Displaying items by tag: Cloud Computing

Over the weekend there were storms through northern Virginia that left many without power. One of these was an Amazon Cloud Computing node that housed Netflix, Pinterest, Instgram, Heroku and a few others were impacted. Ok Impacted is putting it mildly, due to the loss of power those services were offline for at least 6 hours starting Friday night and moving into early Saturday Morning.

In other “hacking news” two days ago Google announced that it would begin spreading FUD…. I mean warning users about the possibility that their computer systems and Gmail accounts could be under attack by “State-Sponsored” individuals. The new came after recent discoveries that Stuxnet was a US sponsored attack and the widely held belief that Flame is also a state-sponsored bit of malware.

Earlier today we talked about how AMD’s Rory Read is looking to cloud based services to help overcome the lack of processing power available to AMD’s APUs (and other CPUs moving forward) in that article we talked (very briefly) about some of the concerns that are keeping people out of cloud based services. Although one that is commonly talked about is privacy the other (and perhaps even more important) is security.

As consumers are becoming less and less enchanted with their wireless carriers we are now hearing that Microsoft is trying to take a leaf from their book of tricks. With a wireless provider the way to get people in the door is to offer great phones (like the iPhone, Google Nexus, Galaxy III Etc) for amazing prices, but then to require a two year commitment for service. This is exactly what Microsoft might be doing with the next round or XboX hardware.

There is a huge amount of traffic on Google’s new Google drive cloud storage system. There are predictions from “they will kill Drop Box and Sky Drive” to it will fail. So this is pretty much your average launch of a new Google product. One of the things that has made the rounds yesterday we were not surprised by (and frankly are shocked that other media outlets are surprised by this), this is the terms of service that seem to indicate that anything you put on Google drive belongs to Google.

You know, back a very long time ago (sometime in 2007 or so) I wrote an article on how dangerous the idea of cloud computing was (and is). The article centered around the fact that in almost 99 cases out of 100 the company that is responsible for the security of your information and services are going to spend as little as possible on maintaining them and securing them. They are banking on the hope that no one tries that simple exploit or can even find the servers in question. Or for that matter they put their trust in other companies to manage their security for them. These companies then do the same thing all over again all to make sure they keep the best profit ratio possible.

Ok, now this is something that looks like it is going to be very cool. Today we got word about something called Cotton Candy. We know you are probably wondering what Cotton Candy is (outside of the real cotton candy). Well, it is a new twist on an old technology. When computer networks first started the screen that was in front of you did not do much processing. In fact, most of the time it did not do any processing. All of that was taken care of by a single powerful mainframe computer and what you saw was the displayed results. Now, as we move more and more into Cloud Based computing we are returning to that style of work. Someone else does all the heavy lifting and you get the results.

USB Companion Adapter Enables Screens to Access the Cloud and Mobile Content

New York, NY and Trondheim, Norway – November 17, 2011 - FXI Technologies, a hardware and software startup based in Trondheim Norway, demonstrated today the world’s first any screen, connected computing USB device.  Codenamed “Cotton Candy”, this sweet little device serves as a technology bridge between any display, the Cloud, and any input peripheral.

At Supercomputing 2011 both Intel and AMD showed off their latest in HPC (High Performance Computing). From AMD we got a look at their new Bulldozer based. These new CPUs will ship in 8 and 16-core varieties. The 16-core flavor called the Opteron 6200 will also have four memory channels (like the Intel 3960X), 1MB of cache per core (level 2), and will top out at 3.3GHz. The 8-Core version will be the Opteron 4200 and will only have two memory channels, but will still have 1MB of L2 cache per core and a top clock speed of 3.3GHz.

In stunning news VMware announced the reinvention of the wheel at the VMware World Conference in Las Vegas. They showed of their new “wheel” which will run slower and have a greater potential for security risks than the older wheel, but they feel that this is the way things are going to be in the future.

Of course the thing that VMware was showing off was not the wheel it was VMware’s Project AppBlast, an updated Horizon Application Manager (which now allows Windows Applications) and a new technology called ThinApp Factory. The theme was the “Post-PC Era” with CTO Steve Herrod saying such catch phrases as “the world has changed” and other nonsense considering the fact that Citrix has been out for more than 10 years and has never managed to push the PC to extinction.

The three technologies that VMware showcased today are not really new, Citrix has XenApp and even Microsoft has products that will allow you to serve up single applications to users. True the Microsoft product will not let you push out to anything other than Windows based systems but Xen can push to the iOS and even to Android in many cases. Xen also has a web interface that allows you to pick and choose the applications you want to run which are run in secured memory spaces on the client system.
We have tinkered with XenApp and XenDesktop on more than a few occasions and it is more than functional with plenty of support behind it.

So, while the new Applications from VMware are interesting they are far from revolutionary and with their expensive licensing scheme you can pretty much bet they will be pricing out of the reach of most companies.

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