The world’s largest DNA-sequencing outfit is looking to the clouds. The BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) this month announced plans to roll out its cloud computing capabilities, which it hopes will help it to dominate bioinformatics in the same way it does the world of sequencing. Research labs often lack the storage, computing power and technical know-how to cope with the current deluge of genomic data. Services such as the BGI’s offer a solution, […]
Elastic
6 posts
One of the few sure things in the online world is Amazon.com. The site never seems to go down, despite the fact that it’s serving millions of customers every day. Yet even the mighty Amazon — or, more accurately, its cloud services unit, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud — collapsed in April for about 24 hours, taking with it customers like Reddit, foursquare, Hootsuite and hundreds of other websites, some of them run by small businesses. […]
A few weeks back, I was on a panel of media pundits asked to make predictions about what might happen in the technology business in 2011. One prominent member of our group, seeking to stake out a bold, contrarian position, asserted that 2011 would be the year that “cloud computing” would be revealed to be a big nothing, an over-hyped concept that in the end is more about marketing than actual technology. He’s so, so […]
When we first heard about cloud computing, public clouds got most of the attention. But as IT managers looked at the security risks of having data outside the corporate firewall, they turned their attention to private clouds, which analysts and various surveys suggest will get more enterprise investment in the next few years. But private clouds have their share of challenges too. There are management issues and operational processes to figure out. And, of course, […]
Cloud computing is a transformative delivery model that is changing the way technology vendors, distributors, resellers, and consumers think about, approach, and implement IT systems. What exactly “the cloud” is remains a matter of debate, because there are more than two dozen definitions for cloud computing. Further, how the cloud is applied to the conventional IT channel is relatively uncharted and may ultimately prove difficult to pin down. Escaping the cloud is almost impossible. Cloud […]
Cloud computing is all the rage. “It’s become the phrase du jour,” says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition. As a metaphor for the Internet, “the cloud” is a familiar cliché, but when combined with “computing,” the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility […]