Cloud News: Gartner, Brocade, Joyent, Amazon

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing industry:

Gartner says cloud is top CIO priority.  Gartner's survey, Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda examines the priorities for over 2,000 CIOs and identified cloud computing as a top technology priority in 2011.  The worldwide CIO survey was conducted by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) and includes CIOs across 50 countries and 38 industries.  "The resource realities indicated in the 2011 CIO Agenda Survey raise the urgency and importance of adopting new infrastructure and operations technologies, such as cloud services and virtualization," McDonald said. "These technologies were selected by CIOs the most often and are the top-two technologies for 2011 and are well-suited for this budget reality, as they offer similar service levels at lower budget costs."  While budgets remain relatively flat at a 1 percent increase, 3 percent of CIOs have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies.  The expectation is that this number will increase to 43 percent over the next four years. The next highest priorities for CIOs included virtualization, mobile technologies, IT management and business intelligence.

Brocade, Dell and VMware demonstrate private clouds.  Brocade (BRCD) announced a joint demonstration with Dell and VMware at the West 2011 Conference and Exposition. The deomonstration showcased a multi-vendor approach to systems design using commercial off-the-shelf products to engineer a sophisticated infrastructure model that can support thousands of VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) clients.  Products used included Brocade VDX 6720 switches, Dell thin clients and Equalogic storage, VMware View VDI client desktop, and VMware ESX vSphere on Dell servers.

Joyent selected by GuardTime for integration. Joyent announced that GuardTime, creator of the Keyless Signature technology used to validate  data for applications such as secure cloud archiving, will enter an integrated business relationship with Joyent and FIT-One Holdings in Japan to deliver the tamper-evident cloud computing stack.  “I believe the combination of Joyent’s robust cloud software, called SmartDataCenter, and Guardtime’s Keyless Signatures for the Cloud, provides Japanese Service Providers with a cloud solution that gives their customers peace of mind,” said Yukihiro Kayama, CEO of FIT-One.

Building an HPC cluster with AWS. InsideHPC has a video on the ease of setting up a HPC cluster using the Amazon AWS cloud. The 18 minute walk-through then shows how to build an 8-node, 64 core, ad-hoc cluster and run a molecular dynamics simulation.