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HP said today it has closed its $13.9 billion acquisition of Plano, Texas-based IT services provider EDS, which was first announced in May. The success of the deal will depend on HP’s ability to integrate such a large buy into its already mammoth corporate structure. HP has tackled such a large integration before, via its $18.6 billion merger with Compaq in 2002, but many would argue that that deal was a blundering mess rather than a streamlined corporate integration success story.

Now that the EDS deal is closed, HP can start to work out its nascent cloud strategy. As Om opined earlier, with EDS, HP gets a mature service provider, which means it could offer computing clouds backed by a team experienced with delivering remote services (I’m not saying hosted computing requires the same skill set as cloud computing, but it’s closer). Both HP and IBM have announced cloud computing initiatives in recent months; HP has even created an entire business unit called the Scalability Computing Initiative to sell both cloud hardware and services.

And if the cloud idea doesn’t work out, there’s plenty of business process outsourcing and other consulting firm jargon inside EDS to help HP compete with IBM on the services side. One thing is for sure: Dell now looks like less of a competitor to these guys than ever.

Google is working with a consortium of carriers to become part of an intra-Asian submarine cable system, tentatively called the Southeast Asian Japan Cable (SJC). The cable would be Google’s second play in the sub-sea category. The new cable links various different cities to Chikura, Japan Guam, the landing site of a transpacific cable called Unity.

Earlier this year, Google invested in this transpacific cable along with a bunch of other carriers. The Unity cable is expected to cost about $300 million. The new SJC cable has pretty much the same carrier partners as the ones in the Unity cable, reports Telegeography, a research company. Continue Reading

Want to watch a great boxing match? Just take a seat and watch the back-and-forth between Adobe Systems and Microsoft. I wrote about this fight-without-an-end last year, but now it seems the punches are being thrown with more intensity.

No surprise: Like two aging gladiators, the two software companies have managed to outlive and beat most of their peers. At face value, the fight is about Flash vs. Silverlight. Look deeper and the tussle is over not just online video but about cloud computing, rich Internet applications and mobile phones.

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Amazon has announced Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), a persistent storage offering that can be used in tandem with applications using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With this move, it is turning up the heat on everyone from storage area network vendors, server companies and of course data center operators. Don’t be surprised if the company starts attracting corporations using its suite of web services.

Amazon first started talking about this back in April, sharing some details about the service. (More about its road map, here.) With EBS, new storage can be essentially created on the fly, attached to the EC2 instances, and make the cloud services behave more like the traditional machines people are used to. Storage volumes can be backed up to Amazon’s S3 service. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has penned an excellent summary about the service, on his All Things Distributed Blog.

RightScale, a company that has received funding from Amazon and works closely with it has a great explainer on how it works — a must read.

With EBS, developers can deploy scalable solutions including relational databases, distributed file systems and Hadoop processing clusters. EBS is more adept for working with databases, as well apps that require a file system. You can now start and stop just like you would on a traditional physical server. This is a play for larger, corporate customers, a move that is long time coming.

First, some facts about the service: Continue Reading

For the past few days we have been getting pinged by the press folks from Dell who want us to attend a joint event next week with Facebook, to announce a new cloud-computing project. That Round Rock, Texas-based Dell and Facebook of Palo Alto, Calif. are getting cozier shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook is seriously “server hungry†and has been on a spending spree to beef up its infrastructure. Dell, on the other hand, has been increasingly seriously about cloud computing, working with online companies and building bespoke solutions for companies like Facebook.

In my conversation with Michael Dell, he said: “Our view is that there is definitely enormous opportunity in cloud infrastructure. A few years ago, we were out there selling our servers and found that some of these new companies had unique requirements that were really different from the general-purpose servers.†Dell has been trying to get closer to Facebook. Dell has worked closely with Joyent to offer a cloud service that offers free services to Facebook app developers. Continue Reading

The summer of 2008 has been the best of times and worst of times for cloud computing. Many companies –- big and small — decided to throw in their lot with cloud computing, betting that it is the future of technology infrastructure. At the same time, cloud computing took its lumps as some of the early large-scale cloud applications hit the skids.

Apple’s MobileMe went on the blink for many while the GMail blackout that left millions angry and frustrated. Even Amazon’s seemingly fool proof S3 service was down for an extended period of time, impacting thousands of its customers. This isn’t the last we have seen of these outages. As the size and scope of cloud computing grows, so will the problems and the need for tools to monitor the clouds.

Enter San Francisco-based web infrastructure monitoring service provider Hyperic, which recently launched CloudStatus, a hosted real-time cloud monitoring service to keep an eye on cloud–based services. Thus far CloudStatus is monitoring Amazon’s web services, but sometime later today, the company will start monitoring Google’s App Engine infrastructure, a move that has been blessed by the search engine giant. The service, still in beta testing phase, is free for near foreseeable future, but company might charge for premium services at a later date.

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