Mike Maxey

The ParaScale Blog Last week the masses converged on San Jose for the SYS-CON convention that covered SOA, Virtualization and Cloud Computing. The event spanned three days and was very well attended. I was surprised at how crowded the sessions were given the state of the economy these days. That is until I headed over to the SOA side of the conference. Granted the rooms were bigger but the SOA audiences were sparse. People love a trend and Cloud Computing is no exception. I managed to catch a couple of interesting presentations on the cloud computing side that were standing room only. The Rightscale CTO gave a good presentation and I finally understand what they do (think a dashboard and automation for cloud computing installations). There were lots of good hallway conversations and the audiences were eager to ask questions and learn more about Clouds. Consistently ... (more)

Cloud Computing Public or Private? How to Choose Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is a relatively new concept that is becoming a more recognizable term in industry vernacular. Originally delivered as a service, it gained early popularity with Web 2.0 startups looking to outsource storage administration. As the concept spread and offerings expanded, the industry has now embraced two flavors of cloud storage: public and private. This article reviews the choices a user faces when choosing a private versus public cloud storage offering. It describes data types and identifies scenarios where cloud storage is a good solution and where it is a poor fit.... (more)

Real-World Use Cases: Cloud Storage Workloads

In my previous article, "Cloud Computing Public or Private? How to Choose Cloud Storage," we covered choosing between public and private cloud storage and the appropriate data types for cloud storage. This month we will dig deeper into the workloads and file creation patterns that best fit cloud storage with a focus on private clouds. Rather than file types, the discussion will cover how files are managed and where cloud storage fits, along with a few real-world use cases. When choosing any storage solution it's important to consider the workload and data usage patterns. This ev... (more)

Hosting Providers Losing Business By Not Offering Cloud Storage Solution?

Cloud Computing Journal Tier1 analyst Antonio Piraino quantifies the public cloud service market to be around $300M in 2009 and conservatively estimates 100% growth per year for the next three years. Cloud storage is estimated to be about 40-60% of this market. Although cloud computing has garnered a lot of early attention, the near term opportunity is cloud storage, since customers can adopt it quickly without requiring too many programming tweaks to existing applications. Overall, cloud storage is an easier economic sale for the host, who can offer up his offering as an alter... (more)