Bluelock

One of the reasons that a lot of IT organizations are not all that comfortable with cloud computing is because they don’t have a lot of visibility into the true costs of cloud computing.

The biggest fear, of course, is paying for cloud resources that don’t wind up being used because the compute resources for the application have been over-provisioned. In an on-premise deployment, over-provisioning is a waste of fixed-cost resources. In the cloud, it’s an ongoing monthly expense that can really add up.

Codesigned is a technology services firm focused on high quality, branded collaboration solutions, specializing in Microsoft SharePoint. With a team of experienced consultants, system engineers, SharePoint Architects, .NET developers and web developers, Codesigned provides enterprise-class collaboration consulting, large-scale implementation planning and installation, design and deployment of custom features and customized private cloud and mobile solutions.

SharePoint has proven to be Microsoft’s fastest revenue growth product in the company’s history. Codesigned’s research and development team has recognized this product growth as a tremendous opportunity within the marketplace and has successfully leveraged it with its cloud-based SharePoint offerings.

F5 migrates DevCentral to Bluelock’s public cloud environment. Collaboration with Bluelock provides DevCentral with simplified lifecycle migration from development, to test, to production. Application Delivery Networking (ADN) firm F5 Networks has migrated its global online community, DevCentral, to Infrastructure-as-a-Service company Bluelock’s public cloud environment. DevCentral now runs F5 cloud-enabled ADN applications in multiple Bluelock Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud, while adhering to IT best practices for scale, control and security.

F5′s DevCentralized Gets Cloudy
F5 Networks’ community can now do all the cool things it’s been doing in the cloud.
By Zeus Kerravala on Thu, 06/14/12 – 11:14am.

Communities of interest have been all the rage over the past few years. Just this year alone we’ve seen Infoblox, Aruba and other tech vendors launch online communities to support their products. The concept behind the community is that users of the products can share ideas, use cases, scripts, architectures or anything else related to the product, and what better way to learn about what’s possible than by leveraging the power of the community.

Although there are many vendors trying to build this today, no one has executed on this better than F5 Networks. For those who aren’t familiar with F5, the company has a scripting language called iRules that administrators can use to enable custom features and do some cool things with the products. DevCentral was created to allow the community to share these ideas, scripts and use cases with one another, and over the past few years it’s become extremely popular and easily F5’s biggest competitive differentiator.

This week F5 made its biggest enhancement to DevCentral since its announcement that it’s moving DevCentral to the cloud. All cloud-enabled F5 solutions will now be running in multiple Bluelock virtual data centers, making the functionality ubiquitously available to the DevCentral community.

VMware supplier’s tool is designed to prevent cloud bill shock by telling customers what their bill will be and how to adjust usage to stay within the monthly budget.

It’s not uncommon to hear cloud customers talk about how their cloud costs got away from them. If you don’t need a set of servers you’ve commissioned but left running, the bill mounts up. Bluelock’s Portfolio tool lets cloud users not only see how their bill is developing during the month, but gives them policies through which they can cap it.

Portfolio, says Pat O’Day, CTO of Bluelock, is not just a monitoring tool granting visibility into how you’re running up a bill. Rather, it can be used “proactively, not just reactively, to set limits and manage cloud costs.”

Pat O’Day, Bluelock’s CTO and Co-founder, was named to Wired.com’s Top 10 List of Cloud Influencers and Thought Leaders. Here’s what Wired.com had to say about O’Day: “As a visionary behind the IaaS business model, O’Day helped Bluelock become one of the most strategic VMware cloud providers and one of the first to offer the VMware vCloud Datacenter Service. He also proved Bluelock to be a main contender in a sea of tech giants when they landed in the “Leaders” quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IaaS.”

Adobe announced expansions to its online customer experience platform, Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, at the EMEA Digital Marketing Summit. New cloud capabilities with Adobe CQ Cloud Manager allow marketers to easily spin up new campaign sites through a SaaS-based set of web experience services. Cloud service for Adobe CQ Cloud Manager is coming soon to Bluelock.

Bluelock’s Jake Robinson, Systems Engineer, shares tips on deploying and using VMware’s vCloud Director 1.5. Preparing for vCloud Director 1.5 deployment, networking and security considerations, and integrating other VMware products are some of the topics covered. VMware’s latest update also boasts support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases.

Citrix executive, Peder Ulander states that CloudStack will be another choice for building private clouds. Can CloudStack and OpenStack, two similar open source projects, survive? Basically, Ulander makes the case that CloudStack and OpenStack are different enough that there’s room for more than one open source project.

A team of TechTarget contributors worked together to come up with this year’s top 10 cloud providers. There has been a lot of change in the cloud computing arena since last year’s top 10 list. The raft of new technologies delivered over the past year or two has enticed many larger IT shops to launch their first private, hybrid and public clouds and served to make or break the fortunes of small and large cloud competitors alike. What remains the same is that big fish get bigger and small fish get smaller—or are eaten. A few sharks—known to us as telecommunications companies—have seen the opportunity to enter the tank and gobble up hot cloud services vendors.