ReadWriteCloud

There is a continuing change in the way businesses are thinking about the concept of disaster recovery and system maintenance, brought on perhaps for the first time since the advent of the Internet itself by government agencies. In researching how huge, country-wide data networks should plan for the contingency of terrorist attack or natural disaster, agencies such as the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security and its E.U. equivalent, ENISA, have begun adopting an emerging concept given an old name: resilience.

It's the key lesson being taught by cloud technologies such as OpenStack, and governments are learning it: Because failures happen, systems should expect them and overcome them - in advance, if possible - rather than wait for them and react. This lesson is having an impact on key data center technologies, most notably virtualization. Now, VMware is offering advice to its customers that bears the traditional "disaster recovery" moniker, but which is in the midst of altering its tone.

One of the nice things about following cloud technologies and virtualization? It's never boring, especially given how new cloud technologies are. That means that there's plenty of room for change, and ample speculation about where the industry is going. While we usually spend time reporting on what's just happened and the impact it will have in the near future, the end of the year gives us an opportunity to pull out the crystal ball and think about what's coming in the year ahead. In short, my forecast for 2012 calls for consolidation, continued domination of Amazon Web Services and scattered patent suits.

Cloud computing, it is often claimed, is a good way for companies to reduce their carbon footprint. The reality, as Tom Raftery explains on Greenmonk, is much more complicated than that.

In context, Raftery is writing about a pair of reports from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix. Raftery argues that "Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century" (PDF) and an addendum for France and the UK (PDF) are fundamentally flawed.

Here's a prediction for 2012 you can bank on: the world's data centers are going to be busy, just like they were in 2011. Emerson Network Power has put together an infographic on the State of the Data Center 2011.

According to the infographic (and its sources) daily tweets tripled, people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data and there are more than 509,000 data centers world-wide (PDF).

On Monday, we reported on an interesting development in a field of endeavor that ReadWriteWeb doesn't usually cover: the expanding capabilities of cloud servers for handling real-time voice traffic at carrier-class levels. A report was released showing surging levels of service quality for carrier-grade cloud server switches from Alcatel-Lucent, as the company revealed a new 40-gigabit-Ethernet (40GbE) OmniSwitch 6900 switching module "pod."

It occurred to us that perhaps this story would be... shall we say, enhanced if we showed you results from the right report. Yes, the one we showed you was a Lippis Enterprises test on Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch; and yes, it's making the rounds and it's dropping jaws. That part's fine. But as we were talking with ALU yesterday, we realized it wasn't the 6900 in that report.

Last year Xmarks, the cross-platform bookmark sync service, narrowly escaped being shut down for good. After tons of media attention focused on the shutdown, and then acquisition by LastPass, a funny thing happened – the service received almost no attention at all in 2011. So whatever happened? I caught up with LastPass CEO Joe Siegrist about the features added to Xmarks this year, the fate of the original Xmarks team and what he calls anti-competitive behavior on Apple's part.

You'd think it would be an easy thing to market an all-in-one concept of a "cloud-in-a-box" - a package that gives enterprises everything they need to deploy and manage a private or hybrid cloud. Soon you discover that it's harder to define the box than to define the cloud, because it's the box that you'll inevitably be selling. And if it doesn't look like a cloud, you might find a competitor charging it with being false and misleading.

Last week, BMC Software brought forth the second generation of its Business Service Management (BSM) delivery model. Think of this as BMC's cloud box - the way it orchestrates a cloud deployment for a data center. What changes with this version of the box versus the previous one is that the planning and deployment phases are presented to customers as workflows, rather than do-it-yourself kits.

We've talked here before in ReadWriteWeb about the so-called "carrier cloud" concept being developed by Alcatel-Lucent. Think about the level of interconnectivity your enterprise data center would need to present voice and multimedia data to customers at carrier speed, while at the same time transferred to a cloud platform that's scalable and easily provisioned.

Last week, A-L (the successor to Bell Laboratories) announced its first 64-port 10-gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), or 6-port 40GbE switch, essentially the first switch of this genre manufactured specifically to support cloud-style data center configurations. The news comes on the heels of an independent analysis released Monday of the OmniSwitch 10K, the company's 10GbE switch released just last April - an analysis which (PDF available here) may have dropped jaws to the floor.

Just in time for the holidays, the Grails team has released Grails 2.0 after almost a year in development. If you're new to Grails, now might be a good time to check it out.

Grails is a Web application framework inspired by Ruby on Rails, but it uses Groovy instead of Ruby. Grails is also extensible, and has a pretty hefty ecosystem of plugins that add functionality.

The main functions for services like Dropbox and Box.net are simple sharing and, to a limited degree, collaboration. Multiple parties can share access to a cloud-based storage device that's easier to set up than a networked drive. That helps small and medium-sized businesses as much as it helps consumers. But businesses, including even smaller ones, are encountering a need far outside the realm of consumer desire: They're starting to utilize big databases that go way beyond the size or scope of individual files.

This is where an object storage system could come into play. It's a way for data to be symmetrically clustered across multiple devices, utilizing a self-optimizing storage map that keeps data replicated, but never bottled up in the same place. We've seen such a system in OpenStack. One commercial alternative is from a company called Caringo, and is called CAstor. This month, an Israel-based company called CTERA Networks, Ltd. has adapted its appliance-based "Dropbox for SMBs" to support CAStor, in an effort to make object storage and backup more of a turnkey process.