ReadWriteCloud

Business survival depends on IT innovation. Enterprise cloud computing presents CIOs with opportunities to deliver that innovation by thinking like CEOs in order to play a strategic role in driving new revenue while reducing costs.

Intel CIO Diane Bryant has shown how this is possible by implementing cloud strategy at Intel. Bryant says that Intel has saved $17 million to date, and anticipates yearly savings of $7 million for the next three years. Intel, Bain & Company and NYSE Technologies share their stories on improving their infrastructure with cloud computing in "The New CIO Agenda: Intel Cloud Computing Insights 2011."

Since its inception, Windows Server has been carried a unique, embedded burden: Windows itself. From the beginning, there hasn't been much justification for all the graphical resources one requires from a client operating system inhabiting a server. Now with remote management evolving away from virtual sessions, and with server OS images becoming virtualized almost by default, Windows Server doesn't really need even the option of the Aero environment.

In August, Twitter acquired BackType, a social media analytics company. One of the things that Twitter picked up in that acquisition was Storm, the "Hadoop of realtime processing.

At the time, Twitter said that it would open source Storm in September at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. Guess what? They did. As of this week, Storm is on GitHub under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Online backup provider Mozy has added a new twist to their service called Data Shuttle: they will overnight you a 1.8 TB external hard drive, which you can use to create your initial backup seed. When you have copied all your files to the drive with their software, you mail it back to their data center, and they copy it to their cloud-based service. This is somewhat similar to what Amazon offers and is a fast way to get going with your initial backup if you have a slow broadband connection.

The service currently works with their Windows v2.8 client. The Mac client will be available later in October with a new 2.4 version to enable the shuttle drive process. The fee is $275 for the initial drive. Up to 7 TB per account can be stored.

To kick off its PuppetConf, taking place this week in Portland, Puppet Labs is announcing Puppet Enterprise 2.0. With 2.0, Puppet Enterprise adds a graphical user console, new provisioning features and introduces a reporting and tracking framework.

Puppet Enterprise is the commercial distribution of Puppet, which includes the core open source systems management platform, plus proprietary features. Puppet Enterprise was introduced in February of this year and added simplified integration and installation features, as well as the requisite support packages and maintenance.

The OpenStack Project is moving a bit closer to its proprietary competition with the Diablo release, out today. In addition to improving the three core projects, OpenStack is now adding a Web-based dashboard, unified authentication and an API for configuring virtual networks. With Diablo, OpenStack is poised to manage global clouds.

The OpenStack Project has made impressive gains since its inception just a little more than a year ago. OpenStack has gone from a joint project between RackSpace and NASA to a massive effort spanning 110 companies and organizations.

Yesterday we held our first live chat on the changing nature of virtual storage. With me on the chat line were Wen Yu, an infrastructure technologist from VMware and several folks from NetApp including Jean Banko, a product marketing manager; Vaughn Stewart, the director of cloud computing and an active blogger; and Julian Cates, a virtualization systems and storage architect. We had a lively discussion that ranged across several topics and I will try to distill the highlights for you in this post. Of course, you are welcome to scroll through the chat yourself below.

One of the more appreciated announcements to come out of last week's Microsoft Build 2011 conference was that Hyper-V, the company's hypervisor and virtual machine manager for high-end servers, would be coming to the Windows 8 client. (While we heard the words "every Windows 8 client," we'll reserve judgment on whether it gets included in the lower-end SKUs.)

The story was covered as "Virtualization Comes to Windows Client." Well, anyone who uses Windows 7 on a regular basis knows it was already there, at least in some form: Microsoft had already integrated its Virtual PC system into Hyper-V since its earliest betas. But Virtual PC is not Hyper-V, for reasons any administrator can tell you: The virtual machine (VM) configuration files in Hyper-V are far more detailed than those of the consumer-grade Virtual PC (WVPC).

The WordPress community has a lot to be excited about this week. BuddyPress and bbPress have pushed out major new releases today. WordPress users looking for a simple way to enable forums and/or add social media features should take a look. The bbPress 2.0 release integrates forum features into any standard WordPress theme. BuddyPress 1.5 brings a better default theme and performance improvements.

If you aren't happy with your existing online backup provider and want to switch to one of the 11 different services that NextAdvisor has analyzed, then head on over to their website now and check it out.

In just a few clicks of the mouse you can see which ones offer the best match of features and price.