Wow. This sounds pretty cool. Anyone know the best way to bid on unused CPU cycles?

I came across some more articles on cloud-based performance. Today, I am looking at the performance of EBS on Amazon and the use of RAID 10 for disk writes. If you have a lot of writes to disk, then seriously consider something other than RAID 10. Generally though, EBS on Amazon performs pretty well.

The Bitsource only compared the compile time of a Linux kernal, but according to this article, CloudServers > EC2 (better performing, lower cost).

Here’s what the article is about:
“The Bitsource conducted a review of the two cloud computing platforms, Rackspace Cloud Servers and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), to get a general idea of overall system performance. Included in the tests were pure computing power (CPU), and raw disk I/O throughput. Using a consistent testing methodology across most instance sizes over a two-month time span (a painstaking process requiring lots of patience) has resulted in the following comparison of CPU performance, disk performance and cost between the two platforms.”

-=John

I’m so excited. We have an awesome speaker for January’s LA CTO Forum: Rick Parker of Fetch Technologies. Check it out:

Building Your Own Private Cloud

Rick Parker will present his experience and perspective in building a private cloud infrastructure from the bottom up for Fetch Technologies. Over the past three years, Rick has leveraged his experience in building cloud-based platforms to dramatically reduce operational costs by a factor of 4 or more. Rick will discuss analyzing, tracking, and sourcing different types of technologies and vendors in order to stay current with rapidly changing technologies. Rick also plans to address issues with the hardware infrastructure and software management systems as they relate to vendors, models, and services. Fault tolerance, monitoring, reporting, scalability, and deployment will be key components of his his presentation. Finally, Rick’ss assessment of the benefits and costs of developing a private cloud infrastructure should provide a substantial source of topics and ideas for a lively discussion.

Rick Parker (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/rick-parker/3/71b/aa5) has over 24 Years of IT experience. At Vendare Media, Rick built the company from an initial desktop environment to 7 datacenters with over 500 servers in them. After that, he went on to found Bedouin Networks, one of the first Cloud Service Providers in 2006. Currently, Rick is an IT Manager for Fetch Technologies, a company that offers cloud-based resources and services to enable organizations to extract, aggregate and use information from sites across the Internet.

In case you hadn’t heard, Google Apps is taking on government organizations. I found this on socaltech.com:

LA Goes Live With Google
—-
The City of Los Angeles has gone live with Google’s cloud software suite,
Google Apps, Google said Monday. Google won the a $7.2M contract with the
city back in October for email service. Google said that 34,000 Los
Angeles city employees will gain access to Google Apps for email and other
collaboration starting yesterday. The move to Google came after a intense
battle between Google and Microsoft for the contract.