Data Storage Virtualisation

Telecoms giant Verizon is planning on branching out even more in the cloud computing business. The company has said it has plans to add 5,500 new server cabinets to its data storage datacentres across Europe, Hong Kong, America and Australia.

Altogether Verizon is planning on spending around $16 billion (approximately £10 billion) on upgrades to its enterprise cloud computing solutions. In particular, Verizon wants to up its capacity in the hopes of gaining U.S. government customers.

Cloud computing is due to sky rocket in the business world. Offering cheap and easy access to company data without the hassle of maintaining datacentres, businesses are turning towards cloud computing more and more often.

Monday saw the formation of a fellowship – slightly less exciting than the Fellowship of the Ring, this one only contained Orange, Cisco, EMC and VMware – mores’ the pity.

The four companies – all giants in their own right – have come together to form a partnership that offers enterprise-grade cloud services. Methinks that we’ll be seeing a few more of these before the year’s done.

Each company will play to its strengths and together they shall beat Sauron…however in the meantime, they’ll offer infrastructure, virtualisation and data storage options.

“It's a combination of assets that go all the way from the operating space to the technology space,” one of the four said.

Initially, the companies will concentrate on offering infrastructure as a service and software as a service. Somebody call me when we get to the good, ork-fighting stuff.

Technology and telecoms giant IBM has made a bid for Netezza Corp., a data storage company which specialises in the analysis of huge amounts of data.

IBM has made a $1.7 billion (around £1.08 billion) bid for the Netezza company which highlights the growing importance of data storage companies which are needed for virtualisation and cloud computing, the new big things in the business world.

As cloud computing and virtualisation both require data storage and the ability to analyse data, data storage companies have become increasingly sought by bigger businesses. Unfortunately, there is only a limited number of such companies and prices have risen considerably – hence the massive bid for Netezza.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, built up towards an announcement of a new Oracle product at the annual Oracle customer conference last weekend. Rather than focus on the strained tensions between HP and Oracle, Ellison chose to talk about cloud computing instead – and how Saleforce.com isn’t an example of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is the new trend for businesses that are looking to make their business more efficient and cost-effective. It involves companies accessing data storage and applications in remote data centres via the internet. And Oracle is due to release a new cloud computing product in the near future - Exalogic Elastic Cloud, affectionately called ‘cloud in a box.’ The Exalogic Elastic Cloud allows companies to set up a private cloud.

Unified communications provider and networking giant Cisco has announced updates to its data centre, switching and virtualisation solutions. These improvements are designed to improve business security, simplify management processes and reduce costs for businesses in cloud computing environments.

The Cisco Unified Network Services solution combines a plethora of virtual products such as a virtual security gateway and a virtual wide area application service. These are designed to help the security and compliance of virtualised data centres which are becoming more popular with businesses.

Research company Forrester has said that cloud computing is going to be especially successful in the business data storage area.

When you outsource to cloud-based data storage vendor, otherwise known as a software-as-a-service provider, you can get more benefits that from employing your own data storage servers.

Using a cloud vendor means that although servers containing your data are connected up to the cloud, it is from an external location, thus saving you lots of space. Specialist cloud data storage companies also take care of maintenance and they have more expertise and better resources. Add to that, that cloud data storage means your data can be accessed by you from anywhere and you’re onto a winner.

In the bidding war between Hewlett-Packard and Dell, HP has emerged with the winning hand – i.e. a massive $2.4 billion bid for high-end data storage company 3Par Inc.

After topping each others’ bids for a couple of weeks, the mighty HP has finally made an offer that 3Par can’t refuse. Which leaves Dell in a bit of a pickle.

To enter the world of cloud computing, the relatively new and massively popular technology, a decent data storage solution is needed. 3Par’s high end data storage portfolio would have fitted the bill nicely but as HP got there first, Dell must now turn to other data storage solutions in order to move into the cloud.

VMware Inc. has announced its acquisition of two start-up companies that will help it progress its virtualisation and cloud computing offerings.

VMware is a virtualisation and cloud-computing specialist which lets user’s access data remotely through the internet.

The company has bought Integrien Corp. a company that provides virtualisation management products and TriCipher, a cloud security company.

As virtualisation and cloud computing is currently such big business, VMware will find itself even better placed than usual to becoming one of the top cloud providers.