Amazon Launches Its First Cloud Data Centers in Korea

Promising to reduce cloud latency for its Korean customers, Amazon Web Services has launched several cloud data centers in the country, establishing a fifth availability region in Asia Pacific. The other four are Sigapore, Beijing, Tokyo, and Sydney.

The company didn’t specify how many data centers the new region consisted of or where exactly they were in Korea. They’re likely in or just outside of Seoul, since it’s called the Seoul region. The region currently has two availability zones, and each zone usually consists of one or more data centers.

Amazon said existing customers who are either based in Korea or do business in the Korean market have requested that the provider launch physical data centers there. Because of latency and in some cases for data-sovereignty reasons, providing infrastructure cloud services globally has become a race to expand geographic reach of the physical infrastructure that only a few players have the resources to participate in.

So far, Amazon and Microsoft have been the two main contenders in the race. Google, considered to be the third cloud giant, doesn’t have nearly as much of its global data center capacity dedicated to its cloud infrastructure services, which may start to change this year.

IBM, following its acquisition of data center service provider SoftLayer, went on a global cloud data center expansion push last year and the year before. Many others, such as HP and Dell, have dropped out of the race, while big telcos, including CenturyLink, Verizon, and AT&T, are reassessing their future in the cloud and data center services market, exploring alternatives to owning the massive data center portfolios they built out in recent years to chase the cloud opportunity.

Read More: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/01/07/amazon-launches-its-first-cloud-data-centers-in-korea/

Cloud Services are Eating the World

The cloud revolution is impacting the technology sector. You can clearly see it in the business results of companies like HP and IBM. For sure, legacy technology providers are embracing the cloud. They are transforming their businesses from building and running on-premise infrastructures to delivering cloud-based services. The harsh reality is that this is a destructive transformation. For every dollar that exits legacy environments, only a fraction comes back through cloud services. This is the great promise of the cloud – maximizing economies of scale, efficient resource utilization and smart sharing of scarce capabilities.

It is just the latest phase of the destructive force that technology applies to all parts of our economy. Traditionally, technology vendors touted benefits such as personnel efficiencies and operational savings as part of the justification for purchasing new technologies – a politically correct way to refer to fewer people, offices and the support systems around them. This has now inevitably impacted the technology vendors themselves. Early indicators were abundant: Salesforce.com has displaced Siebel systems, reducing the need for costly and customized implementations; and Amazon AWS is increasingly displacing physical servers, reducing the need for processors, cabinets, cabling, power and cooling.

Cloud is Eating the World

Marc Andreseen argued in his 2011 Wall Street Journal article that, “software is eating the world.” In my view, this observation is now obsolete. Today, cloud services are eating the world. Cloud services encapsulate and commoditizes the entire technology stack (software, hardware, platforms and professional services). This model is so impactful and irresistible that even capturing only a part of the value is a big win. This is how cloud services now include platforms – including Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com; and infrastructure, provided by such vendors as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM/Softlayer.

Read More: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/01/04/cloud-services-eating-world/

H-P Winds Down Cloud-Computing Project

Hewlett-Packard Co., after a five-year effort, has decided to shutter its cloud-computing competitor to Amazon.com’s AWS service.

The service, called Helion Public Cloud, will power down at the end of January, said Bill Hilf, H-P’s cloud chief.

Mr. Hilf said in an interview the company would focus on so-called private-cloud computing, enabling corporations to build their own AWS-type capabilities using servers they own rather than public-cloud offerings that use shared infrastructure. H-P will also help customers run their software on existing public-cloud services such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, he said.

“Our own public-cloud offering is not really a core area for us,” Mr. Hilf said.

By acting as a broker for other public-cloud services rather than as a competitor, H-P is playing to its strength as a seller of hardware and managed information-technology services, said Cassandra Mooshian, an analyst with Technology Business Research Inc. “This was a well-thought-out, strategically positive move,” she said in a research note published Thursday.

H-P is the latest of several companies to retreat after trying to challenge Amazon in the cloud. Dell Inc. in 2013 shut down its public-cloud business, and Rackspace Inc. announced earlier this year that it would no longer sell such services.

The move frees H-P to focus on its $28 billion hardware business, which is under threat. Hardware sales declined 1% in the company’s most-recent quarter, while on Thursday Amazon reported that its AWS unit scored year-on-year growth of 78%. The research firm Gartner Inc. said that the public cloud is outpacing corporate data centers in taking on new workloads as measured by computing capacity.

Read more : http://www.wsj.com/articles/h-p-winds-down-cloud-computing-project-1445624977

The Morning Download: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Debuts as Cloud Reshapes IT

The separation of the old Hewlett-Packard Co.HPQ +12.58% into two smaller, and yet somehow still massive, tech companies is now complete. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., under the leadership of Meg Whitman, starts trading today. The higher margin printer company, led by Dion Weisler, now known as HP Inc., “no longer will underwrite the corporate information technology sold by Ms. Whitman’s new company,” the WSJ’s Robert McMillan writes. HP Inc. will have the luxury of plowing more money into R&D.

The rise of cloud computing challenges the new enterprise company. It will have to “attract corporate buyers, who increasingly look to cloud-computing technology offered by the likes of Amazon.com Inc AMZN -0.09%. and Microsoft Corp.MSFT +1.14% Last week, H-P abandoned a five-year effort to build a competitor to Amazon’s AWS cloud service, leaving HPE with nothing to offer in that area,” Mr. McMillan writes.

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., tells the WSJ that “a big part of the market is moving in a single direction, and H-P arguably doesn’t have offerings to cater to those [customers] … Traditional vendors have challenges in terms of that migration, but you could argue that others have at least taken more visible, positive steps in that direction.” International Business Machines IBM -0.07% Corp. and Oracle Corp.ORCL +1.80% have articulated clear goals for shifting to a cloud-based business model and taken steps in the direction. Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd says the company has rebuilt almost 100% of its applications for the cloud. Both companies have embraced an elaborate hybrid approach to the cloud. H-P cloud guru Bill Hilf told the WSJ that the majority of corporate spending “would continue to be made on systems in corporate data centers, and that H-P would work with companies such as Amazon and Microsoft to sell cloud services to customers that demand them.”

Read More : http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/11/02/the-morning-download-hewlett-packard-enterprise-debuts-as-cloud-reshapes-it/