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A panel was held Wednesday at Cloud Connect to talk about where cloud standards are going, with a set of experienced panelists at the front of the room. Whatever the script, all did not go as planned. It was if the audience came prepared to present its point of view, and the panel members were forced to listen.

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Appistry is expanding its Cloud IQ platform, a basis for building a private cloud inside the enterprise, to include a file storage system. Cloud IQ Storage is aimed at extremely large storage loads-- up to a petabyte -- that would enable next generation, high scalable applications dealing with masses of data.

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VKernel is offering a free, lightweight tool for evaluating the capacity management of your VMware virtual machines. It's an example of what you can do to get started in intelligent virtual machine management without committing to a big management framework and thousands of dollars of expense.

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Virtualization does more than just consolidate servers in the data center, although that's been its primary role. Virtualization opens up the opportunity to manage servers in new ways. By watching traffic between virtual machines and from virtual machines over the network, Xangati has produced a new management tool.

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There's an experiment underway to see whether video recordings of police actions can be captured as they occur -- by an officer wearing a camera as an ear piece. Local police forces can't afford the system that captures the contents of the camera and stores them. But that's where the cloud can help.

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Fujitsu, a $47 billion IT solutions provider with 175,000 employees, has teamed up with startup Pano Logic on the "zero client" approach to desktop virtualization. It will build a monitor that contains connectors to the network, the keyboard and mouse. This approach eliminates even the tiny square device that Pano normally sells.

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Customers of a dominant enterprise software supplier often shop around for specialists within their environments who do something a little better than their regular supplier. Marc Hutzell, senior systems administrator at the non-profit German Marshall Fund, is an example in virtualization software.

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CA aquired cloud startup 3Tera in a move that is not characteristic of the company. For one thing, it reportedly paid a lot of money for a 20-employee firm, somewhere around $90 million, and CA rarely pays a premium. To Chris O'Malley, executive VP, the purchase is emblematic of a new day at CA.

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Pano Logic at the end of February received $20 million in venture capital to further its approach to desktop virtualization. What sort of client does it use? It doesn't use one other than a user's monitor and a little gray box with network and peripheral connectors. There's no CPU. Pano Logic calls it the "zero client."

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Investment advisor Piper Jaffray interviewed 100 CIOs and IT managers, then wrote up its conclusions in a 320-page report, neatly summarized by its title: "The Future Is In the Cloud." Spending on software as a service and cloud computing will grow from 5.7% today to 13.5% of all software spending in five years, it predicts.

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It's almost a manifesto. "Everything will move to the cloud," predicts Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Mark Murphy and researcher Brian Schwartz. And as it does, three medium-sized companies will become star cloud suppliers. Do you think you know who they are? I, for one, didn't get them right.

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Under CIO Vivek Kundra, the federal government has launched Apps.gov, an online marketplace of software where federal agencies can find what they need, sometimes at bargain prices. But behind the scenes, it's made a much bigger bet on cloud computing. It's NASA's Nebula cloud at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

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Two weeks ago, HP and Microsoft announced they would jointly spend $250 million to better integrate their hardware and software systems. That's one of the first reactions to Oracle's expected acquisition of Sun Microsystems and its entry into the hardware business. More such alliances are likely to spring out of the ranks of Oracle's competitors.

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A virtual machine in Amazon's EC2 cloud has been used as a command and control host for a password stealing version of Zeus, says a senior researcher in the Internet Security Intelligence Initiative, part of CA's security unit. "This is a particularly juicy target," says another security expert.

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With the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention this week reporting widespread H1N1 flu outbreaks in 32 states, many companies are dealing with or anticipating the need for staff to work remotely in the months ahead. This can present a challenge for IT organizations that haven't in the past dealt with large numbers of remote workers.

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IBM has already established cloud computing centers in the Chinese cities of Dongying and Wuxi. In the former, the cloud will serve as a "smarter city" platform for development of services. In Wuxi, it will serve as a collective platform for software development. Now it's on to Ho Chi Minh City.

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Four days before Microsoft launches its Azure cloud platform to developers at a conference in L.A., Amazon has come up with a .Net software development kit to help Windows developers produce code that runs in Amazon's EC2. It's probably just coincidence. But let's see what they're getting with AWS SDK for .Net.

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What's the definition of cloud computing? I keep asking myself that question and hearing different answers. Despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people. That was evident at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo this week in Santa Clara, where I thought I would find consensus.

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Whether your company's data center is a couple of servers stashed in a closet or a gleaming, state-of-the-art climate-controlled facility, you're still facing the same set of challenges: how to keep the IT lights on while controlling costs, take advantage of new technologies to stay competitive, and position your company for an economic recovery in the midst of the toughest times for IT that many of us can remember.

On Wednesday, October 21, 2009, help is on the way.

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IBM has been investing in cloud computing for several years, although Willy Chiu, VP of IBM Cloud Labs, acknowledges it may be difficult for those outside IBM to develop a picture of what its cloud initiative will finally look like.

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What's notable about the open source project announced yesterday, Simple API for cloud computing, are the names that are present, IBM, Microsoft and Rackspace, and the names that are not: Amazon, for one, is not a backer, and let's just stop right there.

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In a relatively brief period, VMware has gone from a small company to 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion. At VMworld in San Francisco, I got a sense of how that rapid growth leads to growing pains. For one thing, some of your best customers prefer your little competitors to you.

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It's no secret enterprises are making heavy use of virtualization in the data center. Market research shows their leading provider is VMware. With Microsoft offering virtualization in Windows Server 2008 and other free alternatives available, it's hard to see how VMware's grip will last. But VMworld offered a glimpse of why it may.

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Amazon, purveyor of the EC2 public cloud, suddenly announced Aug. 26 it’s a private cloud supplier. Isn't there something wrong with a multi-tenant, shared resource provider transforming itself into a private cloud service? I'm not sure Amazon can offer a private cloud --yet. Then again, I see no reason why it couldn't sometime in the future.

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VMware's acquisition of SpringSource is not a match made in heaven. It's going to take an effort by both parties to make this marriage work. Still, it looks like one of the few responses VMware could make to counter Microsoft's dangerous invasion of its turf.

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Cloud computing and virtualization function hand in glove. We knew that. What we didn't know was that there are likely to be efficiencies if the application is built from the ground up for the cloud. The Spring Framework is one of those new development platforms that make it easier to develop Java applications--for the cloud.

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Apptio's newest service tackles chargebacks for server virtualization.

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Investments rose 15 percent in the second quarter of 2009, with IT earning the most VC dollars. But funding remains significantly low compared to previous years.

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Startup Altor Networks launches a new version of its VM firewall that's built for speed and includes an intrusion detection engine from Sourcefire.

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Tim Grance, program manager for cyber and network security at National Institute of Standards, says standards are essential to cloud computing. And among those standards must be additional standards for moving virtual machines from cloud to cloud, something we still lack.

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Sameer Dholakia of VMLogix is not the most prominent spokesman for virtualization. But his firm's product, LabManager, supplies a strong core function--provisioning the virtual server. Furthermore, VMLogix doesn't care whether it’s a VMware, Citrix or Microsoft virtual machine, making Dholakia one of the few CEOs with a vision of a multi-hypervisor future.

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I chatted up a group of IT pros running full tilt towards virtualization. They all seemed to have left their management hats at home... How 'bout you? We'd love to get your view on VM management.

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What standards do you follow if you're interested in getting started in cloud computing? The short answer is, there are few clearly defined standards in what remains a loosely defined area. Nevertheless, the main outline is clear. Follow the leaders and follow the Web.

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Cloud models are starting to provide an attractive option for large and influential regional medical centers to get lots of small, local, laggard doctor offices trading in their paper patient files for electronic medical records. Are there clouds in your forecast?

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Over the last two years, Intel commissioned a study on how companies were delivering virtualization to end users. It's one of the few indicators of where this confused segment is headed. Several approaches are still on the table, but the fastest growing one is where the virtual machine resides on the end user's PC.

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The user conference is labeled "EMC," but its VMware that has the potential for world domination.

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The migration of a running virtual machine from one physical server to another was referred to by one VMware user as "a god-like power" that he gained by using VMware's VMotion product. At the end of this year, Microsoft will catch up by offering live migration on Hyper-V.

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Every IT person has dreams about the technologies they really want for their business. In current economic conditions, however, you may need to downsize your expectations.

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Is Windows 7 with XP on its back going to be your next corporate desktop? How about XP-in-a-can, delivered, somehow, to the device of your choice?

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Greg Scherer, CTO of the I/O device maker Neterion, explains a weakness buried in virtualization's hypervisor. When it comes to virtual machine I/O, the hypervisor has to deal with it through a software switch, and lots of I/O means frequent interruption of the hypervisor's main job, processing guest application needs.

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It's often seemed obvious to me that clouds and Linux go hand in hand. Amazon's EC2 started out running workloads under Linux in a modified open source Xen file format. So why couldn't the operation of the whole cloud be based on open source code?

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I dialed in recently to an online technology discussion sponsored by Wikibon.org, a community of technology professionals. Speaking was Rich Avila, director of server and network operations at California State, who said saving power wasn't a fuzzy, feel good goal for him. It was a necessity.

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What was interesting about Cisco's entry into blade servers Mar. 16 was the key role that it expects virtualization to play. It trumpeted its convergence of storage and networking data on the blade. But what about its assumption that the blade will be virtualized?

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There's been a persistent rumor circulating that Virtual Iron is about to be acquired, fueled in part by a recent Jefferies & Co. research report that said Oracle was interested in the virtualization startup. Why would Oracle, with its own Oracle VM, want a third-tier player in the virtualization market?

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VMware last week continued its push into the cloud computing market with updates to its vCloud initiative and API, Virtual Data Center Operating System (VDC-OS), and more. So, how many of its customers does VMware expect to deploy internal "private" clouds? Answer: all of them.

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Red Hat has moved from being a bolt-it-on virtualization vendor to a build-it-in supplier. It will include the KVM hypervisor in its next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, earlier than expected. It's doing so because it wants to get competitive in virtualization. And it realizes the time to do so is now.

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At the Cloud Computing Forum, InformationWeek asked a distinguished panel why it was necessary for every hypervisor vendor to launch its own virtual machine runtime format. If we can see the need to move workloads from one cloud to another, a common runtime format would simplify the process. What will it take, I asked, a user revolt?

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It's been six months since VMware announced vCloud, the company's grand plan for public, private, and hybrid computing clouds. It's almost time for an update on VMware's progress.

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VMware is bidding for thin client device makers and independent software developers to develop for its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, now called VMware View, with a piece of open source code, Open Client, it's first Lesser GPL open source, as best I know.

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Could Microsoft take its cash reserves and buy an open source company? Why not? Who expected Oracle and Citrix Systems to become such big investors in open source. Citrix' purchase of XenSource sure has worked out--for Microsoft, in my opinion. And that example might seed a desire for more open source code in Microsoft's camp.

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