Year Of The Cloud?
Many agree that 2010 was the year that cloud computing went from concept to reality. As Michael Cohn, founder of Atlanta-based solution provider Cloud Sherpas told CRN earlier this year: In 2010 the conversation changed from what the cloud is to what it can do for businesses.
And there was no shortage of cloud news throughout the year. Here, CRN takes a look at 10 stories that shaped cloud computing in 2010.
1. CA’s Billion-Dollar Cloud Buy In
Perhaps no vendor stormed the cloud computing market with more force or more capital than CA Technologies. In 2010, CA made five cloud-focused acquisitions, which brought its total spend on six cloud computing companies to the $1 billion mark over a 14 month stretch.
In 2010, Islandia, NY-based CA bought cloud authentication player Arcot Systems for $200 million; 3Tera a platform for building and deploying cloud services; Oblicore, which offers service-level management applications; Nimsoft, which has a line of cloud application performance and monitoring tools; and 4Base Technologies, a cloud consulting and integration firm. Those five buys followed 2009’s acquisition of data center and cloud utility software player Cassatt.
Add to CA’s cloud spending spree its appointment of CA and channel veteran Adam Famularo as its managing director of cloud computing in September, and it’s obvious that CA saw 2010 as the year of the cloud, too.
2. Larry Comes Around To The Cloud
After being an outspoken opponent to cloud computing, or at least to calling it cloud computing, throughout most of 2009, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison changed his tune at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in 2010.
At the show, Ellison unveiled Oracle’s “cloud-in-a-box” offering that Ellison himself called “one big honkin’ cloud.” The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server combines 64-bit x86 hardware, a total of 30 compute servers with 360 cores, with Oracle middleware such as the WebLogic server, Oracle Coherence data grid software, JRockit Java runtime software and Oracle VM virtualization software.
The system can handle 1.8 million messages per second or 1 million HTTP requests per second and uses Infiniband technology (capable of handling 40 gigabits per second) to link its internal components, has 2.8 TB of DRAM, 4 TB of read cache and 960 GB of solid-state disk storage.