Communications bandwidth and general FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) relating to reliability and security are likely to be barriers to adoption of cloud computing by large enterprises, according to participants in a panel session on cloud infrastructure at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco today.

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For those interested in high speed interconnects, of the kind used to connect server farms and storage networks, High Performance on Wall Street should have plenty of interest … and may help decide whether your future is in Gigabit Ethernet or InfinBand.

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Speaking at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco today: Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures suggested that 2.0-style mashups have facilitated enterprise integration more readily than SOA initiatives, that have largely failed to fulfill their promise, he claimed. He pointed to the straightforward integration of Echosign’s e-signature service with suites like Salesforce.com.

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It’s been a busy couple of days in the world of virtualisation. Red Hat acquired Qumranet, developer of the open source KVM offering, Sun updated its xVM hypervisor, and VMware lost a top R&D exec, who is returning to Oracle.

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Here at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco today, cloud and utility computing specialist 3Tera announced the availability of global cloud services, based on 3Tera’s AppLogic grid operating system and leveraging a number of data centre partners.

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HP has launched a set of new and enhanced products - blade servers, storage and software - that it is positioning as “designed” to host virtualised environments. The company has also enhanced its business and IT service management offerings to incorporate support for virtualisation, and has a new development agreement with Red Hat to simplify the management and monitoring of virtualised data centres.

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Google will today launch a beta version of its Chrome web browser in 100 countries. Commenting on the development, Google executives stated in a blog post that “What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.” Initially available for Windows only, Linux and Apple Mac versions will be released in the future.

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This Labor Day, we are introducing a new weekly feature to highlight third party blogs that focus on enterprise IT and infrastructure issues.

We begin with Marc Adler’s Magmasystems blog. Marc works for a major investment bank as the technology head of their complex event processing initiatives.

Check out his blog at magmasystems.blogspot.com.

Labor Day weekend is upon us, which means that preparations for the High Performance on Wall Street show are hotting up. This won’t be an R&R time for me. Not least, this news service gets its official launch at the event, so there is more than usual to do.

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AMD and Hewlett Packard have claimed top spot on the 16-core VMware VMmark virtualisation benchmark, with the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant DL585 G5.

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Verari Systems has introduced the SB5168XL DataServer, combining an Intel Xeon 3000 series processor and 10G Ethernet connectivity with the high density storage. The system is being pitched at Web 2.0 and Cloud applications.

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Memory specialist MetaRAM has announced availability of what it dubs DDR3 MetaSDRAM, a memory technology that doubles the capacity of certain types of random access memory (RAM), enabling significant increases in the amount of RAM that servers can support.

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By Charles Rattray, Tideway Systems

Global financial services organisations today face a major challenge - the growing realisation that not knowing what they have is the first barrier to delivering better IT. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, but you can’t measure what you can’t see. Unfortunately, as any business leader can confirm, barriers such as these cost money to break down, and entering a new phase of IT efficiency and operational excellence will come with some cost. Equally unfortunate, return on investment is typically difficult to justify prior to the expenditure - and the net benefit even harder to articulate – two points often raised in defense of doing nothing. Yet what we tend to miss is the idea that what we really want to know is how does one asset we have in our infrastructure relate to other assets – where are its dependencies?

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For a long time, the world of virtualisation meant VMware, for the most part (with due respect to IBM, which more or less invented the concept). OK, and a bit of Xen (now a part of Citrix) and maybe Virtual Iron and perhaps Scalent Systems. Now, add Microsoft to the list. And add it near to the top. Cisco too, though no one knows exactly why.

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Amazon Web Services has introduced Elastic Block Store (EBS), providing persistent storage to augment its EC2 cloud computing offering. So-called EBS volumes provide storage for applications that exist beyond the life of the application instance, and which can be accessed via other applications.

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Cloud computing hoster (aka Infrastructure as a Service provider) GoGrid is now offering both 32- and 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as an on-demand service. One of a few companies to offer cloud-based Windows Server (Amazon’s EC2 is Linux and Solaris only), GoGrid customers can now deploy new servers in minutes, and manage their entire infrastructure via a web-based management control panel.

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Sun Microsystems has extended its family of Intel Xeon-based Sun Fire servers with two new offerings for High Performance Computing (HPC), Cloud/Web 2.0 and back office computing workloads, including a 1U server for HPC workloads and an expandable 2U enterprise-class system. The Sun Fire X2250 and Sun Fire X4250 servers, powered by one or two dual- or quad-core Intel Xeon processors 5200 or 5400 series, run a variety of operating systems, including Solaris 10, Linux and Windows.

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Leading Nordic investment bank Carnegie is leveraging Intel Xeon 5300 processors to create a virtualised environment, consolidating 140 legacy servers down to just 16 in its data centre. The benefits include increased flexibility, improved backup and significant operational expenses.

Find out more at Intel fasterFS.

By Allan Mertner, Tideway Systems

As one of Europe’s most active financial centers, London has been in the news lately due to the shrinking datacentre real estate available to support countless large financial institutions. Experts now estimate that the vacancy rate in London’s co-location facilities will approach 0% by 2009. And London is not alone – Tier1 Research reports that in 2006, global datacentre demand rose nearly 13% percent while facility supply rose only 4%.

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Network World carried this useful article on Fidelity Investments’ plans to expand its use of virtualisation across its datacentres.

Interesting timing of this, given it’s not been a great week for proponents of that technology, in the wake of VMware’s major snafu on Tuesday when users worldwide saw their virtualisation systems stop working properly due to a bug in VMware’s licensing code.

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