Cloud means gloom for hardware vendors – or does it?

Maintaining a good relationship with hardware vendors is an essential element of any cloud or service provider’s daily process. The problem is that, if some recent gloomy predictions come true, there will be fewer of them. That’s the line from Werner Vogels, Amazon’s chief technology officer, among others, according to this piece on ZDNet. But is it true?
Vogels reckons that, as enterprises aim to reduce capital expenditure by buying in an increasing number of services, hardware vendors will suffer a squeeze in sales, and so revenues.

The rest of this article can be found here.

Precise Software adds new performance monitoring features

I don’t need to tell you about the technology industry’s love affair with cloud computing – since as an individual you’re likely to be way ahead of most enterprises in your seamless use of cloud already. After all, you probably use email, you store files on Dropbox, and you sync with Google or iCloud. That makes you a cloud computing user.

For a cloud provider however, extracting maximum value from expensive infrastructure is essential. And for that they need to be able to measure performance accurately – you can’t analyse what you can’t measure. And this is where Precise Software enters the picture.

Precise’s software uses analytics to measure the performance of applications, in the shape of a new version of its flagship product, Precise 9.5, which it sells to large enterprises with their own datacentre and cloud facilities.

The problem datacentre managers are having is tracking data as it moves from virtual machines across the network to storage and back again.

Company spokesman Kevin Wood said: “Users want to track the data through from client to storage, to find why a virtual server is being starved of resources. Are resources being sucked up by another server, for example?”

The software is tailored to work with EMC and VMware‘s storage and hypervisor infrastructure, although a version that supports Microsoft’s Hyper-V and then Citrix Xen are planned in about six months.

Precise is not alone in this area of the industry however, as the explosion of cloud computing is sucking in a growing number of companies keen to sell support products such as Precise. Additionally, the company’s focus on market leaders VMware and EMC may prove a barrier to many potential buyers, who are more likely to run heterogeneous environments.

New start for Big Tin

It’s been a while since this blog was updated, but this is about to change, so expect a new beginning.

You’ll be getting regular updates from on new enterprise technologies – and sometimes consumer ones too – as I encounter interesting new ideas and implementations.

Watch for the next posting – it won’t be long…