... h6. *[TheRegister: The Year in Operating Systems: No battle of big ideas|http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/the_year_in_oses/]*
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by Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a mature IT market, it becomes hard to make any significant changes in hardware architecture or software design without upsetting the installed base of legacy users.
This, of course, makes the evolution of a product somewhat troublesome. Change must fit within the strict confines of compatibility, ensuring both hardware and software vendors do something useful without upsetting the entire apple cart in the data center - or on our desks and in our laps.
To be sure, this is a lot less exciting than having a totally new thing come along, as proprietary minis did in the late 1970s, commercialized Unix did in the mid-1980s, and a decent Windows operating system for desktops and Linux for supercomputers and then regular servers did in the mid-1990s.
These kinds of tectonic shifts are very difficult to imagine in operating systems these days, thanks to the internet where no one particular machine or its operating system is the center of gravity for users and developers.
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h6. *[InfoWorld: Cloud-like hosted service offers customizable servers, storage|http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/16/Cloudlike_service_offers_customizable_servers_storage_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/16/Cloudlike_service_offers_customizable_servers_storage_1.html]*
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by Jon Brodkin
A new managed hosting offering targeted at mid-sized businesses lets customers quickly provision and reconfigure servers, storage, and network capacity through a secure Web portal.
Weather.com handles whatever nature serves up - read this white paper.
RagingWire, which spent the last eight years offering co-location to enterprise-class customers from a 200,000-square foot data center in Sacramento, Calif., has announced a new business unit called StrataScale for smaller customers that prefer to offload the burden of managing their own IT resources.
"Customers told us they wanted more services. They wanted us to take over these layers of infrastructure," says Douglas Adams, vice president of sales and marketing.
RagingWire says its high-end enterprise customers are still looking for pure co-location services, in which the customer rents space and brings in its own equipment. By contrast, the new StrataScale service, known as IronScale , offers dedicated, bare-metal servers along with storage, security and network resources. StrataScale has so far resisted using the ubiquitous "cloud computing" buzz-phrase to describe its services, although its offer of flexible computing resources outside the customer data center would seem to fit that industry segment.
"Analysts are pushing us to use (the word 'cloud'), says Yatish Mishra, CTO and founder of RagingWire. "We're a platform that enables cloud. I'm not sure we're a direct cloud player."
With IronScale, customers rent by the month or year, and can design their own server environments through an easy-to-use interface, company officials say. (Compare server products .)
"The concept is it's completely automated," Mishra says. "You log in through a secure portal and you define what you want. You say I want a Linux box, I want 200GB of storage. I want a firewall, and you say 'go.' In three minutes the whole environment is built. We break down all the components in the physical world. We break down the server, the storage, the network, the firewall, security, VPN, and you can assemble them any way you want."
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h6. *[CNet: Can Sun rise to the cloud-computing challenge?|http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10123834-240.html?tag=mncol]*
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by James Urquhart
As a former employee of Sun Microsystems, I've been fascinated for some time about what the cloud can do for its troubled fortunes. The company has amazing cloud DNA, in terms of technology and talent.
Sun is a company of engineers founded by engineers to engineer for engineers. They've got the technology chops to do something great here, as can be evidenced by some of the interesting things to come out of Sun Labs in the last year or two.
In the last few weeks, Sun finally took direct action for the cloud, and it reorganized its software division to take the cloud challenge head-on. So it was with great anticipation that I listened on Tuesday to a discussion between Dave Douglas and Lew Tucker about Sun's interpretation of the cloud market, and Sun's potential place in it. (The slides are also available.)
This was more of a "placeholder" presentation-certainly not a major announcement-but Douglas and Tucker laid out a foundation of concepts, and then outlined how Sun can work to address the opportunities this market creates.
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