May 17, 2012

Differences Between Virtualization and Cloud Environments

cloud computing virtualization question

Bookmark and Share
Virtualization Does Not Equal Cloud, But They Are Related As Director of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at Carousel Industries, Phil Magnuszewski gets asked lots of questions about IT architectures and technologies. One question he gets frequently of late, he says, is something to the effect of, “Is cloud technology essentially the same as virtualization?” The short answer is, “no,” Magnuszewski says, although virtualization does enable a cloud environment. To shed light on the subject, today we’re going to offer our perspective on what constitutes virtualization and how it relates to private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud technologies.  (For information… Continue Reading ›

3 Technologies We’re Thankful for this Year

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Bookmark and Share
It’s almost Thanksgiving (here in the U.S., at least) so we thought we’d take a moment and reflect on what technologies we have to be thankful for this year.  There was a lot of back and forth during conversations around the water cooler, but we came up with a few that everyone agreed on, all of which can be lumped under the “Consumerization of IT” umbrella – a trend we think will continue to acclerate and that you’ll be hearing more and more about in coming months and years. 1. Cloud Delivers Increased Agility, Lower Costs and More Cloud technology… Continue Reading ›

Feds Make Progress in their Push to the Cloud; TAG to Help States and Others Follow Suit

Secure-Cloud-Backup

Bookmark and Share
It’s been nearly a year since former U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra issued his call for government agencies to shift to a“Cloud First” policy, which states: When evaluating options for new IT deployments, OMB will require that agencies default to cloud-based solutions whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists. To facilitate this shift, we will be standing up secure government-wide cloud computing platforms. Agencies were required to identify at least three services that could migrate to the cloud. And they’ve apparently been making steady progress, as they’ve idendtifed at least 78 systems that have or are in the progress of… Continue Reading ›

Kindle Fire Presents Challenges and Concerns for Corporate IT

Bookmark and Share
As of this writing, the $199 Kindle Fire, still a month away from shipping, is the most wished-for product in the Amazon.com Electronics area (in fact, various Kindle models take the top 10 spots).  While the Fire is a distinctly consumer-oriented device, there are two areas where it may well have enterprises sitting up and taking notice. Amazon Silk: A New Kind of Browser for Mobile Devices First is the Silk browser that comes with the Fire. Silk is a lightweight browser that augments its on-board processor with the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) computers.  As Amazon explains: All… Continue Reading ›

Beyond Consolidation: Mining the Many Benefits of Server Virtualization

Bookmark and Share
While seemingly every company is considering taking advantage of virtualization technology to some degree, it seems many aren’t getting as much out of it as they could – or should. According to a recent “Magic Quadrant” report by Gartner on the x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure market (PDF): As of mid-2011, at least 40% of x86 architecture workloads have been virtualized on servers; furthermore, the installed base is expected to grow five-fold from 2010 through 2015 (as both the number of workloads in the marketplace grow and as penetration grows to more than 75%). Virtualization lays the foundation for cloud Considering… Continue Reading ›

Can You Replace Your Network Hardware with Software?

Virtual Appliance

Bookmark and Share
Recently there has been a fair amount of discussion around the hallways at Carousel about whether software and cloud solutions will start to replace actual hardware and network appliances in a world of virtualized and cloud based data centers. A couple of recent articles from TechTarget seem to indicate that this is not only possible, but is a trend that is starting to gain traction. Over the past decade businesses have deployed specialized network appliances to perform specific tasks quickly, efficiently and consistently. But does that hardware really need to be a part of the solution in a virtualized data… Continue Reading ›

Amazon’s EC2 Outage Highlights Potential Cloud Risks

department-of-redundancy-department

Bookmark and Share
Yesterday, close to 100 major websites including FourSquare, Reddit, HootSuite and Quora were either completely down or seriously impacted for extended periods of time by a substantial outage at Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud service. Although we like to believe that big brand name cloud providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace are immune to these types of hiccups and have magical redundancy protocols that eliminate downtime, this situation shows how even the best of cloud providers can be impacted. Amazon offers their customers protection against this type of outage with what they call Availability Zones. By spreading your application out… Continue Reading ›

Streamlining The Cloud: Riverbed Technology Interview – Partner Podcast

riverbed_logoNEW

Bookmark and Share
Take a listen to this information packed interview with Evan Marcus, the Product Evangelistfor Riverbed Technology. Riverbed is a Carousel partner that specializes in improving performance and security for Wide-Area-Networks and Cloud solutions. Essentially, their technology makes networks run a lot faster, making your WAN feel like a LAN.  Topics we discuss: Issues to Consider when Migrating to Cloud Services Performance – How to ensure users get the same or improved performance relative to local services. Security – How to provide the same level of security on the cloud as you do locally Vendor Lockin – Avoiding having your data trapped… Continue Reading ›

How Virtual Desktops Lower Your Total Cost of Ownership

Bookmark and Share
When businesses initially consider deploying a Virtual Desktop solution for their enterprise, it seems as if the math may not add up. The technology necessary to provide employees with properly supported Virtual Desktop infrastructure includes servers and software for the deployment of a Storage Area Network, hosts (servers) to run the actualy Virtual Desktop environment, licenses for the Virtual Desktop software, OS licensing, ApplicationVirtualization software, User Profile Control software, Virtual Machine Monitoring software and Host Monitoring solutions. Add this tech up, and at first glance it appears this might be close to twice what it would cost to phyiscally deploy… Continue Reading ›

Types of Cloud Computing Offerings – An Overview

Cloud Computing

Bookmark and Share
It’s All About The Cloud these days. We’re not complaining.  This is an area that we are passionate about, and we believe is living up to the hype in terms of efficiency and cost savings.  We read as much about it as we can, make connections with new providers and partners and look for ways to help our customers benefit from new developments.  Over the next several months, we’re going to delve more deeply into various aspects of Cloud Computing, but we thought we’d start with an overview of what the different types of cloud computing are, what type of… Continue Reading ›