In some more good news limping out of recessionary fears, a recent report claims that cloud-related companies will pump $20 billion annually into the economy, roughly translating to 472,000 new jobs over the next five years. No, this is not the latest press release from Commerce, but a research paper published by the Sand Hill Group and sponsored by SAP. It’s a valentine to all things cloud. Read the rest of this entry →

Mercedes’ new mbrace2 offers apps for Facebook, Twitter and Yelp (in addition to more traditional concierge services). But the real “best or nothing” here given how much more tech is in cars today is the use of the cloud to deliver wireless updates as they become available. Read the rest of this entry →

What we know: Apple is building something at its Maiden, North Carolina, data center. What we don’t: What it is. So Wired took to the skies to find out.

Wired Enterprise’s enterprising writer Robert McMillan reports:

These overhead photos — captured last month — show Apple’s $1 billion data center and two adjacent areas where Apple has started new construction. Rumors have suggested that Apple is building a second data center beside the first, but judging from these photos — and county building permits — it appears that this is not the case. In all likelihood, the two construction areas will house the new-age biogas fuel cell plant and the massive solar array Apple will use to help power the original facility.

Apple’s solar array effort has already come under fire from a data center guru James Hamilton at rival Amazon, who said last month that it just may not make sense to use so much land for a solar array that may end up generating a fairly small fraction of the data center’s power. Apple bills its solar farm as a 20-megawatt array, but that represents the solar farm’s peak capacity on a sunny day. In reality, it will probably produce less power than the 4.8-megawatt biogas facility, according to Gary Cook, an IT analyst at Greenpeace.

Now biogas? McMillan reports: But Apple finds itself in this situation because it’s trying to reduce its reliance on the environmentally unfriendly energy sources — primarily coal and nuclear — that power the Duke Energy grid that Apple uses, says Greenpeace’s Cook. “They’re trying to do what they can onsite to reduce their emissions footprint,” he says. “It’s a very dirty energy grid — North Carolina is 60 percent coal, and this is one way to try to reduce that load.”

It’s certainly not easy being green. But is this pure marketing, or will solar and biogas make a difference when iCloud becomes a personal cloud storm?

Consider the last photo you took of a spouse, a child, or a friend. It will likely enter your personal cloud in one or more of these ways:

• You sync your camera with a cloud-based storage service.
• You email a copy of the photo to friends and family, retaining a copy in your cloud-based email service.
• You upload the photo to a social network.

These first-generation cloud services are convenient and wonderful. But in the long run we’ll want them to do more. Here are some other services I can envision. Read the rest of this entry →

It’s not you. It’s really not you. It’s me. I just can’t take this relationship any further. I want to start seeing other cloud providers.

We had our instances. Our happy spin-ups. I thought we’d built a loving relationship that could scale. But the truth is that I don’t have to remain monogamous to you. I have options and I want to explore them. Read the rest of this entry →

When I talk to people about cloud computing, and especially to solution providers and business executives, they tend to have the belief that you are either in the cloud or you are not in the cloud. This causes a lot of distress, as people try to compare less than perfect cloud providers, in hopes of choosing the perfect one. In some of recent posts, this distress has been manifest with comments expressing fears about security and connectivity, among others.

While I do run with the crowd that believes cloud computing will be huge, I believe the industry is just beginning to mature. One of the reasons it is maturing is the formation of niches. Niches are a tell-tale sign that an industry is growing-up. Companies are finding gaps in the industry and then developing products and services to fill those gaps. This maturation will continue, and then the next step will be consolidation in the industry.

With this in mind, the argument of traditional computing vs. cloud computing is an argument that is often unnecessary. The best choice at least in the near future might be segregation until the industry matures further. Not just in the sense of using cloud computing and traditional computing, or a public cloud and a private cloud (called a hybrid cloud), but in using multiple cloud services, possibly even in conjunction with a traditional model. Read the rest of this entry →

There’s been a split in the world of open source cloud software.

Wired Enterprise reported this morning on the news that Citrix has parted ways with OpenStack — the increasingly popular open source project for building Amazon-like “infrastructure clouds” — moving its CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation.

According to Citrix, CloudStack will become a full open source project at Apache under the Apache 2.0 license. “Our proposed contribution makes a very clear statement that this is going to be governed and led in a truly democratic, open source fashion as is mandated by the Apache Foundation governance structure,” Sameer Dholakia, general manager of cloud platforms at Citrix, tells Wired. But no doubt, Citrix will continue to be the main contributor to the code for the foreseeable future.

Citrix indicated it will move to Apache in part because of the politics surrounding OpenStack. Dholakia mentions a “lack of political appetite” on the part of Citrix. But in the end, he says, it came down to “real and material technology gaps” between the two software platforms that were still a year or two from being bridged.

Read the whole post here.

Wired Enterprise has published an in-depth feature story on this history of OpenStack, “the free cloud software that’s changing everything.” The story opens with the “Rainbow Mansion” — a kind of Silicon Valley tech commune — but covers everything from the project’s inception at NASA to its the future with the giants of the tech world:

“This could have fallen apart in a million different ways, from the beginning. In fact, it all seemed impossible,” says Rick Clark, who worked at Rackspace when OpenStack was in its infancy and now helps drive the project at Cisco. “You have to please NASA and the NASA legal team and the Rackspace legal team and the Rackspace board of directors, and you have to do it in a way that still have something that’s palatable to developers everywhere else. It’s amazing that it actually happened.”

Read the whole post here.

Wired Enterprise reports that Dell has announced it will buy the thin client provider Wyse Technology for an undisclosed amount. Dell began life as a PC seller, but in recent years, it has morphed in a full-fledged IT services company, offering everything from PCs to servers to storage hardware to software and support services.

Dell has been vacuuming up companies recently, at a pace of about one per month. In March, the company purchased SonicWall, a network security and data protection vendor. And the previous month, it nabbed AppAssure, which provides protection for both virtual and cloud computing environments. Notably, Dell’s last three buys have all been software vendors — though Wyse does offer hardware thin clients as well. In February, John Swainson — a former IBM and CA exec — joined Dell to run a brand new software group at the company.

What’s your take on Dell’s recent hard charge into software?

Read the whole post here.

When an aircraft crashes, investigators are able to retrieve useful information about what went wrong from the flight data recorder, more commonly known as the black box. (The data recorder itself is actually not black, not until it’s retrieved from charred remains.) Statistically speaking, plane crashes are rare occurrences compared to car crashes, so why not install a black box for cars?

That’s exactly what Japanese telemetrics company Crew Systems developed: a driving data recorder for cars and trucks. A big market exists for these in Japan, since businesses with more than five vehicles are required by law to produce daily reports on the driving habits of their drivers. Read the rest of this entry →