Karl Robinson's blog

There’s a whole lot of hype and hot air surrounding Cloud Computing at the moment, lots of new buzzwords and acronyms like SAAS, PAAS, IAAS etc - but what actually is Cloud Computing?

The answer to this question really depends on who you are speaking with, and to some extent what they are trying to sell!

I attended my first Cloudcamp last night at the QE2 conference centre in Westminster.  I was actually pretty impressed, both with the format of the event and the quality and variety of attendees.  The hosts stuck rigidly to the 5 minute time slots for the ‘Lighting Talks’ which ensured that the first half of the event ran to time.  The most interesting lightening talks for me were William Fellows, principal  analyst from The 451 Group who pres

In a bid to gain market share, Citrix have open sourced their XenServer virtual infrastructure tools.  XenServer customers will now have free access to P2V conversion tools, live motion and centralised management & partching tools, thus reducing the cost of entry to a virtual infrastructure and encouraging more businesses to adopt virtualisation.

Sales of virtualisation software are set to grow by 43% in 2009, according to analyst firm Gartner.  In a recent Microscope report industry commentators stated that virtulisation management software would be the largest growth area, but server virtualisation software will see strong growth and Hosted Virtual Desktop sales are set to treble.

Today, VMware accounced that it has set a world record for web server performance.  This is great news for the world of server virtualisation, as many businesses are still unsure of the comparitive performance of physical and virtual servers.  Physical boxes are a known quantity to most IT administrators.  Introducing another layer (the virtualisation Hypervisor) between the hardware and the operating system MUST impact perfo

On Thursday next week FalconStor, one of Cloud Data’s key technology partners, will be running a webinar showcasing their FalconStor CDP with VMware technology.  The webinar is available to partners and their customers.  Details as follows:

Topic: Protecting VMware with CDP
Date: Thursday, February 19, 2009
Time: 11:00 am, GMT
Meeting Number: 488 601 726
Meeting Password: tpo1tp

Please click the link below to see more information, or to join the meeting.

We are off an running with beta test customers on the Cloud Data VMware hosting platform. It’s early days and we are ironing out a few little niggles but on the whole feedback is extremely positive.

Currently we have deployed Ubuntu and Centos instances on the platform, we still need some test customers to try out some Windows Server instances.

Anyone interested in assisting us with testing in return for 3 months hosting free of charge should contact us via our website at http://www.clouddata.com/beta/signup.html

Once again our country ground to a halt yesterday due to 4 inches of snow being dumped overnight.  1 in 5 British workers didn’t make it to their workplace, costing the economy an estimated  £1.2 billion.

Yesterday I attended a breakfast meeting at the Gherkin hosted by leading UK virtualisation consultancy Virtualize IT (http://www.virtualizeit.com).  The theme was Virtualisation and Business Conintuity.  The guys gave a fantastic overview of virtulisation from a vendor agnostic perspective, and the opportunities that it presents in the business continuity space.

As we edge ever closer to our launch date of March 2nd, things are really starting to take shape at Cloud Data. Our infrastructure is up and running, our website now live, albeit in draft format, and we are ready to commence beta testing.

The beta test will not only give us an opportunity for a shake down of our systems and products - our testers will get the chance to try some cutting edge technology free of charge.