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Oracle and Microsoft To Announce Cloud Partnership Monday
symbolset writes "While some might liken the deal to the Empire joining up with the Trade Federation, there may be some interesting outcomes for this one. On Monday Microsoft and Oracle are expected to announce a 'cloud" partnership'. Although the two companies often seem to be at odds, two of their founders — Bill Gates and Larry Ellison — are partners in charity in the 'giving pledge.' Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? 'Oracle is battling an image not of growing up, but of growing old. On Thursday the company announced lower than expected earnings, which it ascribed to a tough economy overseas. Cloud-based software grew well, but remains a small part of its overall revenue. The company also said it would raise its dividend and announced a big stock buyback, behaviors usually undertaken by tech companies when they begin to grow more slowly.'"
I thought Larry Ellison hates cloud computing?
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -Heinlein
Imagine what their children will look like?
Microsoft has built an impressive new entrant to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, and Ubuntu is there for customers who want to run workloads on Azure that are best suited to Linux. Windows Azure was built for the enterprise market, an audience which is increasingly comfortable with Ubuntu as a workhorse for scale-out workloads; in short, it's a good fit for both of us, and it's been interesting to do the work to bring Ubuntu to the platform.
Given that it's normal for us to spin up 2,000-node Hadoop clusters with Juju, it will be very valuable to have a new enterprise-oriented cloud with which to evaluate performance, latency, reliability, scalability and many other key metrics for production deployment scenarios.
As IAAS grows in recognition as a standard part of the enterprise toolkit, it will be important to have a wide range of infrastructures that are addressable, with diverse strengths. In the case of Windows Azure, there is clearly a deep connection between Windows-based IT and the new IAAS. But I think Microsoft has set their sights on a bigger story, which is high-quality enterprise-oriented infrastructure that is generally useful. That's why Ubuntu is important to them, and why it was worthwhile for us to work together despite our differences. Just as we need to ensure that customers can run Ubuntu and Windows together inside their data centre and on the LAN, we want to ensure that cloud workloads play nicely.
The team leading Azure has a sophisticated understanding of Ubuntu and Linux in general. They are taking a pragmatic approach that will raise eyebrows around the Redmond campus, but is exactly what customers want to see. We have taken a similar view. I know there will be members of the free software community that will leap at the chance to berate Microsoft for its very existence, but it's not very Ubuntu to do so: let's argue our perspective, work towards our goals, be open to those who are open to us, and build great stuff. There is nothing proprietary in Ubuntu-for-Azure, and no about-turn from us on long-held values. This is us making sure our audience, and especially the enterprise audience, can benefit from the work our community and Canonical do no matter where they want to do it.
From: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1158
isn't it obvious?
they already offer linux ffs..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So we're supposed to put business data into US based clouds? Have you missed the news?? Never heard of PRISM?
For example Cloudera, Cloud based Hadoop cluster for businesses:
http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/home.html
Backed with venture capital from....NSA... because terrorists something something
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cloudant
The there's Cloudant, the database in the cloud, which got backing from VC company run by NSA
Oh but my favorites are the always on video recording Looxcie and their sister company vidcie, Looxcie is a life cam you wear all the time that uploads your life to the cloud, and vidcie is a business video system, have those important business meetings using vidcie... back with NSA VC money, because terrorists do conference calls!
http://www.looxcie.com/
http://www.vidcie.com
Seriously, nobody in their right minds is going to move any critical business data into the US cloud, when the NSA can (and does) grab it with secret warrants and their laws say they can do anything that's in US interests.
Their VC company I-Q-Tel, clearly backs business cloud startups and now we know they grab US databases, its easy to see the purpose for trying to get companies to put their secret business data into the US cloud.
Other VC choices:
http://www.platfora.com/
Datamining unstructured data. Remember the claim that NSA don't datamine the data? And yet we got the GCHQ leak showing GCHQ using NSA data mining software! This is a typical datamining company they sunk capital into.
Connectify
http://www.connectify.me/
Wifi sharing software that reports back a lot of linkage info:
"By using Connectify location based services, you authorize us to locate your hardware and to record, compile and display your location. As part of Connectify, we may also collect and store certain information about our users, such as, users’ wireless mobile subscriber ISDN and/or IMEI numbers (as applicable) and users’ network access identifier information.""
3vr
http://www.3vr.com/
"3VR, the video intelligence company, enables organizations to search, mine and leverage video to bolster security".. more data mining.
Their VC company is called InQTel:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/10/exclusive-us-spies-buy-stake-in-twitter-blog-monitoring-firm
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
... doth make strange bedfellows, eh wot?
Miracle
It is definitely about time. Azure is terrible. Anyone who has ever tried to create an Image in Azure knows it is pure garbage. Microsoft blatantly disregarded the Open Virtualization Format standards, and created a VHD. Then even if you use HyperV to save your image, it doesn't necessarily mean its going to work. You still need the Windows Azure Agent. Then... if it still doesn't work. Good luck! Because there is no console to trouble shoot it.
I have no idea what Oracles "cloud" looks like. But it can't be much worse than Azure.