Real-time computing. Real-time news.
November 21, 2008
10 Companies Spurring Enterprise Cloud Computing (Pt. II)
VIrtualization and Web Vendors Step Up Innovation
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 All »
In the first installment, we looked at the cloud computing offerings of the world's leading IT software vendors, and why they will draw enterprise to adopt the cloud. This time, we look at companies that came of age during the Web era, some as recently as last year.
While their customers numbers range from dozens to hundreds of thousands, the one thing these companies all have in common is innovation. From enabling computing in the cloud to encouraging hybrid cloud computing to providing an end-to-end set of cloud products, these companies' technologies strive to make cloud computing as flexible and non-threatening as possible. Given the skepticism some enterprises have about the cloud, anything that eases the process and improves its performance can only be a good thing.
---
Skytap
While most cloud providers hold production workloads as the holy grail for proving the worth of their platforms, Skytap focuses on a more immediate goal. Understanding that provisioning test environments adds both time and costs to a company’s operations, and also that security concerns will mire many production cloud migrations, Skytap let users build virtual test labs in the cloud that mirror their physical counterparts.
Relatively young even by Web standards, Skytap customers have a library of enterprise-class operating systems and databases to choose from, as well as a variety of options for image sizes, and snapshots of configurations can be made for easy provisioning in the future. What’s more, environments can be snapshotted at any point in the process, allowing users to isolate bugs or faulty configurations and resolve them later.
“Essentially, what makes us different from other players out there is we provide absolutely industry-standard infrastructure you can run on. It’s almost like an extension of your existing IT environment,” says Ian Knox, Skytap’s director of product management.
This publication recently ran a feature on virtual lab automation, where you can get a more complete sense of what Skytap is offering and why enterprises are likely to eat it up.
3tera
When you’ve invented a grid operating system designed for scaling Web applications on demand, you’re in a pretty good position to make cloud computing work for enterprise IT. 3tera, with its AppLogic offering, enables companies to create virtualized infrastructure for running and scaling applications on a pay-to-use basis.
Page: 1 of 51 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 All »
Related Articles
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
