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Network World - It wouldn't be a mischaracterization to equate the cloud computing industry to the wild, wild west.

There is such a variety of vendors gunning at one another and the industry is young enough that true winners and losers have not yet been determined. Amazon has established itself as the early market leader, but big-name legacy IT companies are competing hard, especially on the enterprise side, and a budding crop of startups are looking to stake their claims, too.

In its latest Magic Quadrant report, research firm Gartner lists 14 infrastructure as a service (IaaS) companies, but Network World looked at four of the biggest names to compare and contrast: Amazon Web Services, Rackspace (and OpenStack), Microsoft and Google.

Amazon Web Services

It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example.

There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure. >>Read more

Source: NetworkWorld

In an effort to boost UK as a startup hotspot, Rackspace has announced that it will provide selected business startups to be beneficiaries of £12,000 worth of cloud resources (similar to their activities in the US). Through the Rackspace Startup Program, the company has agreed to offer new and emerging businesses with free cloud computing resources in the United Kingdom. The program will be launched in 2013 in partnership with British accelerators and incubators in order to determine which local companies will receive the free resources.

The Rackspace Startup Program is currently being implemented in Australia and the United States of America. It expects to benefit at least 850 emerging businesses in the UK. Rackspace chairman Graham Weston is very enthusiastic about the London program. Sometime in August, UK Chancellor George Osborne was quoted as saying that London is becoming an investment hub for startups. Vodafone already has an incubation center there. Barclays is also laying the groundwork for the company’s collaboration with emerging businesses. Rackspace, for its part, has already talked with British accelerators and will soon work with Springboard and DreamStake.

A recent survey showed that London is being considered the 7th best place for startup companies. According to Telefonica, a telecoms firm, the United Kingdom won’t be the US’s version of Silicon Valley because its investment culture is risk-averse and it lacks investment. That’s why the Rackspace plan is perfect to launch UK as a startup hotspot. >>Read more

Source: CloudTimes

HP, Dell and IBM are all struggling to ship servers due to competition from low-cost and specialist vendors, figures from Gartner shows.

The latest report by the analyst company on the worldwide server market was released on Wednesday. It paints a grim picture of the global datacentre market, with the market's overall revenues during the third quarter decreasing 2.8 percent year-on-year and overall shipments growing a measly 3.6 percent.

"Server revenue was weak due to ongoing economic weakness and market segment differences," Jeffrey Hewitt, a research vice president at Gartner, said.

Major OEMs are struggling to preserver their server dominance. (Data: Gartner. Graph: Jack Clark)

If you look over the past three years of data from Gartner, these "market segment differences", appear to come from growing competition from smaller or specialist vendors, with much of the focus on low-cost servers for huge clouds.

Gartner only lists the top five server vendors by revenue and shipment each quarter and groups the rest into an "other vendor" section. When you look at which companies manage to climb into the fifth position a picture emerges of who these "other vendors" are. Having looked at three years of data we know they include Lenovo, Oracle, Cisco and NEC. >>Read more

Source: ZDNet

As wildly successful as Amazon Web Services have been, there’s still a lot of noise about how big enterprises don’t want to put their precious workloads on this public cloud  infrastructure.  The Amazon cloud is not safe or reliable enough for these important workloads, some say.

Here’s a news flash: Big companies may or may not be wary of Amazon’s cloud, but they’re already using it. And this despite multiple snafus at Amazon’s US-East data center complex in the past year. It’s a pretty safe bet that virtually every Fortune 1000 company is running workloads beyond test and dev in Amazon’s cloud and that means trouble for incumbent IT providers like IBM, HP, Dell and others which are scrambling to respond.

Case in point: Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner, whose company helps businesses make best use of AWS, told me that 30 percent of its AWS customers are large enterprises. And while their applications vary, they do include business-critical workloads, and not just development and testing, he said.

Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, a New York City-based cloud computing and managed hosting provider, agreed that big accounts aren’t just fooling around with AWS. >>Read more

Source: Gigaom

The controversies that afflicted Hewlett-Packard in the past few years have given even the most loyal customers and partners pause. This is, after all, a company that has gone through a half dozen CEOs in 6 years. That uncertainty doesn’t help HP’s cloud computing strategy, which had so many moving parts that the company launched yet another reorg to rationalize the effort two months ago. That might help, but HP still needs to prove it can execute on cloud computing and not surprisingly, Zorawar Biri Singh, SVP and GM of HP Cloud Services, says it can.

Here’s a boiled down version of the Q&A I had with Singh Friday afternoon.

Where’s the rest of the HP OpenStack cloud?

The HP public cloud beta that went live in May includes OpenStack-based storage and content delivery network (CDN) components. The compute piece of that cloud will come soon — probably next month at the HP Discover conference in Frankfurt. Singh did not promise code delivery at that time, but said to “stay tuned.” And a betting person would say that the company had better have real code ready for that event.

HP’s aim is to provide a sort of “OpenStack Plus.” Singh said the company will “curate a set of OpenStack code, adding value around billing, metering, identity, orchestration, load balancing, DNS and messaging services — stuff that will extend OpenStack.”

As for private cloud, he said HP is working on it. “Expect us to have a common reference architecture and code base for public and private cloud soon,” he said. >>Read more

Source: Gigaom