Jim Morin

The success or failure of public cloud services can be measured by whether they deliver high levels of performance, security and reliability that are on par with, or better than, those available within enterprise-owned data centers. Gartner predicts that the global public cloud computing market is set to reach US$131 billion in 2013, up from $111 billion last year. To serve this market with the performance, security and reliability needed, cloud providers are moving quickly to build a virtualized multi-data center service architecture, or a "data center without walls." This approach is made possible by cloud orchestration software that federates the data centers of both the enterprise customer and cloud service provider so that all compute, storage, and networking assets are treated as a single, virtual pool with optimal placement, migration, and interconnection of ... (more)

Outlook 2013: Enterprise Will Seek a Better Network to the Cloud

In 2012, much of the industry was focused on what's going inside the data center to enable cloud computing. As we move into 2013 and beyond, enterprise IT will need to consider the network that connects the data centers - particularly how these inter-data center networks need to change to support new cloud use cases and associated network requirements for bandwidth scalability, low latency, security, virtualization and automation. As network specialists, Ciena has been concentrating on solving the connectivity issues between data centers, and data centers to the cloud. There are... (more)

Building Your Private Cloud

Today's typical broadband virtual private network (VPN) connections to cloud applications will prove insufficient for tomorrow's cloud infrastructure services. The reason is that infrastructure workloads demand more from the network than software services. While broadband network services fit the user-to-machine cloud model for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, the network needs to be upgraded in three key areas for machine-to-machine, cloud infrastructure services (IaaS): Capacity and scalability Security and encryption Bandwidth on-demand Let's take a look at why your... (more)