Last week I headed out to the Big Apple to attend Interop/Web 2.0 and present Dell’s cloud vision/strategy to customers. I was also able to grab several interviews at the co-located shows.
I’ve posted the first video featuring Azure evangelist Keith Pijanowski but have a couple more coming up: Roger Klose, Sr Director of Citrix’s Datacenter & Cloud Division and Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe also moderated a panel that my boss, Andy Rhodes was on: Never Buy a Server Again: Should You Move Everything to On-Demand? (Here’s a write up on the panel that appeared on zdnet.)
I decided to walk the 20 blocks from Penn station to my hotel. It was a fantastic night, Times Square was alive and I even stopped for a slice.
Interop/Web 2.0 were held in everyone's favorite, the Javits Convention center
The Network is dead, long live the Network. Art installation on the show floor.
At the cloud expo in Santa Clara earlier this month I ran into Rick German, CEO of Stoneware, Inc. I had previously heard of Stoneware since they are partnering with Dell on a cloud offering for education but I knew that was just one area in which they played. I sat down with Rick and learned about all they did.
Some of the topics Rick tackles:
Helping customers to build their own private clouds within their data centers and enabling them to plug in their own windows and webhosted apps (plugging public cloud apps into the data center). Taking orgs from client-centric to web-centric.
Delivery via a virtual web desktop accessed from a plethora of browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Stoneware’s 10-year history and how the advent of “cloud-o-mania” has helped or hurt them.
What to look for from Stoneware in the year ahead.
I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/ Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.
Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering
Some of the topics Keith tackles
How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.
Some of the topics Adam tackles:
Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?
At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara last week I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet. Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.
Some of the topics Rob tackles:
The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers. They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.
Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
This week I made the trek out of the Lone Star state and headed west to the Bay Area. I spent the first day in San Francisco where I took our sales folks through my cloud presentation and then had meetings with a few members of the press. Here is the outcome of a couple of those meetings:
From the city I headed down to Santa Clara and the Cloud Computing Expo. I don’t think I saw a single customer at the event but I did run into a bunch of interesting companies in attendance. With my trusty Flip Mino I even recorded a bunch of interviews that I will be rolling out in the days to come. Here’s the list
Posted by Barton George 
