ReadWriteCloud

VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.

The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami and Verizon in Ashburn, Va.

Often appearing on lists of "must have" Mac software, the open source FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV client Cyberduck announced a new version yesterday that gives the tool even more file management features, including support for Google Storage and file versioning in Amazon S3.

New features include integration of Access Control List editing for Amazon S3 and Google Storage so that permissions can be granted to different users. Using Cyberduck alongside Google Storage, for example, one can limit access to files based on whether a user is logged in to a Google Account and authenticated against the ACL.

The debate is often charged between MySQL proponents and those who are increasingly excited about NoSQL.

So, it's good to see a bit of levity enter the discussion. Every once in a while we need to sit back and not take ourselves too seriously. That seems to be the intention of this video that we found on High Scalability.

Switch on a server and you've just doubled its cost. According to Gartner, between 2007 and 2012, most U.S. enterprise datacenters will spend as much on power and cooling as on the hardware itself.

Gartner predicts that energy costs for IT operations could also double by 2012 due to the volume of data that will flow through organizations and the expected increase in utilities.

The answer? Consolidate your servers and optimize them as best as possible.

As you work to develop your product - before and after launch, it's important that you use more than just "gut feelings" to ascertain what's working and what's not. Along those lines, last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of Carsonified offered a list of six key metrics for your web app and how to track them.

It's a great list - with definitions, calculation methods, examples, and even a link to a Google spreadsheet (see below for link) that you can use to input your own data.

German authorities have recently expressed skepticism about cloud computing and the potential it has for breaking data protection laws.

According to the Information Law Group, there is no imminent danger of a European crackdown but legal experts are advising international companies to address the potential concerns in their planning and operations.

One quote from an IBM executive stands out in the post that Chris Cameron wrote today about IBM's augmented reality app for the U.S. Open.

Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships said it all comes down tthe information generated with every tennis stroke, volley and serve:

"This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions."

Salesorce.com acquired Jigsaw earlier this year. This past week, Salesforce.com unveiled the integration.

The service integrates Chatter, the Salesforce.com microblogging platform. When a contact is updated through Jigsaw, the subscriber gets an update in their Chatter feed.

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is an example of how microblogging services are becoming message platforms for crowdsourcing tools. Microblogging tools are serving as social middleware technologies that surface information from enterprise applications.

As the cloud computing market gets more crowded, a number of Web-based calculators are popping up to lure customers.

These online calculators deserve their fair share of scrutiny. For the most part, they are there for the vendor to tell their own story in a way that shows the benefits of their service. Huge savings and incredible returns are pretty much what you are given when you pop in your numbers, requirements and company information. In the end, what you get is barely insightful. What the vendor gets is far more.

At their best, these cloud computing calculators provide a thumbnail view of the market. At their worst, they are slick tools for generating sales leads.

The Virginia Community College system had a problem. The IT department had run out of ways to cool its data center.

They explored going through the expense of transforming the building where the servers were housed or moving to a new building all together.

Virtualization helped sort things out. They discovered servers that were soaking up power but were doing next to nothing. The results came far faster than expected. The cost savings were almost immediate.