IDEAS Insights

Cloud Jobs Have Increased Substantially

Although the economy is still reeling from the Great Recession in the United States and Europe, cloud hiring, at least for the majority of the public cloud market, is up. IDEAS recently analyzed cloud-hiring statistics from the job search website Indeed.com and compared them with similar statistics compiled in August 2011. Overall, the data spells promise for the cloud market, which has exhibited a substantial uptick in hiring over the past five months.

Drive to Public Clouds Powered by Both Consumers and IT Managers

The farthest-reaching changes in the IT industry often occur when a single new development simultaneously responds to the needs of both consumers and business users. Perhaps the best-known example of this kind of wave was the original PC: office workers used PCs during the day for their business tasks and then used the machine when they got home to play games (and often vice versa). The Web was also adopted in equal measure by consumers and business users when it first broke into the mainstream, which was a key factor in its incredibly rapid rise. The same will happen with cloud computing, once the public cloud providers close the loop between business and consumer services.

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IDEAS Adds Free Membership to Its Line-up of Offerings

We recently introduced IDEAS Membership, a free-with-registration offering designed to provide new levels of access to insight, trends, and opinion. IDEAS Membership provides industry professionals with an easy way to keep up with IT infrastructure development highlights, including our new Benchmark Checker app, which lets you quickly verify vendors’ world record benchmark performance claims.

Storage Hypervisor Market: Ready to Take Off?

While server hypervisors have become a well-defined and established server virtualization solution, the term “storage hypervisor” may raise more questions than it answers. Whether a particular solution can be classified as a storage hypervisor is a subject of much debate, but to truly earn the “hypervisor” moniker, a storage hypervisor must virtualize storage hardware – that is, it must consolidate the resources from multiple storage devices into a common pool. However, it is not clear what capabilities are needed to supplement the virtualization function. IBM and DataCore believe that a strong management platform is key. Virsto, with its recent announcement of support for VMware, highlights the need for significant I/O optimization. These attributes are both needed to create a complete solution, and the ideal storage hypervisor would merge them into a single product.

Fundamental Changes Ahead for IT in 2012

IDEAS has identified several major topics that are likely to dominate the attention of IT managers throughout 2012, including the continued rise of cloud computing, the diversification of client devices, and the next stage in the evolution of server designs and storage systems. Some developments will be incremental and fairly predictable; other developments will fundamentally change the course of the industry, as organizations adopt public cloud services for a growing number of workloads, and as users shift from traditional PCs to tablets and other mobile devices for more and more client applications. IDEAS analysts expect the following ten developments to unfold in 2012.

IDEAS Top 10 Predictions for IT Industry in 2012

• User concern will grow about lock-in with public cloud service vendors.
• IT workers will start confronting an acute need to retrain for cloud-computing skills.
• The public cloud business will undergo a shakeout. 
• Some systems vendors will reconsider their client strategies in order to strengthen server positions.
• Rejuvenated PCs will underscore their importance for critical computing tasks.
• Growing use of solid-state drives (SSDs) will start blurring boundaries between server memory caches and storage.
• Simplified and automated storage management will break out in emerging world markets.
• Unified storage will become a requirement for entry-level and midrange customers.
• Systems vendors will step up efforts to differentiate themselves with integrated software stacks.
• Software-defined networking (SDN) will start to get attention.

GoGrid’s Pricing: Cheaper, but at a Cost

Cloud Comparison Series: GoGrid

Most end users would choose the cheaper option between two identical goods. However, this point is moot if those end users can't readily calculate and compare the costs of their options. In some cases, the complexity of a particular pricing model can negate its economic benefits.

Figure 1. Cost Analysis of GoGrid's Professional Cloud vs. Amazon Large Instance (Nonreserved) over a Five-Year Period