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Common Goals of Cloud Management and Great User Experience

8/9/2010 9:03AM

I had the opportunity to represent enStratus at two conferences recently. I didn't expect them to be anything alike, as they represented two divergent aspects of my role at enStratus. The first was CloudCamp Boston—an unconference typically attended by tech-savvy early cloud adopters, or business people steeped in knowledge relating to the cloud. The second was An Event Apart Minneapolis—a two-day conference involving the various disciplines necessary to create great web experiences with today's technologies, including design, development, content and usability. Star Trek jokes got a few chuckles, don't get me wrong, but web fonts sparked more passionate responses from.
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Automated EBS RAID and Encryption with enStratus

8/7/2010 3:07PM

enStratus provides customers with the ability to automatically attach, format, and mount RAID volumes through the enStratus console with the option to have those volumes automatically encrypted. This article describes how this works.
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Multi-currency Financial Controls

8/4/2010 7:00AM

enStratus announces multi-currency financial controls to enable you to maintain budgets in your company accounting currency across clouds that bill in any number of different currencies.
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Rolling Out CloudAudit

7/27/2010 8:26AM

enStratus has been openly supportive of the efforts of CloudAudit for some time now. Our initial involvement was as a tool vendor to leverage the standard to further governance in the cloud. With the release of the draft specification to the IETF, however, we have become the first customer for CloudAudit.
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Announcing OpenStack with enStratus Support

7/18/2010 7:15AM

This past week, enStratus was invited to participate in the inaugural design summit for a new and exciting open source cloud computing platform called OpenStack. I was fortunate enough to attend and thought I would share my observations.
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Managing Access in the Cloud

7/13/2010 11:03AM

A manager recently asked me about managing user access to his cloud infrastructure. User access in the cloud presents an interesting challenge because of the nature of cloud accounts and cloud management platforms. I generally divide the access problem into two separate parts. The first is access to the cloud account itself,
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What vSphere + enStratus Means

6/22/2010 8:39AM

You're used to managing your public cloud environments in enStratus. Today we announced support for something quite uncloudy—managing a virtualized VMware vSphere infrastructure as if it were a private cloud. Here's what that means.
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What Is Cloud Management and Why Does It Matter?

6/10/2010 1:10PM

Cloud computing is definitely a getting some attention 2010. Tons of investment is going into cloud computing infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is rumored to be a $500 million business. Microsoft, Google, and other players are investing vast sums to their solutions. Deploying instances is getting easier which makes cloud management even harder. Cloud management is the task of provisioning, managing, and monitoring applications into these infrastructure clouds. It is more than just monitoring the server usage. To accomplish this, it takes the right combination of people and cloud management software. 1) People – Although cloud computing makes it much easier.
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enStratus and GoGrid

6/2/2010 3:21PM

enStratus today announced support for one of the pioneer cloud providers in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud space, GoGrid. This match teams the first provider to support Microsoft Windows in the cloud with the first infrastructure management provider to support Windows in the cloud.
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Every CFO Needs To Have “The Cloud Conversation”

5/11/2010 8:30AM

Your IT infrastructure is at the beginning of an important transition and if you haven’t had “The Cloud Conversation” with your CIO or CTO, you should.
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It's Official: enStratus Rolls Out vCloud Express Support

5/4/2010 11:59AM

A few months ago, we quietly mention in this blog how enStratus uses Dasein Cloud as a cloud abstraction layer and, thanks to Dasein Cloud + jclouds, that enStratus would support Terremark's vCloud Express through Dasein Cloud + jclouds + vCloud. Today, we formally announced vCloud Express support with Terremark as our launch partner for this support.
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enStratus and Eucalyptus

4/29/2010 4:52PM

enStratus has officially added support for the Eucalyptus platform to the arsenal of cloud environments that we support.
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enStratus, Amazon, and the Asia/Pacific Region

4/28/2010 7:56PM

Amazon Web Services today rolled out their fourth region, the Asia/Pacific Southeast 1 (ap-southeast-1) in Singapore. You can leverage all of the AWS services in this new region. And, as with all new regions, enStratus provides full support for this region immediately.
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Cloud Computing Enables Agencies to Deliver Programs Quickly and Efficiently

4/8/2010 7:48AM

As they seek to achieve competitive advantage, to explore and make available the best solutions and practices for their clients, advertising and marketing agencies are, in increasing numbers, turning to cloud computing environments. Cloud computing will benefit many applications and Web solutions, but it seems that it could be especially attractive to advertising and marketing agencies, due to the dynamic nature typical of their campaigns. But how can agencies put controls in place to ensure success?
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enStratus and Amazon SNS

4/7/2010 8:16AM

Today Amazon Web Services rolled out a new service called Amazon SNS - the Amazon Simple Notification Service. enStratus has been working on integrating this new offering into our services and have some exciting items to talk about whether or not you use Amazon as your primary cloud.
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Key Management Is Key to Cloud Security

3/23/2010 2:01PM

The economics of cloud computing is definitely appealing. However, security is of course of paramount importance when deploying mission-critical applications in the cloud. There can be no trade-offs between improved accessibility, performance, and the integrity of an organization’s most valued data.
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How Cloud Computing Can Save Money

3/15/2010 7:18PM

Simply speaking, the concept of cloud computing allows you to forget about the size, the scalability, the usually large capital investment for your hardware infrastructure. Companies no longer need to worry about hardware complexities, human capital, or pure operating capital. They can now more easily match their IT infrastructure with the demand, decreasing extra costs associated with over-building or lost revenue when not enough IT resources were secured.
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Cloud Services Allow Organizations to Streamline

3/9/2010 10:53AM

Cloud services, or cloud computing solutions, are becoming far more widespread in both the realm of personal computing and within enterprise business activities. They provide the benefit of elasticity, cost control, on-demand availability, resource sharing and wide network access. These outsourced services will help an organization to streamline, as it focuses on its principal delivery model.
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Update Dryad

2/10/2010 11:00AM

Today we are rolling out Update Dryad which is a major system update with significant new functionality for enStratus. Major enStratus updates all center around a specific theme. The theme for Dryad was "user management".
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enStratus, vCloud, and Terremark

1/20/2010 8:01AM

About a year ago, enStratus opened up the cloud abstraction layer we use to make enStratus a cross-cloud platform. This abstraction layer now supports the vCloud API. As a result, a new set of cloud services is opening up to enStratus customers.
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Upcoming Events

1/18/2010 7:04AM

There are a number of exciting events coming up that enStratus is sponsoring or where enStratus staff will be speaking (or both).
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Managing Cloud Budgets with enStratus

12/23/2009 7:50PM

Companies often adopt cloud computing to reduce procurement windows and eliminate capital expenditures. These benefits come with the side-effect of reducing the ability of the finance department to prevent IT from over-spending or managing who is spending approved funds on what resources. enStratus provides that control.
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enStratus and Azure

12/15/2009 6:50PM

With the December update of enStratus, we've rolled out our initial support for the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. The first part of Azure we are supporting is the Azure cloud storage system for blob stores.
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Using Labels to Prevent VM Sprawl

12/12/2009 10:14PM

One of the most compelling uses of the new label feature in enStratus is to help control VM sprawl.
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enStratus and ReliaCloud

12/7/2009 7:21PM

enStratus has been actively working with ReliaCloud on the launch of their new cloud computing service, and we'd like to tell you about our support for the platform as it goes through its beta cycle.
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New AWS Features: US West Region + EBS Boot Volumes

12/3/2009 9:36PM

enStratus customers using the Amazon cloud woke up this morning to discover the new AWS Region in Northern California, us-west-1. AWS exposed this new region and its two availability zones overnight and launched a new feature, EBS boot volumes. The New Region Let's start with the new region. The Northern California region joins Northern Virginia (us-east-1) and Ireland (eu-west-1) to become the third region in the AWS cloud. Regions are distinct infrastructures with almost no common points of failure. If you deploy an application across two regions, you have essentially set yourself up to survive anything but the failure of.
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The O'Reilly Blog

The Cloud Computing Mind Map

June 30, 2010 - Getting your brain around all of the components of cloud computing is a huge challenge. There are so many players, and a number of them are performing functions entirely new to IT. Now you can see the big picture with a mind map of the cloud computing space.

O'Reily

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