Progressing further, we are about to yet another Web technology taking over the desktop. You can now run a full fledged OS called Carbyn in HTML5 alone. Imagine running a UI based OS running inside your Browser.

What that means is that you’ve absolutely nothing to be installed, it runs in any “modern” browser. Logging on to browser is as easy as opening a browser and pointing it to Carbyn and you’re all set. It runs well on all Tablet browsers as well: iPad, Android tablets, Paybook, HP WebOS.

All apps are straightaway built on HTML5, obviously. There’s a SDK for developing apps ont his platform and if you know how to write HTML5, writing one of this OS is no different.

Its like nothing else anyone has ever seen. We’re used to HTML5 webapps but not a HTML5 OS which can run HTML5 apps as well. When you close a Carbyn app, you’re taken back to the Carbyn homescreen. But the key is that there’s much better multi-tasking thanks to their SDK which allows different apps to talk to one another in a way that traditional web apps can’t.

Carbyn is more like Chrome OS minus the underlying browser and customize Ubuntu. Carbyn will run anywhere, just login and instantly you get access to your homescreen and your apps from anywhere: Mobile (soon), tablet, PC.

Carbyn is working hard to get what they really need to be successful: Apps. They are working with key developers to tailor apps for their platform through their own App Store.

See the video coverage from TechCrunch:

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WWDC 2011 would be about several important software releases: the next iteration of its desktop and mobile platform, Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5, as well as iCloud, Apple’s upcoming cloud service that would offer a bunch of cloud services.

However, this is almost certain that there will be no new iPhone 4S that would be announced at this event. iPhone would be delayed for a later year release.

Steve Jobs would take the stage on Monday, June 6th at San Francisco to announce the new Mac OS Lion, iOS5 and cloud services, you can’t dare to miss it. Stay tuned with us, we would be covering the event live with audio, video streams, twitter updates @geeknizer.

more at: http://developer.apple.com/wwdc

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The trouble is over, with Gmail for mobile and Google Cloud Print, its now possible to print from any app on any device, OS or browser without the need to install any drivers for the specific printer.

How to Configure Google Cloud Printing

To get started, you would need one time configuration on your printer, making it capable of Cloud Printing.

You can use  a Windows PC (Linux and Mac soon) support are coming soon. To get started with configuration, install the Chrome with Cloud Print support.

This can be done by going into settings > Under the hood > Sign in to Google Cloud Print.

Once you’re set up, just go to gmail.com from your iPhone or Android browser and choose “Print” from the dropdown menu in the top right corner. You can also print eligible email attachments (such as .pdf or .doc) by clicking the “Print” link that appears next to them.

Now you can be anywhere in the world and print documents directly in your office, home.

If you have any trouble, you can checkout official guide.

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The feature, which Google confirmed it is testing on a select number of users, goes one big step beyond Google Suggest and provides streaming search results as-you-type.

Search Multiple Gmail accoutns, google Apps as you Type

If you are underwhelmed by what you ‘ve seen,  try this Firefox  / chrome Plugin created by a web startup company CloudMagic, that brings “Search as you type” to Gmail and Google Apps.

After Install, you get a new search box that lets you do things to your wildest imaginations. It allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, Contacts, emails, phone numbers, keyword based searches, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread, without navigating away from your current Gmail page, it all works as a snap.

The first time you install the extension, you will have to giveaway your credentials for allt he accounts you wish to unify and search from CloudMagic. I know, even I’m uncomfortable doing that, but company promises on not misusing it.

The interface is appealing and brings True Multitasking to Gmail. Clean up all the clutter by practically working in a single tab. No longer will you have to open another tab to something extra.

Here’s a sneak peak on how to get started.

Download: Firefox /Chrome Extension

What’s Next with CloudMagic?

CloudMagic has bigger plans going further. They will soon be available with Google Docs, Hotmail, Yahoo & other cloud services.

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Google just made sharing and storing files into the cloud very easy, Now you can make your Google Docs visible and accessible to everyone. What this means is that we’re getting 1GB of extremely fast and very easy-to-use cloud storage which supports just anything from music in MP3, OGG & Video in AVI, MP4, OGV, etc.

Apart from that there’s a built-in anti-virus, which even causes troubles for certain file-types.

To get started, click upload in the top left corner of Google Docs. Select any file and click start upload. Then, click through to your new upload, click share in the top left corner, ‘Get the link to share…’ and finally check mark against ‘Allow anyone with the link to view(no signin required)’.

Also checkout: GlideOS: Free Cloud OS, GDrive 30GB

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From today onwards, the pain is over, YouTube has announced Online/ Cloud-based Video editing tool that gives users power and flexibility in the uploaded videos like never before.

The new YouTube editor allows

• Trimming Videos
• Mix and match clips
• Add music (swap sound)
• Combine multiple videos in custom fashion

Although its no replacement for Pro offline tools like Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut Pro, but it sure gives user a lot of convenience. So next time you have multiple Videos on your Android phone, combining them all to make all new production is just launching browser (with flash) away.

The Interface

Youtube Video Editor gives users a very familiar interface : For instance, to combine videos, just drag thumbnails from their existing assets into the timeline/filmstrip at the bottom. Once placed there, you can edit and trim those videos by selecting the obvious scissors icon. Not just that, full Preview is available before you can save it as a new video. The new video would then have option to add title, description, tags just like a newly uploaded video.

Although, YouTube isn’t the best  and/or the first Cloud Video editing app, still it adds lot of convenience.

In 2007, youtube had attempted to start a similar video editing a using Flash-based YouTube mixer, which was based on Adobe Premier Express. However, it was discontinued after it was found to be too buggy.  The new app sure looks way more polished and stable. Try it out.

Taking it further, is Salesforce and VMware, who are turning cloud computing into a Java runtime environment. The companies have partnered to together enable Spring framework based Java cloud. The foundation would be  VMware’s vSphere virtualization infrastructure and will be hosted, of course, at Salesforce.com.

VMforce (the name is obvious) will be able to host any Java application that can be built to utilize existing Salesforce’s database infrastructure. So what this means is that Enterprises and Businesses can build and host their Java applications on the salesforce’s infrastructure just like its possible today with Google’s App Engine. But way more capable.

App Engine limits (and restricts) itself to POJO java applications with limited choice of database: BigTable, a non-relational database (non-RDBMS). However, VMforce will host and run a typical J2ee application on most popular J2ee framework i.e. Spring (using Spring application-hosting layer) and a full blown traditional RDBMS database.

No doubt, Java developers currently lack a simple path to cloud deployment.

“There are over 6 million developers who know Java. It has transformed this industry and brought enterprises onto the Internet. But enterprise Java developers don’t have a clear path into the cloud. Can they deliver these next-generation cloud applications? Is there a gap between where Java is and where cloud computing is going?”

Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, said that “developers value, above everything else, productivity.” He said that, for new applications, deployment to a cloud can increase productivity and reduce internal IT complexity. He said that these benefits are at the heart of the partnership between VMware and Salesforce.

The companies together believe that this gap must be filled, so that we can deploy Real business Java apps to the cloud, giving developer more power to deliver the next generation of application development and deployment.

VMforce should open up to the public this fall. With vSphere being mature enough for most Cloud apps, it would help  in evolution and maturing of Cloud-based Java application.

How it Works:

On top of vSphere, the VMforce cloud will offer a Spring application-hosting layer and a database. Developers will use the SpringSource Tool Suite to build and deploy applications built specifically for the VMforce cloud. Those tools will include automatic analysis tools that can call out the portions of an application that will need to be changed to work in a cloud environment.

The app deployment and maintenance will be done via “The SpringSource Tool Suite” ,a  free development environment. To create a new application, there are a number of wizards but nothing new that needs to be learned. New applications can also be created using Spring template wizards.

However, the bad part: Applications using Enterprise JavaBeans aren’t candidates for moving to VMforce, and other Java EE applications would require significant rework in order to run in that environment. The VMforce platform is targeted at developers creating new Java applications for the cloud. This could be a big limitation of this Cloud service.

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Lot of the back-end work deals with complex signalling and RF management which is both tedious and expensive to maintain. But seems like  IBM researchers in China have come up with a faster, yet, elegant solution that reckons shifting the signal-processing overhead from base stations into the cloud. This will make it cheaper and easier to upgrade networks, leading to wireless networks that can provide better coverage by rapidly adapting to user demand.

In order to make offloading the signal processing to the cloud, A new architecture called the Wireless Network Cloud (WNC). WNC would make it possible to step away from “the usual” dedicated hardware for RBS (radio base stations) that serve Radio Frequencies for networks like GSM and 3G cell phone networks. This technique would decouple the radio antennas from the base stations, which now will be processed in the Cloud.

Carrying a voice/data signal is a costly job. There’s a lot of signal processing–the modulation and encoding of the signals to and from the physical antennas–which is carried out using software radio technology. Witht he power of Multicore processors and network grids, a general-purpose data center can do all the signal processing, making it much more cost-effective.
Advanced Network Management
Apart from what is said, WNC enables management of the network in a more centralized way. The Bearer signals would be relayed to and from multiple antennas, “remote radio heads,” via optical fibres from as far away as 40 kms. (The limitation of the distance is set by the acceptable delays.)

Having a centralized network management can certainly give providers added benefits. When it comes to managing networks Optimally, it can provide smart solution. e.g. In areas where cell traffic may vary dramatically depending upon the time of day–residential area where daytime voice traffic is light but evening traffic is heavy, or business areas where the opposite is true–WNC should allow the network operator to allocate, scale resources on-demand, something which was never so easy with traditional Networks.

Cost Benefit
The main attraction for network operators is the cost. Traditional base stations currently account for about 40 percent of a network’s total cost. So that means of a new company starts its setup for say 4G service, 40-50% is spent on the netowrk equipment leaving aside the staffing, assets, etc. And because Telecom hardware is totally proprietary, whenever a network is upgraded, almost all of this equipment has to be replaced. On the other side, WNC upgrades can be implemented relatively cheaply by installing new software.
So is this Cloud Network Management New?

“IBM’s concept is not totally new but rather a combination of familiar themes, such as software-defined radio, network equipment virtualization, and networks as software,” says Dipankar Raychaudhuri director of the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers University.

“For example, there is a U.K. company called picoChip that offers a variety of base stations in software using the same parallel computing platform.

“I think there is a good, strong argument to use software radio in base stations,” says David Grace head of the communications research group at the University of York, U.K., and chair of the World Universities Network Initiative on Cognitive Communications. Grace says the approach is capable of handling the signal processing required of base stations, but he is less convinced about the need to relocate this software and absorb it within the cloud. “It’s the old argument of whether to centralize or distribute,” he says.

Is there a downside of Cloud Network  Management?

Of course, the one I see is that we have to introduce the additional communication between devices to allow that to happen, which can cause problems in bad times. Even with AtoD (analog-to-digital) converters at the antennas, the raw streams of data they would create would be of very high frequencies. Processing this is notoriously difficult because it requires even higher frequency sampling. For instance, a typical GSM network at 1800 Mhz would need sampling at atleast double the frequency 3600 Mhz and converting that into bitstream would quote to very high bitrates, hence large data capacity would be needed for the Fibre, but certianly its not as high as what you would assume, few mbps can serve a typical GSM Antenna (BTS) quiet well.

Has this been Tested in field?

IBM already seems to have a prototype for a 4G technology:  WiMax. This has demonstrated that a general-purpose data server can handle the software radio requirements in realtime.

Verdict

The potential for WNC is huge. Beyond cost effectiveness, it will improve their ability to manage mobile virtual network operators–phone companies that own no infrastructure and instead lease it off larger companies. And although WNC would be most suitable for urban areas with very high density, it could also help in rural areas where network nodes can be hard to access and have unreliable power supplies. Overall, providing optimal solutions in every sector.

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Apart from technical benefits like prevailing thin-clients, platform independence; it can discourage piracy and reduce time to hit the market for game developers. OnLive had been over this concept since along while. They’ve demoed LIVE gaming via TV, PC, Mac in the past nothing was as detailed as the recent one. The video is lengthy but worth every second as it takes you into a convincing zone.

Update: The service is going LIVE in  June.

Here’s a  breakdown of the video: CEO Steve Perlman goes over the technology that makes this possible, routing it to U.S. within the tolerance Network delay of 80ms, then he discusses OnLive user interface (11:53), followed by an inevitable Crysis Wars demo (16:35) with blazing graphics, Brag Clips (17:49), and of course the iPhone app (19:31) and Q&A at 33:14.

Though cellphone integration is still limited to primarily spectating and social networking functions, PCs and Macs can get gaming via a 1MB browser plugin, or you can grab the microconsole streaming box for your TV. This microconsole goes free for with OnLive subscriptions. Watch the Video:

Ain’t that powerful? I thought these must be powered by AMD Fusion and  NVidia RealityServer cloud, or may be both of them combined with Lucid Hydra. But the CEO explains a different story.

This makes me believe Cloud Desktop computing (like Chrome OS) could go true end-user desktop quickly, provided cloud apps are designed in a good way.

What do you think?

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The Apps MarketPlace is essentially an app store integrated within Google Apps that would allow third-party developers to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers. The concept is very similar to Apple’s App Store difference being it target corporate business customers.

The marketPlace is all about how easy it will be to create, set up, and install apps using Google’s App Marketplace. It appears that the big focus is on how everything—apps and existing Google products—will work together seamlessly and allow for all your tools and data to sit in the cloud. Right now the appeal is for business applications, but the potential seems incredible and would certainly touch end users someday.

What it Means for App Developers, Business Users

Google is offering developers access to 25 million users and only asking for a one-time fee of $100 and 20% revenue in exchange—that’s less than Apple’s 30%. Of course, Google is providing a solid system with apps being authenticated using OpenID, secured using oAuth, and made available through a universal Google Apps navigation system.

there are already 50 partners right at launch. There are no details on approval process, But once an app is in the Marketplace, it’s easy for users or buyers to add them to their Google accounts.

What is the Scope?

App development of these apps is so simple that the moment the developers came out of GooglePlex, they started writing apps.

What does all this mean right now? For business users, there are plenty of apps already available—ones for Business WorkFlow, payroll, data entry, management, and an office suite—and they’ll be able to run everything right from the cloud.

This is a great opportunity for each and every business user, developer, since all the power of apps that had been offline, would now be  leveraging the power of the cloud.

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We may not see GDrive coming out ever, but here is something even better.

One step further in Cloud computing is the Cloud OS. No, we are not talking about Chrome OS or Jolicloud OS likes but rather an Operating System that has a thinner client: a browser. There are several such offerings in the market that let you create a desktop environment hosted on a cloud service. The best one that comes for free is: GlideOS.

GlideOS is a Flash based Application that runs in your browser and simulates a complete desktop environment for which all the application processing happens in the cloud. What’s more? GDrive. To make it easier for us to get our files synced up with the cloud, Glide provides a desktop client for Windows, Mac, Linux (RPM), and Solaris/OpenSolaris (yes, really!). There’s also a mobile portalwhich you can access from just about any smartphone.

They recently upgrade the free package to 30GB — 30x times more than Google Docs. Further, 250GB for $50US per year — the same price gets you 200GB from Google.

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Click to Enlarge

But there is a limitation: Glide doesn’t allow just any file – their storage is restricted to media and documents, so you won’t be uploading things like installers and archives, other files.

Seems like a good deal for people with smaller form factor devices like netbooks or even for people who want data on the move.

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This includes: Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Facebook, Delicious, Flickr, Photobucket, Basecamp, Zoho. And all this is free only for new users who singup before till January 31, 2010. The service will be free for lifetime.
What’s more is that it will support YouTube, Tumblr, and XMarks, RSS soon.

But wait a minute, what if this cloud also goes down ? Well, no one has answer for that but I guess one backup of original content decreases failure rate by significant amount. Privacy may be of concern for certain policy but their privacy policy takes care of the most concerns.

Signup for Backupify

When WEP was launched it was called Wired equivalent privacy, Now people call it Wasted

On the contrary, WPA based networks are still better, it need dictionary brute force which can be very slow at times coz all the permutations and combinations will take several hours over standard core duo or quad cores. However, what if you could leverage the Power of Cloud computing to do this, it would take couple of minutes.

Confused by WEP, WPA, TKIP, AES & Other Wireless Security Acronyms?

The idea has been taken by WPACracker, a cloud based service that promises to break those WPA keys that took 4-5 days in under 20 minutes.

WPA-PSK networks are vulnerable to dictionary attacks, but running a respectable-sized dictionary over a WPA network handshake can take days or weeks. WPA Cracker gives you access to a 400CPU cluster that will run your network capture against a 135 million word dictionary created specifically for WPA passwords. While this job would take over 5 days on a contemporary dual-core PC, on our cluster it takes an average of 20 minutes, for only $17.

Well, good for crackers, but what about the Security admin nightmares?

We sure need new encryption standards, don’t we?

There are 100s of Cloud services that let you host your apps on their Servers with a highly scalable architecture, and High availability (Practically five 9s of uptime), all that at a fraction of cost of ownership.

Without getting into detail of stuff you, probably, already know, let’s give a look at comparing the cloud Computing services from industy’s leaders. Let’s compare : Google`s App Engine vs. Microsoft`s Windows Azure, back to back, feature by feature:

Language Support:
At this year’s PDC, when Microsoft talked about Windows Azure, the announcement came with a surprise that blew everyone away: Support for  .NET (C# and Visual Basic), C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, Java.
On the other hand, Google App Engine does only Java and Python, atleast at this time.

Programming languages is not the only restriction in GAE. Another restriction is that you get only Servlets, JSPs, you can’t host EJB based Apps. Now that’s not good!

Winner: Azure

Application Types
Azure offers two different kinds of application models: Web Roles and Worker Roles. Web roles are your typical request/response HTTP paradigm similar to GAE’s Web based Request model. More interesting is the Worker role that adds processing and logic that does not need to be triggered via a web request, rather, run Natively on the system as Service/process. This gives you the ability to run background tasks and opens up a whole raft of application possibilities. On the contrary, limited stuff can be achieved in AppEngine using Cron Jobs or via Java/Python based application schedulers.

In GAE, it would go like this: The Cron job needs to ping a URL which executes a task, but that task is limited by the request timeout. Basically you have 30 seconds to finish processing while Azure can run for hours on a single task. May be, this is not the best example as it’s asynchronous but I know you got the point.

Winner: Azure

Development/Ease of Migration

Both of them provide a secure access, abstract from the underlying OS, hence both prohibit system level access like Files, Sockets, etc. This introduces an additional step for the the developers to make sure they run independently. Like Microsoft quoted “give us your application in USB drive that can run with .bat file”

Both cloud services offer a number of plugins for IDEs to make application development and deployment easy. Microsoft wants developers to automate the deployment from a bat file or any Windows native runnable, on the contrary, Google gives you Deployment descriptors for directly deploying into the Webserver. Because of this, people would argue that GAE is simpler when it comes to application deployment.

What’s more important is to emulate the GAE and Azure system offline. Developing an application anywhere, anytime for the cloud is a key enabler. Though, both of them claim to be competitive, but in my experience I found AppEngine Emulator works 99% cases, Azure misbehaves, sometimes.

Winner: AppEngine slightly better than Azure

Integration with Other Apps

Google will let you use all your Google Apps (Accounts, Docs, Gmail, IM etc) Pre-integrated with the service at almost no hassle. With this comes integrated email, XMPP IM at zero cost. Azure looks pretty cool, on this too. Microsoft claims that it will integrate well with SharePoint, SQL server, outlook and all other apps that Microsoft has to offer. Of course, you will have to purchase them.

Winner:  -Tie-

Customized solutions

Another important point of consideration is “How customizable the solution is”. What we actually mean is: apart from the default webserver/database can we choose any other? Yes in Azure, No in AppsEngine. Azure will let you run a different database and webserver of choice but Google restrains you to their proprietary solution. I know Google’s solution is awesome but what if my application is written in such a way that it needs AppServer like Weblogic and an Oracle database?

Winner: Azure

Performance

We are not comparing the hardware both clouds have to offer, ofcourse both of them are good. Rather we are comparing the services that come built-in for High performance, distributed applications. AppEngine offers distributed caching using Memcache. I heard Azure plans to include Velocity. Otherwise, if you only have one web instance you can use ASP.NET caching. If you have multiple web instances, then you need a way to invalidate the other server’s cache. Inter-role communication is coming soon which would make this possible.

Winner: Hard to compare

Scalability
Azure claims High scalability, but is yet unproven in this area and would remain so until we see their service Officially launched, next year. On the Google’s front, web is the proof that GAE would not hold up against traffic of a serious or sustained nature. Concerns with CPU and storage limitations, caching, database immutability plus one way in and out ( via the Google API ).

In GAE the app automatically scales. In Azure you need to change the config to add new web or worker role instances. For few this is more painful as it requires more monitoring and it’s also harder to write worker roles that balance effectively especially since in code you can’t tell how many are running.

Of course we will have to wait and see how Azure stacks up in this regard practically, so it’s pretty impossible to compare both technologies at this time.

Winner: -Tie-

Storage
Azure offers a few different storage options including Table Storage that leverages the ADO.NET Data Services Framework to get the job done. GAE encourages Persistence and “soft schema” based large tables which are able to achieve High performance using auto-partitioning approach. On the bad side, GAE blobs are stored in the regular data store and are limited to 1MB.  Azure supports 50GB blobs. Which is something serious.

Winner: -Tie- (Both have advantages, flaws)

Cost of Ownership

Though official packages and plans aren’t out for Azure, but there’s one thing we know of for sure: It’s definitely not free. Google gives you a fairly capacitive Engine for free and of course to scale higher, you need to pay an affordable amount.

Google offers a decent resource utilization (CPU and bandwidth) that can serve 5 million pageviews for an average application. For free account, AppEngine restricts total storage to be less than 500mb. But I believe 5 million transactions capacity would be enough for small enterprise or a self-hosted developer webapp.

From what we have learned from the past, there’s no doubt Google’s pricing are much more competitive than Microsoft can ever think of. Credit goes to Open Source.

Winner: AppEngine

Verdict

Google’s offering is fairly proven and competitive when it comes down to prices, scalability and performance. But when it comes to application/language support, Azure takes a big lead. At this point of time, Google is not targeting to serve just-any-other business but rather a “niche of Enterprises, developers” that rely on Python, Java web applications based on simple servlets,  JSPs with decent persistence mechanisms.

Microsoft has really done a great job at expanding the horizon to a wider scope. I definitely applaud them for this achievement but it all nails down to one concern: Would you host your IT Business at the mercy of Windows Servers? You have to decide!

Note: This Blog will be updated as they change. So, make sure you subscribe to us below.

Cloud Computing

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Windows Azure is the cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for all the web applications we see on the Internet, Enterprise. Windows Azure provides you on-demand compute & storage to host, scale, and manage web applications and services on the internet in Microsoft data centers. i.e. On-Demand, the capacity can be increased, or based on Threshold triggers, capacity can be increased to meet-up the expected traffic with optimal performance.

e.g. For Bloggers: You can host your WordPress blogging app-service on the Cloud and capacity is Tuned dynamically. For Developers: You can run Java, Perl, Ruby, PHP, .NET applications on the cloud. 

So if you own a blog or belong to an enterprise that wants to run Applications and scale the capacity sky high, Azure is for you. On day one: your blog may be getting low traffic, you can subscribe to a low-end cloud service. On demand, with rise in traffic, capacity can be increased (on the fly) to scale upto a traffic of Billion hits per day, like Twitter gets.

So what all can be done with Windows Azure?

Features (as per Microsoft)

When is it Available, What is the Deal?

Microsoft will launch Azure as a production service on January 1st, and customers can avail it for free for 1 month. The Technical Preview, now underway, will continue through the end of the year.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, took the keynote stage on PDC 09, today. He introduced the world to Azure Services Platform a year ago, during PDC 08. Today, he added when to why, what and where about what Microsoft now calls the Windows Azure Platform.

Ozzie said that a few companies would take Azure into production starting today (November 18th 09). With that as introduction, Ozzie announced that Automatic, creator of open-source WordPress blogging system, would be one of those companies. From a marketing perspective, it was a stunning announcement, since Automatic uses open-source tools like Apache and MySQL.

The message: Azure isn’t just about Microsoft products or development tools.

I must say it was simply shocking, Microsoft promoting Open source, I Love it!

What do you think?

Cloud Computing started from the cloud based processing then expanded steps to storage and now comes the third contender: Graphics. Now, Nvidia will power cloud-based GPU rendering which can be deployed as server-farms.

Nvidia looks to be bringing 3D rendering to the cloud with the news it is to partner with rendering expert Mental Images to launch its RealityServer platform. The pair are hoping to develop systems for offering web-based 3D rendering via Nvidia’s high-end Tesla RS GPUs.

As per the plan, On Nov. 30, Nvidia will launch the RealityServer platform, featuring a hardware server based on the Fermi architecture with a minimum of eight GPUs, scaling to 32 and even 100. A developer edition of RealityServer 3.0 software will be downloadable free of charge, including the right to deploy non-commercial applications.

RealityServer is designed around CUDA general purpose GPU technology and features 240 individually addressable cores. The technology is quiet scalable considering the fact that a single implementation can feature a 100 or more Tesla GPUs capable of simultaneously rendering for thousands of users. This will allow for the creation of extremely realistic objects via a simple user interface – and can calculate complex graphics like shadows, anti-Aliasing, anisotropy and reflections swiftly.

The idea is quiet similar to what AMD had with it’s Fusion Cloud. Although, fusion is  more aimed at allowing games to be sold on a SaaS model than for professional graphics creation.

Thin-client Cloud Gaming: Makes Crysis on iPhone possible

Application: The initial target market for the RealityServer product is, of course, corporate – engineering, medical research, product development, and architecture.

The purpose behind RealityServer is fairly simple: change the way Graphics are produced (rendered) today. Most PC users are used to their PC rendering 3D graphics via a GPU. Animation/Movie studios and product development, faced with the task of rendering even more complex scenes, use a series of locally-networked servers or workstations known as a rendering farm.

RealityServer intends on taking the concept one step further by isolating those servers away from the user, across the Internet, in a cloud configuration.

If you wonder is it even practical? Here is a solid slap —  Google Earth uses a similar technique, caching a small portion of data on the user’s PC, then streaming additional data over a broadband connection as the user moves over the virtual map.

It does have one weakness, (as per Nvidia): The geometry of the virtual world is calculated using the local graphics engine, making impossible for some mobile devices from leveraging it.

Consider this: If the graphics are too simple, workstations and a user’s own 3D cards would make the RealityServer irrelevant. But the latency and bandwidth limitations imposed on cloud-based rendering would make rendering realtime video nearly impossible.

As a compromise, the RealityServer will render complex static images using ray tracing, a graphical technique that models the flight of individual photons as they reflect and refract across various surfaces and textures.

It will be up to customers, however, to provide the front-end software and applications to take advantage of the technology, such as a car manufacturer which uses the RealityEngine to render the latest roadster, using the software to dynamically change the color.

It has lot of potential, all we need is the right kind of application that could integrate client and the Cloud in a phenomenal way.

Next is what? Cloud OS: Chrome OS

What do you think ? Is it all worth ?

Magic of Cloud computing: VMware and RDP 6 client: Run Windows 7, Flash on iPhone – Wyse PocketCloud

Here is an example:

What you Draw ---- What you get

PhotoSketch is an internet-based Cloud application that can take the rough, labeled sketch on the left and magically turn it into the REAL on the right. Seems unbelievable watch the video:

The basic how-it-works, is presented in a research paper [pdf]. Here is the summary:

Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture – anything from seagulls to a Mercedes, whatever tickles your fancy,

Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.

Step 3. PhotoSketch will then find real-life images to match your doodles and put them together in a Photoshopped image that will make your jaw drop.

PhotoSketch’s blending algorithm analyzes each of these images, compares them with each other, and decides which are better for the blending process. It automatically traces and places them into a single photograph, matching the scene, and adding shadows. Of course, the results are less than perfect, but they are good enough:

I tired this yesterday and it was like one of the most innovative technologies i`ve seen in my life. If you want to try this out, you’ll probably have to wait. It became so popular within hours of the release that the load on their servers has taken their site down. LINK

Try again later, good luck

Wyse released PocketCloud iPhone application that features a RDP 6 client (Windows 7 compatible) for iPhone/iPod Touch with one very unique Feature- VMware View 3.1 support, making it a perfect Thin-OS.

Till this app was released, I used iRdesktop for RDP, which is a capable and free RDP client that has done everything one needs. The problem with most RDP clients is that the mouse is very hard and cumbersome to use. Common iPhone gestures (pinch to zoom, for instance) make it a bit easier to navigate, but that alone makes it only barely useable.

Thanks toWyse, this problem is solved. They have developed a new interface for the mouse pointer that allows users to make it finally do-able from iPhone/iPod Touch.

My first reaction was “Wow… why such a great idea was left un-discovered till now”.

To pretend mouse moves, you have to simple move the large circular cursor around until you get to the area you want, then select the object of interest from the floating icons around the large cursor. And the good part, gestures still work, as does the “exact tapping” method, should you choose to keep it.

The RDP client portion is simple and clean, and let’s come to the interesting part. VMware client

The VMware View is indeed a great value add. It’s easy to use, but one huge feature is missing: TCX rich multimedia support.  The app is branded as being “Certified VMware Ready,” and Wyse is obviously tight with VMware since TCX is built in to View, but they also have a pretty tight relationship with Citrix.

Resolutions and Layout:

The App lets you choose various resolutions both landscape and portrait:

Thin-Browser:

Thin-Browser is a feature that allows server-side web browsing with support for Flash, Java, and Silverlight by presenting what amounts to a seamless Internet Explorer session that has been formatted for the iPhone. Being Internet Explorer, ActiveX is also supported. All you need for enabling this feature is an application called PocketCloud Windows Companion to be installed on the remote machine.

Adobe Buzzword (Flash based App)

Here is the summary of Features as per the company:

Wyse Proprietary RDP 6.0 Engine (windows 7 compatible)

• Fast: Optimized for the iPhone
• Enterprise grade security: 128-bit encryption and FIPS support
• Microsoft Terminal Services support

3G and Wi-Fi Optimized

• Work smoothly with 3G connections and Wi-Fi

VMware View 3.1 Certified

• Support for:
  • Direct connections and advanced tunneling
  • SSL encryption
  • Experimental support for RSA Two-Factor Authentication

Optimized iPhone GUI

• Fast, interactive, and enjoyable user experience
• Advanced high-accuracy mouse cursor
• Removable toolbars for maximum screen real estate

Free Windows Companion Application

• Thin-Browser™
  • Server-side Web browsing with iPhone GUI
  • Support for rich and interactive content such as Flash, Silverlight, and Java
  • ActiveX and add-ons support
• Automatic keyboard detection:
• Whenever a keyboard is needed, PocketCloud windows companion notifies the PocketCloud on the iPhone to invoke the virtual keyboard

Verdict

The App is priced sky high at $30, which is a bit unjustified considering the lack of TCX support and only experimental RSA SecurID support. Still, I bought it to give it a try, and for me it was worth it. The app is good for Business users and niche enthusiasts who need 24×7 access to servers on remote PCs anytime anywhere, but for others, not worth the price set.

At this year’s CES, AMD demoed something new that shows how their platform technology can enable fully interactive cloud gaming. Sounds cool but what exactly is that? Cloud computing allows fully interactive game play from virtually any type of client over the Internet because the heavy lifting is being done “server side” in the cloud.

The user logs on, clicks open a browser and then starts blasting away. No hours of game installation, no exotic authorization dances, just instant gratification That is the main story of cloud computing. Enough preaching but I had to let that fly because it’s a powerful look at a better future for gaming.
The CES demo consisted of an AMD Fusion Render Nod that hosted an off-the-shelf version of EA’s amazing “Mercenaries II” served up via the Internet. The laptop powered  by AMD technology was given a URL to click and Mercenararies-II fired up.  Playback was full screen at 60 frames/sec.

Is it a Video trick?

Jules Urbach, the CEO of OTOY, is the Guru of GPGPU. The software that made this work is from his company.  He is to the GPU what Robert Rodriguez (another artist who employs AMD technology) is to digital moviemaking.

Jules is a true innovator and someone who chose AMD because we have all the pieces to make this work. We are the only one-stop-shopping platform solution for cloud computing hardware. The OTOY software harnesses the full power of the AMD platform including CPU, GPU and our Direct Connect high bandwidth interconnect.
In short, the game source code unaltered is hosted on the AMD Fusion Render Cloud hardware and served up on the web via breathtaking OTOY compression technology made possible by the AMD combined platform power. The OTOY software allows multiple instances of a game to be hosted on the AMD Fusion Render node so the solution scales for all the right economic reasons such as energy efficiency, space,  quiet operation, etc.

In a nutshell, OTOY claims to be able to deliver 3D games in real-time over the Internet, so that you can play, say, Crysis by using a remote render farm as a kind of terminal server that pushes out frames to a thin client that just does display and user input.

How is this accomplished?

It’s pretty interesting. First, the Game is rendered like normal on the server machine, where frames from it are grabbed by the OTOY server-side software. Next, these frames are compressed and sent out over the network to the client, which decompresses them using a very small chunk of code.

In fact, it can be surprisingly small. e.g.  780KB on the iPhone. It then displays them in a window. User input is sent back to the server over UDP because it’s tolerant of packet loss, so you don’t add to latency by resending dropped packets.

The demos of Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft were surprisingly responsive, despite the fact that the games were being served up by machines in a different state.

As expected, there was some discernible lag, but not much worse than what it was in Quake deathmatch days. The main problem with these demos was that one can easily see a ton of compression artifacts on the large monitors that AMD used.

Smaller monitors and fewer demo stations (for more bandwidth per station) would’ve put OTOY in a better light, but unless the visual experience was very significantly improved One couldn’t see immediately see many PC or console gamers settling for this in its present state.

But for casual/handheld gaming, this tech has immediate potential, as Crysis running the iPhone demonstrated. The iPhone’s screen was small enough and the gameplay was smooth and responsive.

As for OTOY’s prospects for eventually reaching the hardcore, my chat with their engineer proved instructive.

Will this Cloud Gaming Prevail ?

There’s a network bandwidth threshold beyond which OTOY’s technology is “good enough” to compete with a locally run game, and that this threshold is at the 20Mbit mark, which is the point that OTOY can push 1080p frames across the network. As long as latency is under control, if you’re playing at full 1080p then you’ll be just as happy gaming remotely via, say, a set-top box, as you are playing locally on very expensive hardware.

If you can game on way more parallel computing power at 1080p over the network than you could ever afford to buy locally, then even a hardcore gamer may be willing to tolerate a little latency and loss of sharpness, at least for certain types of games.

I can see where game developers love this idea, because it solves their piracy problem in one shot, eliminates support costs, and gives them a recurring revenue stream via subscriptions. I’m still having a bit of trouble getting my head around why AMD/ATI thinks this is a good long-term idea, though, because it seems like it could sell a lot more silicon to gamers than it could to render farms. It’s probably the case that AMD is happy to sell GPUs to both clients and servers for a while, especially if it opens up a new market like iPhone gaming to high-end GPUs.

The current release of Chrome – 3.0 is not extendible or much developer friendly. Which beats Chrome way back as compared to Firefox. Google is brining the next big change in Chrome 4.0, that will accelearte the adoption.

Era begins with the Bookmarks synchronization service that comes as part of Google Accounts(released few days back). That service makes its first appearance today with the first Dev build of the browser to bear the number “4.” The announcement that Google’s open-source Chromium team had developed a library for hooking into Google Bookmarks came just two weeks ago.

Of course, that “4″ is not supposed to mean anything specific. Like a child who finishes cleaning his room the moment he shouts, “I’m finished,” there’s no specific reason for us to assume that Chrome 3, the subject of both the Dev and beta channels, will necessarily drop into the Stable channel anytime soon. When that happens sometime this week or this year, Chrome 2 users will wake up one day and find Chrome 3.

For now, the first Chrome 4 bears little difference from the previous developer build 3.0.197.11 except for continued acceleration (more on that in a moment) and the option to enable Google Bookmarks for testing. It requires a command line launch, as in chrome –enable-sync (Windows XP users can invoke Run from the Start menu); from there, the Sync my bookmarks command appears on Chrome 4′s Tools menu.

In typical Google fashion, the program ascertains as much as it can without asking the user what she wants. All the tool requires is the user’s account name and password. If bookmarks already exist in the account, then Chrome 4 imports them; if they don’t, the browser exports the bookmarks that already exist, into that account.

One more addon arrives that makes web users’ life easier – Xmarks Browser sync. This si the famous bookmark sync plugin on firefox, and now arrives to chrome, making  inter-browser syncing possible.

Step Towards Chrome OS

Google is demonstrating how it’s tailoring its browser to netbook users. They won’t be using their portable netbooks full-time, and Chrome may or may not be the browser they use on their PCs. Currently, the Google Toolbar on Internet Explorer and Firefox are capable of performing browser synching functions, provided you save your bookmarks in the Toolbar and not the browser (or import them into the Toolbar from the browser). Typically, these users will prefer to use the same brand of browser on their netbooks as on their main PCs, though an easy method to sync bookmarks between the two browsers automatically could compel netbook users to try Chrome instead.

In initial tests of the first Chrome 4 on our physical Windows XP SP3-based test platform, the browser scored a record 20.09 on our Betanews performance index, representing over 20 times the speed of Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, running on the same machine. Improvements in JavaScript execution this round were only minor, but rendering speed continues to improve, although the latest Apple Safari 4 browser remains the fastest renderer in our test suite (4.53 versus 4.48).

The Chrome browser continues to lack some of the other features found in Firefox - the extensive Addons. However, we get the impression that we may start to see more of those features in the new Chrome 4 development track, and the unlimited Addons just like Firefox has today. These addons will fidn a good future for the Chrome OS.

Cloud has brought us unlimited and unmatched processing power that we could never think of a decade ago.

Earlier, I wrote how cloud computing was actually a Dark (Cloud) Knight. And the joker was successful in showing the Gotham that even the best among us could fall. This finds a corollary in the cloud computing world.

A Look back at the Benefits: Cloud storage offers some exciting advantages. It offers “pay as you go”, with no capital outlay and no need to buy extra equipment in anticipation of future storage demands. You scale storage dynamically and pay only for what you use. But you must trust your data to the cloud and the vendor behind the service.

Are we Ready to Build up the Trust? Few mid-size or large businesses are willing to trust the cloud today, although some are experimenting. “There’s a huge amount of interest,” says an analyst at Burton Group. But, he adds, none of his firm’s Fortune 100 clients is using a cloud storage service for live data today.

Fortune 100 companies believe It’s probably wise to proceed with caution, Cloud storage today is pretty much an early-stage concept.

Aside from a few Billionaires, like Amazon and Verizon’s Online Backup and Restore service, most offerings come from small start-ups.

“It’s best suited for low-priority or low-access, low-touch kinds of applications, primarily file-based as opposed to block-based,” says a Computerworld columnist. But he says he does have clients that use services from Amazon as temporary expansion space for testbeds or marketing programs. Another company quotes ”We have a lot to lose. If we’re playing, we’re only going to play with the big guys,”

Talking about Amazon’s S3 integration with educational universities, so far, has worked well. But it’s still questionable “If Amazon went down for two days, It could be a Nightmare”.

Cloud Security concerns pose Adoption Hurdle
But the attraction is real!

Reliability and Liability are still unknown in the cloud computing world: Businesses considering using cloud services will need to protect themselves against “information malpractice,” according to Drew Bartkiewicz, the VP of cyber-risk and new-media markets at the Hartford insurance company. He said that companies should stay away from cloud providers that are not open to discussing contractual, legal, privacy and compliance concerns.

Michelle Munson, co-founder and developer of Aspera thinks that reliability “is a much bigger issue than people are letting on.” She went on to say that liability and security aside, if cloud computing consolidates into too few providers, it would represent a global security concern of the highest order. Munson points to natural disasters as a primary consideration, like the Middle Eastern undersea outage in 2008 and to Google’s 2-hour May 14th outage, saying companies may not realize their exposure until after the fact. “Wait until the first 12-hour outage from a major cloud provider.” she said.

The Target Segment

The current segment under Cloud focus is nothing more than “A Storage”. The amazon and Verizon services haven’t gone much far from it. Though Google with its Apps, VOICE have taken a small step further. Still It’s merely a begining of what Cloud has to offer.

As per CloudSecurityAlliance, In the 21st century, cloud computing business models (a) challenge the presumption that a company possesses, or even controls, all of the digital business information for which the law imposes duties to preserve and produce, and (b) potentially jeopardize a company’s ability to preserve and produce required records and information. As a result, companies face substantial barriers to implementing cloud computing solutions if, as a result, their compliance capabilities and legal profiles are compromised.

Microsoft’s Azure is like a product thrown out to the market to analyze the prospects of a suite-solution-approach. We will still have to wait a while to know how well it can do.

Th REAL power of Cloud is still yet to be seen. The processing power we would be able to leverage with Cloud services of the future will be enough to glorify the future industry.

Virtualization- The Single Immortal Warrior

Except for Virtualization, nothing else has promised a good level of security. Optimal practices in Virtualization can lead to very good results. Refer to Tips for Optimizing Virtualization across Networks.

If you are not yet convinced about power of Virtualization, consider reading Five reasons why you should consider Virtualization.

Virtualization is the single domain where had been a lot of investments and fruitfull results from Vendors like Cisco, VMWare. Cisco has innovated in field of Virtualization aware networks. On the Server Virtualization side,  VMWare’s vSphere and Oracle’s Virtual Iron have seamless, secure portability of In-service Hardware switching in your data center where you no longer have to be worried about Dynamic Load sharing. thanks to Virtualization, OS is nothing but an application which can be flexibly load-balanced in the way you want to mould it to.

Portability and Inter-Operatability with Optimum Security:

Businesses using the cloud should be prepared for the worst. Yes, large cloud providers can make it easier to handle general availability issues well. But what happens when the cloud provider isn’t good enough? What are the considerations for moving applications across clouds? Or should businesses perhaps consider building a cross-cloud solution in the first place?

The ability to govern and measure enterprise risk within a company owned data center is difficult and still in the stages of maturation in most organizations. Using cloud computing resources could lead to many new unknowns in the areas of governance and enterprise risk. Online agreements and contracts are untested in a court of law and consumers have yet to taste an extended outage of services that they may someday determine is needed on a 24×7 basis. Questions still remain on the ability of user organizations to assess the risk of the provider through onsite assessments. Governance of the provider’s facilities and services could leave the user without recourse or recompense placing the risk of use squarely on the shoulders of the user. The storage and use of information that is considered sensitive by nature may be allowed but it could be unclear as to who is responsible in the event of a breach. If both the code authored by the user and the service delivered by the provider is flawed, who is responsible?

The Top concerns still left lost in the cloud as noted by “CloudsecurityAlliance” are on: How to manage each of these when there is trend shift from what we do today to what would be done in Cloud:

• Information lifecycle management
• Governance and Enterprise Risk Management
• Compliance & Audit
• General Legal
• eDiscovery
• Encryption and Key Management
• Identity and Access Management
• Storage
• Virtualization
• Application Security
• Portability & Interoperability
• Data Center Operations Management
• Incident Response, Notification, Remediation
• “Traditional” Security impact (business continuity, disaster recovery, physical security)
• Architectural Framework

Concerns still persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data. As per the Vendors, security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford.Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Ownership, control and access to data controlled by “cloud” providers may be made more difficult, just as it is sometimes difficult to gain access to “live” support with current utilities. Under the cloud paradigm, management of sensitive data is placed in the hands of cloud providers and third parties.

All of them need to be Re-defined to suit a new Paradigm.

Overall, the consensus is clear: The cloud’s promise of easy, elastic computing power is not enough for users with established IT organizations. That’s not to say the interest isn’t there- it is, but real-world concerns far outweigh lofty ideas at this point. Security is what Industry demands Today.

Basically, Chrome OS will be a cloud based OS circulating around the Chrome core. the news became official yesterday when Google published this on their blog.

Google’s vice president of product management and Linus Upson, engineering director at the search giant, said Google sought to build an operating system designed for the web, because “the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.” So Google came up with the Google Chrome Operating System, which is “a natural extension” of the company’s Google Chrome browser, the duo said.

Google says the OS is open source and lightweight, primarily targeting Netbooks, allowing users super quick access to the web. They claim the OS will be virus free (the security architecture is entirely new), and run a newly-designed windowing system on top of a Linux kernel that will be compatible with x86 and ARM processors alike. Though they were quick to mention this was separate from Android, they also conceded there would be some overlap in concept and functionality between the two platforms.

UPDATE: Google has also revelaed Hardware partners:

The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

While the discussion of specific apps and their look and feel was vague(could be intentional), Google made reference to a developer ecosystem that will be heavily web-based, and apps would be compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux .

The announcement of Google Chrome OS is a big step forward for a company who slowly and subtly wedged their way into web app development. Google says that Chrome OS is intended for “power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” So what does this mean for Google, and more importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft and Apple?

While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google,” the Google duo’s post said.

Meanwhile, Almaer, a former Google employee, gently chided the company for its pre-announcement of a technology that appears to be in its early stages. Said Almaer:

“It is interesting that Google pre-announced this so far in advance. Google is very different from other companies, that normally hold back for a release. They instead come out and tell you what they are doing (sometimes) and promise to open source it ”

Yet, “There is a reason that we won’t see the fruit of this labor for awhile though, and that is because there is a ton of work to be done,” he added. “I am excited to see us all come together to push the Open Web platform further and get to a point where it can do everything we need to create compelling user experiences!”

Google’s stack looks like this :

• The Chrome OS;
• The Chrome browser;
• Google Apps
• Android for mobile;
• The ad monetization model (search based obviously and focused on ‘free’ services);
• The cloud.

Since this Chrome OS is a Cloud OS, there is a question that dangles in my mind. Those of us who consider ourselves technologically advanced, how much of the desktop experience have Google’s web apps already replaced? We’ll still have our main computers, but what will be running on our netbooks or old laptops that sit in the living room?

The only apps I use that aren’t cloud-happy are either utilities, media players or photo/video editors. And even then, those are heading in that web-centric direction. Cloud computing has been bringing us closer and closer to the mainframe days of yore. Google wants to be the only backbone working behind the scenes. By saying they’re keeping Chrome OS app development web-centric and platform-agnostic, they’re slowly luring techies into their web.

Still, Windows and OSX will always have a spacious home in the computer world, undoubtedly. Some apps will always require native architecture, and the businessmen, code-monkeys, graphic designers, video editors and other connoisseurs of nuanced computing would be foolhardy to try and work strictly in the cloud.

The Chrome OS will work on computers with different kinds of microprocessors inside, including the x86 architecture used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and the ARM architecture, which is commonly found in mobile devices.

Intel’s Asia-Pacific spokesman Nick Jacobs said Google’s new OS further validates the netbook category of mobile devices. He called Chrome an example of innovation creating opportunity in the information technology industry and more choice for consumers.

Acer, the world’s third largest PC vendor, was unable to immediately provide a comment, while Asustek Computer declined to comment.

And perhaps more importantly, will they be able to offer the service for free? If they can let us really extend our hard drives into the cloud, look out. Chrome OS will be a force to be reckoned with.

I believe answer would be yes, and it would be more than a Just cloud OS. good things await next year. Doom’s Day.

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their data centers.

Cisco Officials said. “Demand for virtualized data centers is high due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage”.

“Power is increasing at a faster rate than the top line revenue of your company,” said John McCool, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s data center, switching and services group. McCool spoke at the Cisco Live conference in San Francisco.

The key driver had been it’s inherited benefits. Virtualization removes the logical view of an infrastructure from the physical underpinnings, thus making data center resources transparent to an application and enabling that application to move. Cisco itself was faced with a “$100 million server” issue – it needed the server but didn’t have enough room for it in a current data center and faced an expensive build out of a new facility just to house it. But virtualization let Cisco pocket that stash. Virtualizing its data centers reduced its cable plant by 4,800 cables made room for 50% more physical servers and increased virtual machine capacity fourfold.

Definitely, this gave Cisco a practical approach for virtualization.

Another example,  a New Jersey financial institution. They were opening an office in Bangalore opted to host applications in New Jersey and implement virtual desktops in India with Cisco’s Wide Area Application Services and Application Control Engine products to save money.

But virtualization poses few challenges. It makes the mobile VM difficult to monitor and track and thus hard to manage. That’s why Cisco developed VN-Link, software that allows the network to become VM-aware and map policies to a VM as it moves across physical ports.though previously  when Oracle bought Virtual Iron, Oracle got this feature in-built too. But Actually, Virtual Iron is much more powerful than what Cisco solution is. That might mean that Cisco is not alone, it’s quiet possible Oracle is also packing it’s bags for serious Cloud Computing.

Cisco’s VN-Link is intended to provide full visibility to VMs for the network administrator and VM management for the systems administrator. VN-Link is integral to Cisco’s Nexus 2148T fabric extender to provide network interface virtualization, which provides a “direct, consistent view of VMs and the (data center) operational model” by divorcing VMs from their physical interfaces.

This, combined with a unified switching fabric supporting Ethernet and Fibre Channel, simplifies and provides greater and more consistent visibility into all data center operations, Bugnion said. The environment can be managed from a network perspective or from a server perspective, he said.

Cisco’s platform for enabling all of this, of course, is the Unified Computing System. UCS is intended to be a single point of data center management through its ability to discover, view and configure resources, such as servers, and apply and enforce service profiles on those servers.

“Our strategy (with UCS) is to accelerate virtualization through increased visibility and control,” Bugnion said. “We’re focused on that part of the data center in which the network plays a central role. Management and energy efficiency is not an afterthought.”

To date, Savvis and Thomson Reuters are two publicly announced potential customers for UCS. They note significant results from using or trialing virtualization and UCS.

The future of cloud computing lies in hands of success of Virtualization. Cisco, Oracle, IBM, HP, and lots other are serious in making it a success.