Posts tagged Texas
Touring Texas with the Bloggers Part 1: Cloud Factories
Jan 13th
This week I attended HP ISS Tech Day at Hewlett-Packard‘s Houston facility along with several other bloggers. We were given a tour and demonstrations of HP’s Industry Standard Servers (ISS) technology. We didn’t see new, unreleased products and we didn’t talk about potential tech breakthroughs of the future. We focused entirely on technologies HP offers today and how those technologies can benefit IT workers.
HP assumes clouds will be ubiquitous – either private or public – and the the ISS Tech Day was all about technologies making it easier and faster to deploy private clouds.
Sponsor
What is a Private Cloud?
Definitions of cloud computing are always hard to pin down, and it seems cloudwash is everywhere. We’ve been skeptical about the terms “private cloud” and “cloud in a box” before, but in many ways it comes down to a fundamental question: what is a cloud?
HP decided to get that question out of the way early in the day. The common characteristics of a cloud, according to HP’s Daniel Bowers:
- A pool of resources that can be allocated and modified elastically.
- A means for requesting and granting access to resources.
- Optionally, a means to measure and bill for those resources.
It doesn’t matter if those resources are in a public data center or a private data center.
So for our purposes a private cloud is any means of delivering elastic resources to users from within the firewall. That means you lose one advantage of using a public cloud – paying for only what you use. But you do retain one important advantage: you don’t have to over-invest in every single server if each server has a pool of resources to draw from.
Via Wikipedia:
Douglas Parkhill first described the concept of a “Private Computer Utility” in his 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility. The idea was based upon direct comparison with other industries (e.g. the electricity industry) and the extensive use of hybrid supply models to balance and mitigate risks.
Private cloud and internal cloud have been described as neologisms, however the concepts themselves pre-date the term cloud by 40 years. Even within modern utility industries, hybrid models still exist despite the formation of reasonably well-functioning markets and the ability to combine multiple providers.
POD-Works, an Assembly Line for Data Centers
An HP POD. Photos by Klint Finley
HP’s POD-Works facility custom builds modular data centers that can be delivered to a customer’s site. POD stands for Performance Optimized Data Center. Shipping container-esque modular data centers have been around for a few years, but HP offers a new twist: it’s taking advantage of assembly line productivity to produce these data centers faster and cheaper.
HP claims that not only can it do all the work of setting up racks, wiring, optimizing power consumption and building out the full data center for you – it claims it can do so at the fraction of the cost of doing it yourself. HP takes advantage of assembly line productivity to industrialize the process of creating data centers.
Left: A completely wired rack from the above POD. Right: The assembly line floor. Photos by Klint Finley
According to The Register, the PODs can cost about $1.5 million – not including servers, storage and switches. However, that can still be significantly cheaper than building a brick and mortar data center.
Here’s a video from HP explaining a bit more:
This video is a bit longer and more detailed:
We can very much see this becoming part of how data centers are built in the future. HP is trying to make it easier not just to virtualize and manage infrastructure, but it make it easier to implement actual physical infrastructure as well. It brings a whole new meaning to the term “cloud in a box.”
HP’s POD-Works competes with other modular data center vendors, such as Oracle‘s Sun Modular Data Center.
Next: Power management, I/O virtualization and a bit of cloud history.
Disclosure: HP is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor, and paid for Klint Finley’s travel and accommodations to attend HP ISS Tech day.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Texas launches first US competition inquiry into Google – Vertical Leap News (press release)
Sep 7th
 Reuters |
Texas launches first US competition inquiry into Google
Vertical Leap News (press release) … pages (SERPs) is generally considered to be the fault of either poor search engine optimisation or winning SEO on the behalf of a keyword competitor. … Why does Texas have Google in court? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Why does Texas have Google in court? – TECH.BLORGE.com
Sep 6th
|
Why does Texas have Google in court?
TECH.BLORGE.com This algorithm is the holy grail of an entire industry, that of search engine optimization (SEO), although it is kept entirely secret by Google. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Texas Attorney General Investigating Google & Antitrust Issues
Sep 3rd
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting an investigation into Google’s business practices as they relate to search listings, in particular whether Google is manipulating its paid and editorial results in a way that violates antitrust laws.
We received a tip about the investigation this week, and Google confirmed today that an investigation started in July. [...]
*** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***
View full post on Search Engine Land: News About Search Engines & Search Marketing
Central Texas Digital Marketing Company Offers SEO Services to Austin … – PR.com (press release)
Jul 21st
|
Central Texas Digital Marketing Company Offers SEO Services to Austin …
PR.com (press release) By using reliable SEO techniques, TSEG, LLC helps Austin Accounting serve even more clients and share their expertise with a broader online audience. … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Citizens National Bank Texas Enlists T8 Webware to Improve Online Visibility, Customer Interaction Via the Web
Feb 11th
Citizens National Bank Texas Enlists T8 Webware to Improve Online Visibility, Customer Interaction Via the Web
CEDAR FALLS, Iowa—-T8 Webware, a provider of Web development, management and hosting services for the financial industry, today announced that Citizens National Bank Texas enlisted the company to achieve a more functional Web presence for users as well as to improve its search engine optimization for better online visibility among competing banks.
Read more on Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance
