Last Week in Performance Industry - July #4 Edition

Understanding Data: Bytes Sized

Information is Beautiful Studio has made an infographic for BBC Future comparing megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes, and even yottabytes of data to analogue content in books, biological data and data encoded in our cells. It serves as a guide to understanding data storage capacities. For example, all cells in human body could be stored in 0.09 yottabytes of data, or all printed material on Earth could be stored in 0.2 exabytes of data, and human sperm created per day could be stored in 152 petabytes. Read this and more interesting information from an infographic below.

Link to full infographic: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130621-byte-sized-guide-to-data-storage

Open Stack's 3rd Birthday: Equal to 379 Years of Effort

"Keep it coming, OpenStack. Cut the birthday cake and pour a glass of champagne. The money spent is worth every drop," says Alex Williams in an article for TechCrunch and reflects on OpenStack celebrating its third birthday. "OpenStack is an important effort enabling anyone to build their own cloud service free from the control of proprietary cloud vendors," he explains.

Rackspace made a mini-documentary about OpenStack. You can watch it below.  In the documentary, you can hear opinions from some of the founders and early contributors to Openstack as they look back to the initial collaboration and reflect on the joining of like-minded developers and technologists that ignited the Openstack open-source movement.

OpenStack brings some of the milestones and looks back at what they have done in the last 3 years. For example, OpenStack has grown into a global community spanning 121 countries, expanded scope from compute and object storage to a cloud platform comprised of compute, storage, networking and shared services with more than 1,278 contributors who have written more than 1,3 million lines of code.

Read more from TechCrunch or celebrate with OpenStack and grab the badge for your website and read the full anniversary infographic.

Meanwhile: Amazon fully controls the Cloud?

Recently, AWS (Amazon Web Services) made its 37th price reduction and had cut prices again for its dedicated instances. "The day AWS announced the news, the price of Rackspace's stock dropped as well," Linthicum comments on InfoWorld. "With its huge price reductions, Amazon Web Services not only leads the market, but controls it as well," Linthicum claims. Since the cloud market is still in its forming years, all should be concerned about a single company owning such a degree of control over pricing.  "As we saw with Microsoft in the desktop operating system market in the 1990s, such control has both good and bad aspects. The good: You have a single technology provider that defines the market for you, so you don't have to bet on who will win. The bad: That already-a-winner controls the market, and it can get lazy or stupid, hurting everyone."

Read the full article by David Linthicum here.

Forbes: Global Cloud Perspectives

A new white paper about global cloud perspectives is out (http://www.itwhitepapers.com/content28299). Supported by Cisco Systems, Forbes surveyed over 500 senior executives from global companies with sales ranging from $250 million to over $20 billion, and interviewed 15 executives. The study examined the ways business leaders increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results, and enhance innovation and collaboration across borders and functions.

CloudTweaks bring some highlights from the report:

• Business initiatives are implemented faster when the business is infused with cloud-based collaborative agility. So much so that nearly two out of three executives, 64%, say that cloud-based collaboration tools accelerate business results—a figure that rises to 82% among so-called “leaders”
• Over half—55%—say that cloud-based solutions are no mere evolution but rather represent a true revolution in collaborative effectiveness. This figure rises to 87% among “leaders.”
• 58% percent of total respondents—and 90% of “leaders”—say that cloud-based collaboration has the potential to improve virtually any set of processes.
• 95% of executives—93% of “leaders”—believe cloud-based collaboration stimulates innovation.

Read the full review from CloudTweaks http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/07/the-collaborative-revolution/ or find the full paper here http://www.itwhitepapers.com/content28299

Google’s Cloud Products took on $200 Million in Revenue Last Quarter

According to TBR analysis, Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps generated $200 million in the second quarter of 2013. This is a rise by 195% in comparison to last year, and it is expected to hit $885 million. "Even if the annual outlook is on point, Google cloud probably will still trail the biggest IaaS running today, Amazon Web Services, which is believed to be a $2 billion operation," says Jordan Novet at GigaOM. TBR further comments in an analysis that if Google wants to grow its cloud revenue more, it will need to invest more money in hybrid and private deployments.

Google Cloud Platform lets you build applications and websites, store data, and analyze data on Google’s infrastructure and Google Apps is a cloud-based productivity suite that helps you connect and get work done from anywhere on any device.

Read more from GigaOM.

Related articles

• Randy Bias: OpenStack Needs Amazon APIs To Drive Hybrid Clouds
• Last Week in Performance Industry - July #3 Edition
• COO Mark Collier discusses OpenStack roadmap, API fit with AWS
• IBM Makes Pivotal Move to Support Cloud Foundry PaaS