Cloud Computing’s Popularity with SMB’s
Despite those figures, overall, small businesses are largely unfamiliar with cloud computing. Josh Waldo, director of SMB Marketing at Microsoft reveals, “Roughly 20 percent of SMBs claim to know what cloud technology is.”
The numbers just don’t match up, but Waldo points out that just because people may not identify with the term cloud computing doesn’t mean they aren’t using the technology. Take Gmail or Hotmail, for example: They are both prime examples of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) form of cloud computing and are extremely popular—without their many users even realizing they are using cloud technology when checking their inbox.
“People might not understand what cloud is. But they are using it. They’re using it in their private life. In some cases they’re using it in their work life. But they might not necessarily identify it with the term cloud,” says Waldo.
He believes that the lack of familiarity SMB’s have with cloud computing can be an opportunity for Microsoft, Zoho and other providers of small business technology. Says Waldo, “For Microsoft, what that means is that this gives us a big opportunity to really educate SMB’s about cloud technologies and how they can benefit their business. Our goal is really going to be to help SMB’s evolve how they think about technology.”
According to Waldo, the benefits for small businesses that embrace the cloud are potentially huge: “First, SMBs can get enterprise-class technology at a fraction of the price, where you’re not purchasing on-premises technology that’s going to cost you an enormous amount upfront. Second, it really allows companies, whether you’re a development shop and you’re building software, or you’re an end customer—like a financial or insurance firm—to focus on your business rather than your IT requirements.”
By outsourcing data-center needs, for example, small business IT can eliminate building out capacity to handle potential strikes in data or transaction processing, because they buy the processing power they need when they need it. This leads to another key benefit of cloud computing: elasticity and the expectation of mobility. Waldo defines elasticity as the capability to scale up or down rapidly, based on need. While that includes processing power, it also means being able to add new users from a seasonal workforce—without having to deal with per-seat licensing associated with traditional desktop software.
When it comes to the expectation of mobility, Waldo says that today’s notebook, smartphone and tablet-totting employees want to make their work more flexible by making it mobile. SMB’s can let employees access the information and applications they need while on the go by exposing core applications as SaaS via the cloud.
Embracing Cloud Computing
Waldo recommends that SMB’s that have decided to embrace the cloud by adding cloud computing to their small business technology portfolio seek expert advice. “We really think it’s important that SMB’s choose carefully. And if they’re uncertain, they should work with a third party or a consultant or a value added reseller or some type of agent who understands the various elements of cloud technology and [who] can advise clients,” he says.
According to Chad Collins, CEO of Nubifer.com, a provider of turn-key cloud automation solutions, the first thing a small business should consider is which problem it is trying to solve: “The most important thing is that the cloud really isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s about solving problems. It should be about scalability, elasticity and economies of scale.” Collins adds, “What our enterprise clients are asking for is the ability to create virtual environments, run applications without code changes or rewrites and, most importantly, to be able to collaborate and share using single sign-on interface.
Another important question is whether the cloud provider offers granular user access and user-based permissions based on roles. Can you measure value on a per user basis? Can you auto-suspend resources by setting parameters on usage to avoid overuse of the cloud? The latter is important because although cloud services can result in immense cost savings, their pay-as-you-go nature can yield a large tab if used inefficiently.
Collins recommends paying special attention to the level of responsive support offered by a cloud provider. “I think for SMBs it’s really important. Having to log a Web form and then wait 24 to 48 hours for support can be really frustrating,” he says, adding that the provider should guarantee that a support team would respond in mere hours. Agreeing with Collins, Waldo points out that a service-level agreement with a high-availability and 24 hour support is key.
To discover how the power of cloud computing can benefit your SMB, please visit Nubifer.com.
This year Amazon took the world by storm with the announcement of services focused on HPC, HPC Clusters. Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Finally, it seems that affordable, flexible and elastic services have arrived for the HPC community.
Computing, and in particular cloud computing, is really all about the software and how to make the cloud work for you and not against you as a user. Adaptive has been around since mid 1990’s (formerly known as Cluster Resources) and provides intelligent automation software for data center, cloud, and high-performance computing environments. The company’s software solutions, powered by Moab, deliver policy-based governance that allows customers to consolidate and virtualize resources, allocate and manage applications, optimize service levels, and reduce operational costs. These services have allowed many users to get the most out of the cloud infrastructure.
Here’s a name that might be new to some of you. 
Clustercorp has an impressive sound byte – “Over 10,000 datacenters are power by Rocks Worldwide.”
First what a great name, not easy to forget. Whamcloud is basically picking up Lustre where Sun left off. The company provides vendor-neutral solutions for Lustre 1.6 and beyond. With years of experience developing Lustre features for high performance computing solutions – 50% of the TOP 500 fastest computers are powered by Lustre.
Yet another great name that’s certainly not easy to forget….
With many of the traditional big vendors reducing or even eliminating their spend in HPC markets Microsoft seems to be increasing their spend. Pushing the Azure and Azure services Microsoft’s cloud services vision starts to become a reality as the company continues to tout its proclaimed devotion to bringing high performance computing to the masses.
It is all about software management services here and many from traditional HPC have at least heard the name. After all, it’s the software makes the hardware work. The good news is that the world is recognizing that software and software management has been a missing link in the evolution of cloud computing. Platform has a rich set of cluster workload management software and have clearly targeted the HPC community and will likely continuting building its long legacy in HPC this year with more advancements for HPC cloud users.
With a broad array of system interconnects, Mellanox provide the fabric or glue that connects all the pieces together – Ethernet to Infinband, interconnect CPUs and Storage, adapter cards to switches. Mellanox has what can only be described as a “veritable smorgasbord” of interconnect products for high performance computing.
A pay-as-you go cloud computing model which is very attractive to small- and mid-size businesses as well as HPC users for the simple reason that it reduces capital expenditures and provides economies of scale not possible with the traditional datacenter model. Rightscale also provides a simple way to leverage Amazon’s EC2 platform, which is the top IaaS choice for many scientific and large-scale enterprise applications.
In 2009 the amount of digital content created and stored grew by 62 percent over the previous year, which had already been higher than any year on record. By the end of this decade the amount of data to be stored and created will be 44 times bigger than it was in 2009. This explosive growth in digital content, particularly unstructured content, has changed the rules of the game for businesses of all types. HPC is a huge creator and consumer of data, and it is more and more unstructured. Not only do you get both structured and unstructured but you also get high availability, manageability and high performance.
Is it conceivable that the HPC user community is ready for solid-state storage solutions? Answer is yes. Solid state has been around for 30 or so years in the HPC/supercomputing community from vendors such as Cray Research first half of 1980. Now SSD, based on NAND Flash memory, is back with a vengeance in several form factors as HDD replacements or more impressively as storage utilizing PCIe form factor. tachIOn from Virident provides a Tier 0 solution for high performance computing workloads, the goal is to eliminate the all to common IO bottleneck.
