Nimbula announces ship date for Cloud Operating System and partner ecosystem

Nimbula annouced it is ready to ship within 30 days.

Nimbula Announces General Availability of Cloud Operating System Software and Free Version

Santa Clara, CA – March 8, 2011 – Today at the Cloud Connect Conference, Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, announced that its flagship product, Nimbula Director, will be generally available within the next 30 days.

Based on Nimbula's Cloud Operating System technology, Nimbula Director delivers Amazon EC2-like services to both enterprises and service providers. Allowing customers to efficiently manage both on- and off-premises resources, Nimbula Director quickly and cost effectively transforms inflexible, inefficient and under-utilized data centers into powerful, easily configurable compute capacity while supporting controlled access to off-premise clouds.

And, they have launched a partner ecosystem with the following companies signed on.

Citrix Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of virtual computing solutions that help companies deliver IT as an on-demand service. Cloud Cruiser

Founded in 2010, Cloud Cruiser is a venture backed company that provides cost optimization solutions for the rapidly evolving enterprise cloud.

enStratus is a cloud infrastructure management solution for deploying and managing enterprise-class applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation and provides the Opscode SaaS Platform, a widely used hosted service for configuration management and infrastructure automation.

Puppet Labs develops and commercially supports Puppet, the leading open source platform for enterprise systems management. With millions of nodes under management and thousands of users, including Twitter, NYSE, Zynga, Genentech, Match.com, eBay, NYU, and Oracle, Puppet standardizes the way IT staff deploy and manage infrastructure in the enterprise and the cloud.

Scalr is an open source cloud management tool. It is focused on scalability for web applications, with hybrid clouds, mysql failover, automatic load balancing.

There are fundamentally two choices out there.  One go to one company for your cloud solution – VMware, IBM, HP, etc.  Or a best of breed approach for your environment.  Nimbula for those who want to design and engineer their cloud environments.

Now that Nimbula is close to ship, we’ll see who adopts this approach.

China and Taiwan’s #1 Telecom companies join efforts in Cloud Computing between countries

Chunghwa Telecom (Taiwan’s #1 Telecom) and China Telecom (China’s #1 Telecom) have signed an agreement to deploy Telecom services in Western Taiwan to support Cloud and Smart Grid services between the countries reports Taiwan Economic News.

Chunghwa Telecom, China Telecom Co-Tap Coastal Economic Zone Market

2011/03/07

Taipei, March 7, 2011 (CENS)--Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. and China Telecom Co., Ltd. recently signed an agreement to jointly deploy telecom services including intelligent energy management and cloud-computing networks on the Western Taiwan Straits Economic Zone, which mainly lies along the cost of the Fujian Province of mainland China.
The two telecom carriers vow to cooperate on the two telecom services across the mainland starting from the said zone, which was proposed by Chinese central government to integrate the economies, transport, infrastructure, policies from the coastal cities west of the Taiwan Straits for competitiveness, social development, increased and strengthened economic cooperation with Taiwan

The cooperation supports expanded services and cost reduction.

Chunghwa Telecom executives pointed out that the two companies will integrate their networks, distribution channels, products and technologies to explore business opportunities on the zone, with cooperation covering cloud computing, Internet Data Center, intelligent energy management, electronic commerce and energy saving services.

China Telecom Chairman Wang Xiaochu pointed out that the cooperation will help the two companies pare down cost for operations on the zone.

Twitter follows Facebook, both are looking for Server HW Supply Chain Managers

I posted about Facebook looking for a Manager of supply chain operations for server hardware.  The job posting is still open.

But, there is a bit of competition as Twitter also has a job posting open for a Technical Supplier Negotiator (Datacenter Hardware).

About This Job
Do you like to build data center infrastructure? Hardware Operations is looking for an experienced and self-motivated person to help build out Twitter’s growing data center compute power. We’re looking for someone to lead the supply purchasing processes. You should be comfortable working at both the tactical and strategic levels.
Responsibilities

• Lead the purchasing strategy and execution for hardware
• Own the total supplier relationship for Twitter’s supply base  
• Lead all supplier negotiations and execute supplier contract agreements
• Drive continuous supplier improvement performance programs

If you were qualified for this job would you rather work at Facebook or Twitter? 

One of the biggest problems with a person taking the job at Facebook or Twitter is you would most likely be the one person who does this job, and you don’t have peers to work together with.  There will be support people, and internal customers, but there are logistics expertise is not common in Internet companies.

Why is this an issue?  In my early days I was a distribution logistics engineer at HP, but the only one in the division.  Others who I could discuss ideas with were in other divisions, not my division.  Compare this to being a distribution logistics engineer at UPS or FedEx where there are many times dozens of people with this job role.  For the same reason groups can out innovate the most experienced individual, there are risk to be the only person working in a role.

This role should possibly be outsourced in addition to an internal hire.  Where?  A company that could help out a supply chain manager is Redapt.   I think it is time to go have beers with the Redapt folks at Black Raven Brewing and have discussion on this idea.

Someone asked who is Redapt?  Here are quotes with some customers.

Zynga

From start to finish, Redapt made our project a success by introducing innovative technologies and delivering fully integrated racks ahead of schedule.

Mark Stockford, VP of Production Operations, Zynga

Online "E"tailer

Redapt addresses our needs and finds the best solution to our problem. They have proven to be a true partner who really cares about our needs and expectations. We look forward to partnering with them in the future.

Client, National Sporting Goods Retailer

IBM

Redapt is fearless in finding new ways to identify, work and close complex opportunities.  I am always impressed with their commitment to educating their team on leading edge technology, competition and what's new and hot in the industry.

Leslie Johnston, IBM

423 job openings in AWS, how many employees does AWS have? 2,000

Seattletimes has an article about Amazon's job growth in the Seattle area.

Amazon.com on a hiring spree

Amazon.com has been expanding its office complex in South Lake Union and has about 1,900 openings in Seattle.

By Amy Martinez

Seattle Times business reporter

GREG GILBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Amazon began moving into its new headquarters complex in South Lake Union last spring and now occupies seven buildings covering 845,000 square feet.

It's tough times all around, just not at Amazon's new headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle.

Young workers dressed in jeans and T-shirts type away on laptops in small conference rooms named after products sold on Amazon's website. Vending machines serve up pricey gluten-free cookies and dry-roasted edamame. And for their pooches, doggy biscuits are handed out at the main reception desk.

Amid a sluggish job market and shaky economic recovery, the world's biggest Internet retailer is hiring like crazy at its headquarters complex. Consider Amazon's online jobs board: It lists about 1,900 openings in Seattle, at least twice as many as a year ago. More than 900 call for techies.

If Amazon is adding 900 technical jobs.  How many are in AWS?  I blogged about 166 job positions open in May 2010.

I was in Home Depot yesterday and saw one of my ex-Microsoft friends who joined Amazon Web Services 4 years ago when people weren't familiar with the term Cloud Computing.  We had a quick catch-up in between Grill Aisle and Lawn Mowers.  I told him how I blogged about AWS having 100 job openings. Curious I checked today and there were 147 US jobs and 19 Int'l jobs for AWS.

So, going up to Amazon career and searching for "AWS" there are 43 pages of 10 jobs a page.  The 43rd page has 3 entries.  42 X 10 + 3 = 423.

Current job postings for Amazon of 1,900 for 33,700 employees equals a 5.6% hiring rate.

Worldwide, Amazon had 33,700 employees at the end of 2010, about 9,400 more than at the end of the previous year.

For a fast growing business if you assume a 20% hiring percentage, multiply 423 X 5 is about 2,000 employees.  Take your own guess on the size of AWS higher or lower, AWS is on fire and hiring.

Don't forget versus all the rest of the cloud companies, Amazon has more customers and more data than anyone else. A huge investment in customer analytics systems.  Analyzing behavior gives Amazon an advantage where their size makes it difficult for competitors.

Why do we need Fire Bowls in Water pools? Hope this trend dies

Saw this article in Barron's on great a natural/propane flame in a pool of water looks in a landscape.

You can display a fire bowl on dry land if you want, but the real drama comes when you pair it with a reflecting pool. Run a gas line underneath and the works of art will blaze on demand.

The artist even admits fire and water don't go together.

Make Your Landscape Really Hot

Fire and water usually don't mix well. "The two elements are not born together, nor do they really want to be together," says Brooklyn sculptor Elena Colombo. But with fire bowls, an increasingly popular type of landscape installation from Colombo and others, fire and water meet, mingle and mesmerize.

Could you imagine having one of these fire fountains installed now a day?

At least no green data center would install one of these.