Only a day after it launched its own e-mail cloud on October 5th, IBM announced a private data storage cloud. It’s called the Smart Business Storage Cloud, and with it, IBM will release an Information Archive. This is the latest cloud news to come from IBM, which seems eager to get into this space.

But this isn’t the only cloud product that will come down the pike from IBM. The company is promising a business-grade public storage cloud with flexible consumption models, complete with a self-service user interface. (Look over your shoulder Amazon S3; competition is heating up!)

IBM says its new product is a “true scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition,” according to a recent story on the company’s cloud<%2

Today, more companies than ever are offering complex business services over the Internet via cloud computing. For business-critical applications, every minute of downtime means lost sales, customers and opportunities. It is a challenge to keep websites up and running round the clock.

Web monitoring services can help businesses make sure that their sites are functioning. Yet, simply checking if a website is working and online doesn’t mean that users are having a satisfactory experience. It’s like driving a 20-year old car. Is it working? Well, yes. But are you enjoying the bumpy, rattly ride? That’s another story.

Due to many reasons like peak traffic at rush hours, publicity campaigns that drive people to sites, a bug in software, database issues or the failure of third-party services, your online applications can become slow or non functional, disappoint visitors and prod them to leave and visit rival sites.

The answer is transaction monitoring services, which have two goals:

1. ensuring fast application performance and good user experience for visitors from anywhere around the globe
2. guaranteeing complete business functionality of applications 24 hours, seven days per week

Package Delivery, Transportation and Logistics Case Study

Lets consider how a Monitis Inc., customer, the world’s largest package delivery company and a leading global provider of specialized transportation and logistics, uses transaction monitoring to ensure the continuous availability of billing and reporting modules on the company’s website. They’ve used Monitis to monitor the following activities on their site every 5 minute, 24 hours per day:

1. open the website
2. logging in to the system, using a “test” user account
2. go to the payments’ page and search for available invoices
3. find the latest invoice and go to the details’ page and check certain content
4. go and check the history of all invoices
5. go to the report generation page
6. generate report of payments and check the content
7. download the report
8. sign out from the system

Monitis Transaction Monitoring Summary Report

The above Monitis report summarizes the end-user customer experience for the company, reporting peak, mid-point and low activity periods. To investigate low-activity periods, the company studied a Monitis detailed transaction report, shown below, and discovered that its Sign In/Sign Out and Invoice History pages were slow. As a result of studying this information, the company was able to pinpoint operational issues, optimize its database and, in the end, improve the user experience for its visitors and customers.

Continuous transactions monitoring ensures high functional availability for the application. You can read more Monitis blog posts about transactions monitoring best practices! Or Download Application and Transaction Monitoring Users Guide here.

Putting ICT (information and computer technologies) on the cloud is a phenomenon being undertaken by governments all over the world, and as a result, we’re becoming used to “citizen-centric” computing.

We now expect “services, more value, choice, transparency, and ease of use, all to be delivered through multiple channels,” according to a media piece on how Saas, cloud computing and self-service portals are transforming government websites.

Driving the trend is brand-spanking new technology, delivery systems and financial models.

Hey, here’s a thought: maybe cloud computing is driving the growth of democracy around the world! What an idea that is – as citizens’ expectations prod governments to re-think how they deliver information, provide digital conversations and services to Joe and Jane, Heinz and Gertrude or Pierre and Claudette.

In other words, as people have become used to the instantaneous nature of the Web, they now want answers and information pronto from their governments.

But government clouds need to be robust on the back end. Not least among primary features should be the capability to deliver information and communication via multiple channels. Because that’s what people use – different channels. Not everybody logs on via their desktop.

There are also issues around security and access and bandwidth, and governments, whether municipal, regional or international, should take these into consideration when choosing cloud providers.

You know, when you think of it, these are all issues that are key in private-sector cloud computing, too. Perhaps when they become less front-and-center in the private world, the change and positive results will spill over into the public.

What do you think? Have you had any good or horrible experience with government clouds?

Remember that IPO that Gomez had filed with the SEC in May 2008? Investors waited and waited for it to be finalized. Analysts waited and waited. The industry waited and waited.

Well, the recent acquisition of internet performance monitoring company Gomez by Compuware for $295 million in cash (expected to close in November) lets Gomez off the hook, in terms of the IPO. But, more importantly, the move makes Compuware the first APM vendor to offer last-mile web performance monitoring, combined with back-end datacenter management. Gomez will become an operating unit of Compuware, retain its name, most of its employees and will be fairly independent in managing the business.

The motivation for the deal for Compuware isn’t hard to understand. It specializes in monitoring and management of application performance from the datacenter perspective: the servers, databases and applications that reside on them. Compuware is betting on APM as its future.

Compuware added end-user monitoring when it bought APM provider Adlex in 2005. And with the addition of Gomez, Compuware can offer an additional layer of front-end performance management, tracking the performance of last-mile Internet connectivity, how websites perform in multiple browsers, as well as the performance of complex Web applications using rich interfaces such as AJAX. This means Compuware will be able to present its customers a unified view of performance data, from the datacenter to the Internet connection to the browser, all from one vendor.

I’d say this is pretty significant, as it’ll make Compuware the first APM player to offer all this in one package. Gomez also brings tools for pre-deployment load and performance testing to the mix.

And there are implications for cloud computing in this deal, too. The combined entity can monitor cloud user experiences and correlate them to the back-end performance of those services. That can help determine when cloud-bursting or deploying new virtualized infrastructure is needed.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the merged parties work together and what it brings in terms of services, front- and back-end, to companies. We’ll be watching!

There’s a new analysis by research outfits the 451 group and Tier1Research that I think encapsulates perfectly the advantages and challenges of the new world of cloud computing. In “Enabling the Distributed Datacenter,” the 451 Cloudscape communication, they make the following points – some of them obvious, some of them of the “I did not know that” kind:

- Cloud data storage is a growing market, dominated by Amazon S3 (see also Monitis Launches On-Demand Cloud Storage Monitoring Service), with its commodity public-cloud infrastructure. But lookout, other providers are catching up and offering more enterprise-friendly solutions;

- What’s the big appeal of cloud computing? Cost savings, as it enables companies to reduce capex and enables a “pay-as-you-go” approach to storage;

- Archiving and data protection are what most companies use cloud storage for these days, but that’s not the extent of capacity by any means. On the upswing in terms of usage: file-server replacement, content distribution and app storage;

- Growing usage is driving cloud storage architecture, some of which will soon be the “backbone” of storage clouds.

And the paper’s outlook on the development of cloud trends:

- A new market for storage vendors is emerging, with some providers building services with scale-out, object-based systems;

- If you’re a vendor with a novel way of storing huge sums of data, cloud storage service providers will beat a path to your doorstep (like the old mousetrap analogy);

- There still remains a lot of concern about data security and service reliability on the cloud, not to mention, bandwidth issues. And until users can see past these challenges (and, quite frankly, they get resolved by developers and providers), the cloud business will be held back from really rolling along;

- Integration issues, due to a lack of standards in cloud storage, are slowing down the adoption of the cloud’s IT-as-a-service functionality. And that’s also affecting enthusiasm among service providers.

I found this assessment of cloud computing to be on the mark, and I appreciated the concise and plain-language approach to the issues and challenges. I’m providing the link here if you want to check out the research and read up more on the state of cloud computing.

Schedule load tests at your convenience!

Press Release

San Jose, CA – Oct 9, 2009 – Monitis Inc., a leading provider of affordable cloud-based performance management solutions, today announced a new scheduling feature for its on-demand load testing product.

Monitis’ WebLoadTester is an on-demand website load and stress testing service. It allows unlimited virtual usage generation for websites; SOAP/SOA based architectures, and databases. Now website owners and webmasters can easily plan tests in advance, save lots of time, and ensure website availability during high traffic hours. Until now, users were able to do only instant testing.

The new feature will allow them to schedule future testing in three different ways:

One-time scheduling allows the users to schedule a single test on the chosen date and time. It can be used to schedule a test at night, during low traffic hours.

Periodic scheduling lets the users test URLs recurrently according to the period the user selects. The period can be every second or third week, every night, the first/last day of the week/month/year, and so on. Users may schedule a cautionary load test, say every Sunday, to ensure new releases do not compromise website load handling capacities.

Periodic Cron scheduling is for users that prefer to use Cron Expressions to set times and dates for scheduled load tests.

All options are available in only one click. More at: http://portal.webloadtester.com

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is an industry leading, comprehensive, affordable, and scalable fault and performance management platform.  It monitors, collects, and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices, providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health.  Monitis also has open-source plug-ins and powerful APIs which allow the users to extend and integrate its powerful monitoring and management capabilities into their current systems. Monitis provides reliable, quality services to customers worldwide.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solutions. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve the productivity of their IT staff, and reduce operational expenditures.  Monitis is radically changing the system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, SaaS-based, and flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud) solutions. For more information, please visit http://www.monitis.com

An amazing video presentation from Salesforce.com – “Force.com…The Platform is a Service”:

Here’s some encouraging news in these recessionary times – when everything seems to be down except the unemployment rate: the network monitoring business is booming!

They’re called passive network-monitoring systems, and the demand for their wireless technology is growing by leaps and bounds, and the market is becoming more competitive, too – which often means better bargains for buyers. Network monitoring systems are rapidly taking over the traditional technology of protocol analyzers. I read about research from analysts Frost & Sullivan that says the total wireless protocol analyzer and network-monitoring systems market generated revenues of over half a billion dollars last year, up 13% over 2007.

Meanwhile, traditional troubleshooting and monitoring protocol analyzers registered a year-over-year revenue drop of 9.5%, while load stress generators and functional testers fell 7%.

Clearly, the future is in wireless, passive systems, as the market is forecast to reach $814.6 million in 2013, growing at a compounded 6.5% per year.

So why is this important news? you may be asking yourself right now. For one, I think it’s because of some pretty powerful trends driving it, including, below, which were mapped out in a recent article on network monitoring:

- The growth of services that marry voice, video and data; there’s more demand now for mobile broadband and IP-based networks, and many services are being introduced that will increase the adoption rate of new technologies (e.g. LTE and mobile WiMax). So, as carriers converge multiple network types, there’s more need to monitor the network for end-to-end performance.

- The complexity of 3G networks (e.g. iPhone). This is forcing service providers to buy network-monitoring systems that are capable of monitoring services across different technologies.

- The growth of mobile applications in cloud computing, for example, Google email. Recently, there has been some high-profile press coverage of system-wide outages, with some observers suggesting the downtimes could have been avoided by using network monitoring systems.

Expect the market to expand, too, providing buyers with more choices, as it’s a sure bet that traditional protocol analyzers will switch to manufacturing monitoring systems and CEMS (customer experience management systems). Many already are.

Also, the future is all about service providers taking more interest in gauging service quality and subscriber experience. That, also, will feed the need for network monitoring.

Where do you think the future of network monitoring is going? Any thoughts on this topic that you’d like to share?

Are you a teacher and using the Amazon cloud to educate? How about a researcher, IT developer or a sales account manager at a business?

Now, according to Amazon Web Services, you can share snapshots of data with others using the company’s EC2 Elastic Block Store snapshot facility. You can even share them publicly. Here are the details, straight from the horse’s mouth, that is, Amazon’s blog:

- It’s now possible to use Amazon’s AWS Management Console, the command line tools, or the EC2 API to create a snapshot backup of an EBS volume at any time. The snapshots, once created, can be used to create a new EBS volume in the same AWS region. By sharing these snapshots, others can create an identical copy of the EBS.

- Amazon also says its new ModifySnapshotAttribute function enables you to set and change the createPermission attribute on any of your snapshots. An added ResetSnapshotAttribute function lets you clear snapshot attributes. Plus, you can use the DescribeSnapshotAttribute function to get the value of a particular attribute. The DescribeSnapshots function now lists all of the snapshots that have been shared with you. You can also use this function to retrieve a list of all Amazon’s Public Data Sets.

You can also modify snapshot permissions using the AWS Management Console.

So what does this have to do with teachers, sales managers and the like? As the blog pointed out, teachers can share reference data in the classroom and businesses can use snapshots to store data internally, for customers or partners.

Sounds like an improvement to me! After all, information is powerful, and sharing it with the right parties can make you powerful.