Cloud Computing
Many IT experts believe that cloud computing is the next big pivotal technology that will revolutionize the IT industry. To understand the concept behind cloud computing, it is basically the utilization of resources in a more efficient and cost effective manner by leveraging infrastructure and technology owned and managed by content and infrastructure experts. Applications and software need not to be installed on every single computer; instead the application is installed and configured at the...
Read MoreIT and The Cloud: Connecting AWS to HQ
The next step in my journey (see previous post) was to prove I could connect the Amazon EC2 server I had built to our Corporate LAN via a secure VPN tunnel. I spent some time reading up on Amazon’s VPC offering (which is still in Beta) in hopes that I’d be able to simply create an IPSEC tunnel and be done. I had provisioned my EC2 server in the US West region as it provided the least latency but when I went to fire up the Amazon VPN I found out it was only currently being offered...
Read MoreIT and The Cloud: AWS Latency
One of the primary concerns I have regarding relocating our IT Infrastructure to ‘The Cloud’ is latency. We (the IT Industry) have spent so much time and money upgrading our LAN infrastructure to where our servers are all at a minimum GigE attached (if not bundles GigE or 10GigE) with 10GigE uplinks and GigE piped to the desktop! Our users are extremely used to very responsive system and the ability to move data from Point A to B in the LAN at very high speeds. If we move...
Read MoreIT and The Cloud: AWS EC2
It’s Day #2 on my excellent cloud adventure and I decided to dive right on in and see if I could provision a Windows 2008 R2 Server running SQL Server. Armed with my credit card and my Amazon.com account, I signed up and created my AWS profile. I eagerly clicked the Launch Instance in the EC2 Console Dashboard, followed a few prompts and bingo, my AWS console informed me it was launching my Large Standard Windows instance! A matter of minutes later, I had downloaded the preconfigured...
Read MoreIT and The Cloud: Introduction
I have begun researching Cloud Computing vendors that host infrastructure as a service solutions (IaaS) to examine the validity of migrating traditional IT Infrastructure services (and applications) into the Cloud. There are a number of large players in this space, from the veteran that is Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the Rack Space Cloud and to new players like Microsoft’s Azure platform and they are all vying for marketing dominance in the space I believe is the future of computing. My...
Read MoreAndroid vs iPhone: Which is better?
I picked up my first Android phone at the beginning of this year – the Google Nexus One. Prior to that I had been a BlackBerry user and the IT Organizations I managed all ran BES servers and only supported BlackBerry devices so the transition to the Nexus One was quite a significant one! It was only a short couple of weeks later that I had decided the Android OS was the ONLY way to go and I never looked at a Blackberry again! However, just a couple of weeks ago I got an iPhone 4 and...
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