New Opera 12 hooks web apps to 3D graphics acceleration
A new version of Opera's desktop browser rolls out today, six weeks after the public beta.
The list of new features hasn't changed much - and the new version also deprecates older features such as Opera Unite and widgets. HTML apps can now take advantage of experimental hardware acceleration and also access to the computer's webcam.
The hardware acceleration drills into the machine's 3D graphics processor to render pages, WebGL JavaScript code and the browser's user interface. It is enabled on an opt-in basis and remains labelled "experimental". Read more...
The great cloud computing pricing debate
A continuing controversy in cloud computing is its putative cost benefits; specifically, whether public cloud computing can provide cost advantages over computing carried out within a company's own data center.
Certainly, billions of bytes have been expended on this discussion, with steadfast advocates for both positions. I have often heard people confidently state that their internal cloud environment is cheaper than the public alternatives. I have even seen spreadsheets proving that an internal cloud has lower costs than the primary public provider, Amazon.
Briefly summed up, the argument in favor of private clouds goes something like this: If one examines the posted prices of Amazon and projects a given application's resource demands to those prices, it seems clear that an IT organization could achieve lower costs running its own infrastructure. Read more...
Moving to the cloud in 2012? Look out for these pitfalls
Businesses that want to take advantage of the maturing cloud marketplace in 2012 can learn from some common mistakes others have made when moving to infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offerings, experts said.
One of the most common errors companies make when moving to cloud services is failing to set up redundancies for disaster scenarios.
"One thing people assume is if you spin up a cloud server on Rackspace or Amazon, that that cloud server is somehow redundant or backed up somewhere else. An individual cloud server on its own is not redundant or backed up," said John Engates, CTO at Rackspace.
Researchers at Forrester call this "the uneven handshake" -- between the services cloud providers offer and the responsibilities left to the customer -- and say it extends beyond disaster recovery. Developers, who are commonly the people in an organization who start using these kinds of cloud services, "often assume that the cloud service takes care of security, application availability, backup and recovery, and ensuring service performance," Forrester analysts wrote in a recent report. "In most cases this isn't true." Read more...
How cloud computing is changing data center design and cost
If you've read this blog for a while, it's no secret that I believe that one aspect of cloud computing is a dramatic drop in the cost of computing. While many discuss cloud computing's cost advantage in terms of better utilization via resource pooling and rapid elasticity, we believe that there is a more fundamental shift going on as data centers are redesigned to focus on scale, efficiency, and a shift to commodity components.
Put another way, the former cost advantage (utilization, etc.) relies on more efficient use of existing data center design patterns, while the latter relies on transforming the cost basis of data centers by creating new design patterns.
I wrote about this topic a few months ago in a post entitled "Are you making your data centers cloud-friendly?" In it I discussed trends evinced at the San Francisco DatacenterDynamics conference: energy efficiency, raised operating temperatures, and "chicken coop" data center building designs. Read more...