Cloud Computing Info

Rackspace has announced the availability of Windows Cloud Servers. They are offering Windows Server 2008 is 32 bit and 64 bit versions for 2008 SP2, 2008 R2 and 2008 R2 SP2. You can grab various CPU and memory combinations and the cost/hour is very competitive.

You’ll pay a bit more for Windows than you do for Linux but that’s pretty standard as MS charges licensing fees to the provider.  The cost per hour is actually cheaper on Rackspace than it is on Amazon EC2 but the box you get at Rackspace is not as beefy.

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 and page 2 first.

MobiPocket

The free MobiPocket ebook reader used to be produced by a German company but they are now an Amazon subsidiary. The Mobi format is what the Kindle uses as the default format for all of those ebooks. That means that for a Kindle, if you want to view PDFs, you need to convert them to Mobi format. Fortunately, Mobi provides that functionality.

I have been using mobi on my blackberry for a long time now. I mainly used it to read free science fiction books the Baen Free Library.

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

If you haven’t already, you should read page 1 first.

BeamReader

BeamReader, formerly BeamBerry, is produced by SLG Mobile. BeamReader was originally created BeamBerry as a hosted service. It would translate the PDF on a server and stream the output to your device. SLG still offers a service like this (for PDFs and many other document types) and even offers a print service. The newer BeamReader provides a native PDF renderer and they claim to be “the first full fidelity native PDF reader for BlackBerry”.

Unfortunately, I had some major problems with BeamReader while trying to do this review.

From the Cloud Computing Blog.

Today’s post is a little bit different than my normal fare. In my quest for mobile productivity, I have been looking for a way to carry my technical library with me where ever I go. While I can upload my PDFs to various Cloud OSes, and I do, I still have a need to access my documentation while disconnected. Plus, I still have to view those documents when I may not have a computer available (although with my EEE PC 1000h, that is rare these days). That leaves me with my phone.

I recently upgraded to a blackberry bold.

Desktops as a Service

Falling some somewhere between software and a platform are Cloud Desktops (also called a Cloud OS). These desktops run inside a browser and are accessible from any desktop with an internet connection.

A cloud desktop offers word processing, spreadsheets, development tools, networking tools and more. While relatively immature at this time, we can expect this market to grow significantly in the coming years, especially as more and more smart phones and ultraportables hit the real world.

Microsoft LiveMesh offers free storage, machine synchronization and a cloud based desktop.

Have you taken the leap into the cloud? If you don’t want to start with data centers in the sky, you can start with a desktop in the sky. Microsoft has offered Live Mesh for a while now. I wrote about live mesh on this blog. Live Mesh, even though it offers a desktop, is not much of a cloud OS. It’s more of a synch and remote desktop tool.

You could wait for Microsoft Azure. That’s MS’s services based, cloud OS. It’s still mostly fog at this point though. Fog, vapor? Get it?

Anyway, there are a few Cloud desktops that you can start using today.

3 Leaf Systems is working on a very interesting product that they call the next generation of server virtualization. Basically, they say they can take a pool of low cost commodity hardware and create a transparent cloud cluster.

3Leaf Systems enable a “cloud computing” environment to be built from low-cost commodity servers by providing virtualization of CPU & Memory for an entire server farm. With 3Leaf technology, a group of servers can look like one big server that has one pool of CPU processing and one pool of memory that can be dynamically allocated and/or repurposed to applications as needed, without any modifications to operating systems.

This is a very cool concept and one that I will be watching very carefully.

I’m evaluating various web based desktops. A web desktop is a desktop in the cloud. So far, I have found three that I like. Today’s is iCloud by Xcerion. I’ll have a lot more info after my beta login is approved but from the videos, it looks like iCloud is the most advanced of all the Cloud OSes that I have looked at this far.

Here is a quick 3 minute video showing how to use the iCloud day planner.

And here is a little bit longer demo (5 minutes) of the OS itself.

You might not think of remote desktop as a cloud tool but MS has added cloud storage to remote desktop and called it Live Mesh. I have been using it recently and it is pretty nice. I use VNC fairly extensively and, when I’m not using VNC, I tend to use SSH. Well, I heard about this Live Mesh thing and decided to download it and give it a try. It is currently a beta product but I haven’t had any issues.

My first thought on using it was that it was a clone of gotomypc.