Delegates, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors will be traveling from all over the world to New York this coming June 6-9 to attend 8th International Cloud Expo in New York City, co-located at the Jacob Javits Convention Center with 11th Virtualization Conference & Expo. Listen to Cloud Expo being promoted yesterday in New York City on CBS Radio/1010Wins [WikiUpload - MP3 file] Here is an early sneak-peek at some of the many and varied themes and topics due to be discussed in the breakout technical sessions scheduled in the course of the jam-packed four days. (Editorial Note: this is a small initial selection only – the Call for Papers for 8th Cloud Expo only closed February 4th, and new sessions are being selected and posted on a daily basis.) Agile Cloud Integration – see The Transactional Cloud Application Development in the Cloud – see Java in the Cloud Automation in... (more)

Cloud Computing Expo - The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud

As cloud computing becomes more commonplace, creating a secure method to bridge the gap between existing data centers and remote sources of compute capacity is being more and more important. The ability to efficiently and securely tap into remote cloud resources is one of the most important opportunities in the cloud computing today. In this session Reuven Cohen will discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to deploying across a diverse global cloud infrastructure. Location, security, portability, and reliability, he will explain, all play critical roles in a scalable IT environment. Sponsor Virtualization Conference & Expo Register Now and Save! Submit Your Speaking Proposal Speaker Bio: Reuven Cohen is Founder & Chief Technologist for Toronto- based Enomaly Inc. - leading developer of Cloud computing products and solutions focused on enterprise businesses. ... (more)

Cloud Computing & Privacy: Pew Report Says Many Cloud Computing Users Unaware of Privacy Concerns

“Even as large numbers of users turn to ‘cloud computing’ applications, many may lack a full understanding of possible consequences of storing personal data online,” said John B. Horrigan, Associate Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project and author a recent report, "Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services," based on a survey of 2,251 adults. Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web, according to Horrigan's report. Online users who take advantage of “cloud” applications say they like the convenience of having access to data and applications from any Web-connected device. At the same time, however, they express high levels of concerns about storing personal data online when presented with scenarios about possible use... (more)

Economic Downturn Helps Drive Cloud Evolution

Douglas Gourlay's Blog As providers evolve from traditional hosting they may be facing a window of opportunity in the current, rather dismal, economic outlook: Cloud Computing. In periods of economic uncertainty, especially when the capital for large-scale build-outs may be hard to raise in the debt markets or at least much more expensive to raise people turn to look at other options that enable them to continue to meet end-user and business demands for IT services. Sometimes they need capacity, sometimes IT just needs the time to focus on new projects. Enter Cloud Computing, or as we may describe it here, ‘Hosting Evolved’. The key benefits that I see to a cloud architecture from the client side are as follows: 1) Can expand amount of resources applied against a given workload without having to front the capital and without having to build in advance of demand 2) Do... (more)

Big Week for Cloud Computing in Silicon Valley

The GigaSpaces Blog SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo took place Wednesday through Friday in San Jose. Seems like everyone came in to the Bay Area for this one, so I am looking forward to meeting a lot of the folks active in cloud computing at this event. There is also talk of another Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum [Google Groups] get together around this event as well as a Silicon Valley CloudCamp. GigaSpaces CTO Nati Shalom is part of the star-studded lineup of speakers at SYS-CON's 1st International Cloud Computing Conferecne & Expo. Between them, they'll be covering every aspect of the hottest IT topic for years, with not just Amazon but also IBM, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Intel, HP and a host of others all offering, using or developing high-end computing services typically described as “cloud computing” - through which massively scalable IT-related capab... (more)

The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing

Cloud Expo Early Bird Savings A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to half as many again - testimony, if any further were needed, to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites cited. As ever we encourage software engineers, developers, IT operations managers, and new/growing companies in every case to "suck it and see" by downloading or otherwise sampling the offering in question for themselves. (Omissions to this Top 150 list sh... (more)

Cloud Computing Expo Keynote to Be Delivered by IBM's CTO Kristof Kloeckner

SYS-CON Events announced today that Dr Kristof Kloeckner will present the keynote address at the upcoming 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, being held March 30-April 1, 2009, in New York City. Drawing on IBM's experience of working with customers and operating 13 cloud centers worldwide, Kristof Kloeckner, CTO of Enterprise Initiatives and VP of Cloud Computing Platforms, IBM Software Group, will review the conditions under which cloud computing can deliver its promise of flexibility and cost savings in the delivery of IT services to the enterprise. In his keynote, Kristof Kloeckner will discuss the importance of dynamic infrastructures and service management for both public and private clouds, cloud service life cycles, and integration between public clouds and enterprise services. He will also talk about the standards required for interoperabil... (more)

Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto

Over the last few weeks I have been working closely with several of the largest technology companies and organizations helping to co-author the Open Cloud Manifesto. Our goal is to draft a document that clearly states we (including dozens of supporting companies) believe that like the Internet, the cloud itself should be open. The manifesto does not speak to application code or licensing but instead to the fundamental principles that the Internet was founded upon - an open platform available to all. It is a call to action for the worldwide cloud community to get involved and embrace the principles of the open cloud. We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible inviti... (more)

Andy Bechtolsheim’s Off Reinventing the World Again

Arista Networks, the so-called “cloud networking” start-up that began life by challenging Cisco with an ultra-fast network switch that cost a tenth the price of a Cisco switch, is closing in on the problem of redesigning the network to support large data centers and cloud computing that it was started by Andy Bechtolsheim to solve. The company’s premise is that existing networks aren’t designed for virtual and mobile workloads. See, along with virtualization has come an explosion of virtual machines over physical servers by a factor of 10x-20x creating in turn a proportional sprawl of virtual switches to connect the VMs in the physical servers. Arista contends that this combination of multi-core CPUs, VMs and virtual switch infrastructure is making untenable demands on the underlying cloud network fabric. The traditional 64:1 oversubscribed network topologies don’t... (more)

The Cloud is a Radical and Transformational Change

Thank you Mike Vizard for your discussion of why cloud computing will drive more custom application development. This is the point that seems to keep getting skipped in the many theoretical considerations of whether “the cloud” is hype or revolution. People are talking a lot about data center consolidation and reduction of IT expenditures, or shifts from capital expenditures to operating expenditures, and frequently in a tone that questions whether this even represents a material improvement. But in so doing, they are missing the real value gains; the cloud is about a radical and transformational change in the quantity and quality of business automation. The cloud isn’t just about surface concepts like “storing all your data on S3” or “spinning up servers on GoGrid”; those things are just the beginning. What it is REALLY about is what each of those things in turn wi... (more)

Combining the Cloud with the Computing: Application Delivery Networks

IT executives are being asked to increasingly evaluate new cloud-based services to improve business agility while lowering operating and capital costs within the enterprise. Yet often very little is known about the “cloud” itself. How does it work? What new challenges does it present for the enterprise? While cloud vendors continue to roll-out new technology to capture the imagination of application development and IT organizations – one area continues to remain noticeably cloudy and overlooked – the cloud itself. The first of the two words in cloud computing is often not well understood. It’s almost always drawn very minuscule in pictures while dwarfed by the virtualized server farms providing on-demand computing power. Implying as if the cloud is secondary and works in a simple way – something goes in one side of the cloud and then shows up instantaneously on the o... (more)