite because of the way they use to get its goals, but they have a lot of media and they use to do good market analysis (disregarding the final goal of them):

Surprise!, the top ten that have more robust policies for business in the cloud are Japan, Australia, Germany, United States, France, Italy, UK, Korea, Spain, and Singapore. (Note at the bottom of this post you’ll find the complete ranking).

OK, as a Spanish technician, I’m proud to be in the ninth place, if it would be correct). Moreover, as European, I’m also happy when I see German in the 3^rd place, and France in the 5^th, Italy in the 6^th and United Kingdom in the 7^th (by thaw way, let me say it again, Spain in the 9^th) … and according that study the US is behind Germany in the 4^th place, and tightly, as aforesaid, followed by France, Italy and UK. According to the BSA market analyses the main cuties of EU economy seam to do, all together, the things better than others …so, what happens with the Gartner’s Analyses?.

First of all (disregarding the final goals of BSA, that I don’t want to analyze because probably I won’t be fair) we should to quote its words and we can summarize them in that “the countries were scored, taking into account their laws and regulations for provision of cloud watching seven areas: data privacy, cyber security, cyber crime control, preservation of intellectual property, technology interoperability and legal harmonization, free trade, and infrastructure IT”. Quoting again BSA, Japan, the first country in the raking, has a comprehensive suite of modern laws that support and facilitate the digital economy and cloud computing — from comprehensive privacy legislation that avoids burdens on data transfers and data controllers to a full range of criminal and IP law protections. Further, Japan is a leader in the Japan has a comprehensive suite of modern laws that support and facilitate the digital economy and cloud computing — from comprehensive privacy legislation that avoids burdens on data transfers and data controllers to a full range of criminal and IP law protections”.

Therefore, BSA proposes seven policies that Governments should strengthen to expand economic opportunities in the cloud computing solutions, and in fact its analysis is based in the following that “seven policy categories that measure the countries’ preparedness to support the growth of cloud computing”:

1 – Protecting the privacy of users by allowing the free flow of information and commerce.

2 – Promote advanced cybersecurity practices without requiring the use of specific technologies.

3 – Fighting cybercrime with clear measures and actions against the perpetrators.

4 – Provide protection strengthened against the misappropriation and breach of cloud technologies.

5 – Encourage openness and interoperability between cloud providers.

6 – To promote free trade, reducing barriers and eliminate preferences for certain products or companies.

7 – Provide incentives for private sector to invest in broadband infrastructure and promote digital inclusion.

Well, in you’ve compared what any report say, you probably understand my point: there’s cloud confusion even among the Consulting companies.

About that kind of governmental policies, let me state my very particular opinion: disregarding what other important laws (as the ones stated in the BSA report or in the European Digital Agenda recommendations) and governmental policies (also analyzed by the great Consulting companies), the US Government with its “First Cloud” policy and the UK Convergent with its “UK Cloud Store” that pursue to foster the Cloud market in the US or UK Administration organisms are quite incentive and will help to foster the private Cloud market too. Of course the private initiative is important, but some kind of public incentive will accelerate it specially in Europe (where public sector influence in IT business is more important than in USA. ); indeed, the US government is practising that policy, may be for different reasons, or for that ones and others.

Let me finalize quoting the whole ranking and the scores of 24 countries surveyed by BSA:

01 – Japan – 83.3
02 – Australia – 79 2
03 – Germany – 79.0
04 – United States – 78.6
05 – France – 78.4
06 – Italy – 76.6
07 – United Kingdom – 76.6
08 – Korea – 76.0
09 – Spain – 73.9
10 – Singapore – 72.2
11 – Poland – 70.7
12 – Canada – 70.4
13 – Malaysia – 59.2
14 – Mexico – 56.4
15 – Argentina – 55.0
16 – Russia-52.3
17 – Turkey – 52.1
18 – South Africa – 50.4
19 – India – 50.0
20 – Indonesia – 49.7
21 – China – 47.5
22 – Thailand – 42.6
23 – Vietnam – 39.5
24 – Brazil- 35.1

Here you can find the full BSA report

Interoute y Tissat refuerzan su acuerdo de colaboración para ofrecer servicios de Consultoría TIC

ccebrian — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:04:00 +0000

Interoute colabora con su amplia oferta de infraestructura de comunicaciones y sus Centros de Datos Europeos y Tissat aportará su experiencia en soluciones en DRP (Recuperación de Desastres) y continuidad de negocio, Cloud, Backup y Escritorio Virtual as a Service, entre otros servicios

Interoute, el operador con la mayor plataforma de servicios cloud de Europa, ha firmado un acuerdo de colaboración y apoyo mutuo con Tissat, propietaria del centro de datos más avanzado de Europa denominado Walhalla, para impulsar los servicios de Consultoría TIC a nivel internacional.

En virtud de este acuerdo, Tissat aportará su experiencia en proyectos de consultoría TIC especialmente en soluciones de Recuperación de la información ante Desastres y Continuidad de Negocio, además de sus soluciones cloud IaaS Storage as a Service, Backup as a Service y Escritorio Virtual as a Service, que completan la oferta de IaaS de Interoute con su servicio en sus Centro de Datos distribuidos por Europa. Además, Tissat aporta sus soluciones verticales de Estrategia Social Media, Social CRM, Social Buzz Monitoring, Social E-Commerce, Colaborative – Crowd-Computing, Gestión de Flotas, Cuadro de Mandos, Movilidad Urbana y Administración Electrónica.

Por su parte, Interoute colabora con su amplia oferta de infraestructura de comunicaciones y sus diferentes Centros de Datos Europeos, entre los que figuran los propios de Tissat, ya que ambas empresas mantienen un acuerdo de colaboración desde enero de 2012, por el que Tissat se integra en la red paneuropea del operador, permitiendo a ambas empresas ofrecer servicios de manera conjunta en esta red de Centros de Datos.

Walhalla es el único centro de datos español y uno de los principales europeos que puede ofrecer servicios de alojamiento de datos y aplicaciones a las empresas con las máximas garantías de seguridad y confidencialidad de los datos allí alojados, así como disponibilidad y continuidad del servicio. Dispone de capacidad para guardar todos los datos de empresas e instituciones con un volumen de información importante, desde administraciones públicas a grandes multinacionales.

En palabras de Carmen García, Directora de Tissat Madrid, “es un placer para nosotros ampliar el objeto de colaboración del acuerdo que ya manteníamos con una empresa del prestigio de Interoute, aportando nuevas soluciones y servicios, ya que ambas empresas podemos, desde la colaboración, revalorizar y diversificar nuestra oferta y ampliar el ámbito de nuestras colaboraciones”.

Diego Matas, director general de Interoute Iberia, ha comentado: “Tissat aporta un valor añadido a nuestra oferta de soluciones y estamos satisfechos de reforzar nuestro acuerdo y seguir colaborando juntos para satisfacer la demanda de nuestros clientes”.

Nota:

Interoute es la compañía propietaria y operadora de la red privada de voz y datos más avanzada y mejor conectada de Europa, con más de 60.000 Km. de fibra iluminada, 9 centros de datos integrados en su infraestructura, 32 centros especializados de alojamiento compartido de equipos (co-location) integrados en la red y conexiones con 140 centros de datos gestionados por terceros en toda Europa. Su plataforma Unified ICT da servicio a compañías internacionales de diversos sectores, desde los antiguos monopolios de telecomunicaciones de Europa y los principales operadores de América del Norte, Este y Sur de Asia a gobiernos y universidades. Estas organizaciones encuentran en Interoute al socio idóneo para gestionar sus soluciones de telecomunicaciones y el desarrollo de servicios de Valor Añadido.

Su estrategia Unified ICT ha demostrado ser muy atractiva para organizaciones que buscan una plataforma escalable, segura y sin restricciones para alojar sus aplicaciones de voz, vídeo, informática y datos, así como para los proveedores de servicios que necesitan alta capacidad internacional para tránsito de datos e infraestructura. Con operaciones en los principales países europeos, Norteamérica y Dubái, Interoute también posee y opera redes metropolitanas en los principales centros de negocios de Europa.

Personal Cloud Services Comparison

ccebrian — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:49:00 +0000

Recently (on 12 February 2013) Gartner has published its “MarketScope for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing”. Quoting to Gartner, “Enterprise file synchronization and sharing (EFSS) offerings enable productivity and collaboration for mobile workers who use multiple devices, such as smartphones and media tablets, in addition to PCs. Organizations must deploy EFSS services to secure enterprise information assets. Failure to provide these capabilities will subject organizations to information leakage threats caused by users who move data through uncontrolled personal cloud services”.

When I read this article, I recognize the generalization (as the same Gartner states in its report) of the concept of “Personal Cloud” (going, and widening, from the personal needs to the workers and company needs: the EFSS, subject on which I come back in the future), about what I spoke several times in this blog last year (e.g. ”Market Analysis of Personal Cloud Services”, “Personal Cloud, pending challenges”, “Discussion on Gartner Forecast about Personal Cloud”, or “StackSync“).

As the name of one of those post announces, I‘ve already made a short analysis of the market at the date of the study (may 2012) and even shorter review of some products available in that moment: Dropbox, Google Drive (it that date just appeared), Microsoft SkyDrive, iCloud of Apple, SugarSync, Box, Cubby, Cubby, Insync, Wuala, Syncplicity (now acquired by EMC) and OwnCloud.

So, by the end of that year (2012) I decided to go more deeply into that study and I gathered when possible more data to widen the study scope. It was quite difficult, in short, because the market is still immature, as I’ve already said in some old post. About the market, in general, I keep my main old conclusions and expand them with the following ones:

The market is highly fragmented
A lot of small suppliers
Great dynamism
Mergers, acquisitions and consolidation will become common, since some big players are still outside of the market right now.
It’s quite difficult to compare prices because of:

Some provider limit the files size (even depending in the file type).
Other ones limit the number of transactions (or bill for them).
Other ones limit the downloading traffic (or bill for them).
Others limit the number of User’s devices to synchronize.
In general the billing policies are pretty disparate: from flat rate to billing for number of users, per space quota, per downloads, per a combination of two o more of them, and so on.
etc.

Very different technologic performances, as well as continuous improvements (several at the year) make difficult to compare vendors or providers based on their current features:

Available clients and supported devices
Redundancy and number of copies of the stored information
Security in communication
Security in stored information
Laws and regulation (specially about privacy) accomplishment
Service and support are highly variable from provider to provider, so it isn’t almost impossible to compare them.

As just stated it is not easy to compare services but to be hones it’s still more difficult because in most the cases not all the needed information is publicly available in the web site of companies: so, if you aren’t Gartner, you have ask that information or to sign for a free trial (where the performances are not the same of the real services), and so on. In this way I must mention too, that it was helpful the work made by other people, since I found related reports with valuable information. So when I compare all the information I decided not publicize because there are a lot of blank cell: comparison is not possible. However, after reading the aforementioned Gartner report, where they left out a lot of important players (for good and explained reasons) as Dropbox, Apple (iCloud), Microsoft (SkyDrive) and Google (GDrive), ownCloud and others, I decided to publish my results because some of them are in my table.

Prior to show my comparison table, please let me see it again:

When you see a blank cell in my comparison table just implies that I’VE NOT BE ABLE to get the information.
And the comparison took me a couple of months (I do it in my free time) so I compare services at different dates.
And it was finished in the first half of the last December (so these results today could, and probably will, be different)
Frankly, I also must state that I use several reports that I found about this subject (introducing a wider time gap).
Note: I’ve got the time and the Gartner permission; in future post I’ll summarize the Gartner’s “MarketScope for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing” report.

Next table summarizes my own comparison results: