In first week of June, I attended  Tier1 Research’s Hosting Transformation Summit in London. Excellent location right by the Tower Bridge - those parts have been redeveloped and it is very nice. Good exposure to W European hosters and managed service providers and overall a good event. In the spirit of full disclosure, ParaScale is [...]

Over the last couple of days I have been involved in running the Alfresco Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software on the ParaScale cloud. Alfresco is a solution to manage content, which includes web sites, office documents, media, electronic records and scanned media. Traditionally such solutions have had a backend repository that stores the [...]

I just heard with great shock that Rajeev Motwani has passed away. I’m still in disbelief. I saw Rajeev a few months ago at University Coffee in Palo Alto where we talked about ParaScale and cloud storage architectures and its impact on data mining and convergence of computation and storage of unstructured data.
My thoughts and [...]

During my interview for the lead QA position at Parascale, the company’s founder, Cameron Bahar, asked me what worries me most about quality. Coming from a prominent storage appliance vendor (hardware + software) my answer was immediate: Interoperability.

How Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS) delivers storage as a service and saves money for IT managers.

I’ve been working with one of ParaScale’s early customers, The Stanford Genome Technology Center, that has been conducting DNA sequencing and genomic analysis for the Human Genome project. One of the instruments in their lab is a Genome Sequencer, and from what I understand it is a “biochemical magnifying glass” for DNA. Each run of [...]

Overall McKinsey’s “Clearing the air on Cloud Computing ” is a good effort – that addresses definition, economics, pitfalls etc (see here for alternate copy). I happened to chat with a McKinsey consultant many months ago to provide input to this report. Being a practitioner in this space, I don’t agree with [...]

This week we exhibited at the SYS-CON Cloud Computing Expo in NYC. I was impressed with the turnout and as usual the SYS-CON team put on a great show. More and more we are seeing the larger enterprise’s embrace cloud storage and this show was no exception. Enterprise attendees ranged from finance to pharma backgrounds [...]

Today we are happy to announce the availability of our software. We have been working closely with early customer and partners and as of today everyone can participate in the ParaScale experience. You can read more about the release and our early customers in the announcement. If you would like to download the software, click [...]

At least with vendors and the media it seems to be some sort of tipping point :-). It’s in the Wall Street Journal, its in the Economist. And on top of this vendors have been busy. Sun announces its Sun Cloud, talk about IBM buying Sun for a 100% premium, Cisco announcing its “Unified Computing [...]

In talking to various customers who are facing the daunting challenge of exponential unstructured data growth, I often run into a class of companies that have several attributes in common that propels them to design and build their own internal cloud storage solutions. These attributes are often a very technically adept software engineering team who [...]

           In a previous blog titled Public Storage Clouds and Service Providers - What 2009 Holds I start by saying “I think 2009 will be the year that public cloud services really breakout”. Well, things are starting to break free. IBM with its Blue Cloud Initiative is rolling out a hybrid cloud computing model, whereby [...]

            As the popularity of cloud computing increases, I am getting this question more often …”grid, utility, cloud …. are they not just new names for the same old thing?”. Close, but with differences.
             First, Grid Computing. The best definition of this I heard from Rich Wolski of the University of California at Santa Barbara. [...]

             About 2 weeks ago, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories spun off an open-source cloud-computing start-up called Zimory. Zimory is in a new cloud category. It is a marketplace, an exchange. Quoting from the Zimory press release “Zimory Public Cloud brings together both sellers and buyers of computing resources via an easy online trading platform”.
             John Webster of [...]

It was interesting and refreshing to see SNIA organizing a Cloud Storage Summit.  We were excited to present our vision for Private Cloud Storage and compare notes with other vendors on this rapidly developing market. 
It was good to see large vendors embracing the Private Cloud reality as the next evolution of the data center. I [...]