Backblaze, a leader in cloud storage, just celebrated its fifth anniversary. While the company is now profitable and its seven founders are getting paid salaries, that wasn’t always the case. We got a chance to look deep into the company’s balance sheet and see exactly how it managed its cash flow over the past five years. The tale offers…
Tag Archives: Case Studies
Hosting a WordPress Blog on OpenShift
If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?
As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather…
Stanford: Move the Cloud from Disk to DRAM
If you were to give a moment’s thought to the question of what’s keeping high-volume storage centers — especially the ones with cloud architectures — from replacing their multiple, redundant disk arrays with memory, you’d have time left over after you’d concluded the answer was cost. But what if the cost differentiator was getting smaller…
The State of the Mobile Cloud According to Cisco
A new survey from Cisco’s consulting group has some surprising conclusions. They looked at 1000 business users this past spring to understand the interaction between their mobile devices and how they interacted with various cloud-based services.
IActionable Engage Makes Salesforce More Fun
Next week the Appquest 11 contest will showcase four different Salesforce.com CRM add-on apps and anoint the winner. We are profiling each of the finalists and today we’ll talk about IActionable’s Engage. We wrote earlier about another gaming app that is a finalist, Bunchball’s Nitro, here.
Love Baseball? An iPad App That Uses the Cloud to Explore a National Pastime
Baseball is a game of numbers. There are 162 games in a season. Each team’s performance is defined by the numbers that the players show when at the plate and in the field. A team may have a mediocre overall batting average and still be at the top of the league. Why? Their pitchers don’t […]
Love Baseball? An iPad App That Uses the Cloud to Explore a National Pastime
Baseball is a game of numbers. There are 162 games in a season. Each team’s performance is defined by the numbers that the players show when at the plate and in the field. A team may have a mediocre overall batting average and still be at the top of the league. Why? Their pitchers don’t allow many runs. Their earned run average is so low that it…
Netflix’s Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services
The Netflix’s video streaming service has nearly tripled in growth during the past year. To scale the service, Netflix has moved its API and other operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the past several months.
In an interview today on the Cloudscaling blog, Netflix Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft discusses why Netflix moved to AWS. He…
New York Schools Go Google
Google announces this morning that New York will join Oregon, Iowa, Colorado and Maryland as the fifth and largest state to bring Google Apps for Education to K-12 classrooms.
New York’s 3.1 million students and hundreds of thousands of teachers across the state’s 697 public school districts will now have access to Google Apps for Education…
Weekly Case Study: Simplot Moves Beyond Test and Development
Simplot Australia initially used VMware virtualization software and Intel hardare to create a test and development environment.
The wholly owned subsidiary of the J R Simplot Company saw the immediate benefits and has not looked back since.
Today, more than 60% of the IT infrastructure at Simplot Australia’s corporate office has been…
Shutterstock: A Successful Online Company Not Built on the Cloud
The cost of photography is not what it used to be. So many people take pictures now that a new market has emerged for the sale of images at a far less cost than ever before.
Shutterstock is the leader in providing royalty-free images by subscription. No, they do not leverage the cloud to serve images. They’re a company that got started early in…
U.S. Department of Energy Asks, Is Cloud Computing Fast Enough for Science?
With cloud computing gaining acceptance in the business world, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to know if cloud computing can also meet the needs of the scientific computing. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has launched
Survey: More Than 80% of Businesses Support the iPad
In a new survey (which is still accepting responses for the rest of today) Citrix is asking its IT customers to characterize their support for iPad in their businesses. Currently, over 80% of respondents expect to purchase the iPad for their company. Even more respondents are saying they will support personal iPads for their employees.
Developer Trends: Ruby in the Cloud with Enterprise Class SLAs
Heroku is a platform that offers an effective join of the best parts of scaling cloud infrastructure with simple but great tools for immediately provisioning Ruby applications. Last week, at the Under the Radar event, where Heroku is a alumni, the company announced that they are nearly at 60,000 applications – marking a growth rate of over 1,000…
One Approach to Growth: Build Your Own Cloud with vCenter in the Middle
Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter. Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it…
The “Regional” Cloud: A Case Study
Back in February, John Treadway, director of cloud computing portfolio at Boston-based Unisys, wrote that, “I think we might be at the very beginning of an interesting new phase in the evolution of cloud computing — regional and local clouds.”
Treadway rightly points out that local and regional hosting is hardly new, as smaller players have been…
Got Budget? Virtualization Leads to Fewer Meetings
McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate “the last mile” of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it’s a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the…
Paperboy 2.0: Using the Cloud to Get Paid for Application and Content Subscriptions
For content and application developers there is more opportunity than ever to monetize subscriptions. The Apple App Store has sparked a revolution in the mobile space generating billions of dollars for Apple and also creating look-alike services from nearly every mobile vendor. In the iPhone OS 3.0, Apple included a “Store Kit”, which allows an…
Send Help: Disaster Response From The Cloud
Relief agencies, companies and volunteers came together and built a global network of systems and people to coordinate emergency aid operations for the Haiti earthquake victims.
This piecing together of a jigsaw of different organizations and technologies with one common goal serves as a testament to what is possible using cloud computing and…