Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud-testing service Soasta helps companies set up tests for their app or web site to see if they can avoid crashes and failures caused by heavy traffic. The company has just patented the “cross-cloud grid provisioning” process that makes this testing possible.

The company uses more than 500,000 servers across the globe to simulate hundreds of thousands of users accessing a single app or website.

It’s ideal for extreme test-cases where people suddenly flood a website. For instance, prior to the London Olympic Games, Soasta helped staff prepare the official website for millions of people attempting to buy tickets.

Prior to the invention of cross-cloud grid provisioning technology, a lack of servers constrained this kind of performance testing. Setting up servers in the cloud would take hours. However, Soasta can tap into servers in 60 global locations running on 20 providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace. Setup takes place in a matter of minutes — even for the largest tests.

“This kind of cloud testing is now done daily by 400 of our corporate customers,” CEO Tom Lounibos told VentureBeat in an interview. When asked about whether the unique patent will make the company more attractive to potential acquirers, Lounibos said Soasta will likely go public.

Analysts agree that the availability of this kind of testing is an important step for the industry as a whole and boosts customer’s faith in the cloud. “Cloud computing depends on rapid deployment and on-demand access,” said Melinda Ballou, program director for technology research firm IDC in a statement. This technology can now provide “immediate access to those load servers across environments to help with the problems users face when trying to utilize different cloud platforms for testing.”

Soasta is often billed as Mercury Interactive for the cloud. Mercury is a testing services provider that HP bought for $4.5 billion. It was formed in 2008 and is currently used by 12 out of the 24 top online retailers. Its most high-profile customers include NASA, Microsoft, and Netflix.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Claranet, a London-based cloud hosting provider, has scooped up Star, a company that delivers managed technology services like unified communications, and advanced security services.

According to an official statement released on Star’s website, this acquisition has turned Claranet into the largest mid-tier provider of integrating hosting and networking services in Europe.

The local media views this as evidence of “cloud hosting consolidation;” Europe-based cloud companies like Claranet need to grow quickly, and bolster their range of services to compete with global cloud hosting giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

Related news: AWS recently announced that it would expand to its ninth region; it already has a strong footing in Europe with a data center in Ireland.

“This announcement confirms our ambition to become the clear European leader in the delivery of managed services,” said Claranet Group CEO, Charles Nasser. In a statement, Nasser termed this an “British entrepreneurial success story”, as both companies were founded in the UK.

The new business will incorporate an extended range of managed hosting and network services, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, and virtual data centers.

Claranet claims that this new and expanded company will have revenues of over $150 million, about 700 staff, and over 4,500 customers, and operations will be expanded to the UK France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

In addition, new customers gained through the acquisition include Airbus, Amnesty International, Care UK, Channel 5, Veolia, Signet, CSH, IRIS, De Vere Hotels and Richmond Events.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Better grab an umbrella, because it’s about to get real cloudy. A new study by Cisco estimates that global traffic generated by cloud computing services will increase a staggering 12 times by 2015 compared to cloud traffic in 2010, while data center traffic will increase at a less-showy-but-still-impressive four times by 2015.

As one of the biggest cloud computing providers in the world, Cisco has an interest in tracking and estimating how big its services and clientele could be in the next few years. The company’s Global Cloud Index, from which the eye-popping traffic numbers originate, is based on measured data center traffic, analyst projections, and academic studies.

Cisco has tracked and estimated future data center traffic for several years, but this is the first time it has looked at purely cloud-based traffic. The study confirms what many experts expect: that cloud service adoption will greatly accelerate in the next several years as more companies and consumers realize the potential of cloud solutions and storage. Global cloud traffic will increase from 130 exabytes (EBs) in 2010 to a projected 1.6 zettabytes (ZBs) in 2015, a 12-fold increase that will take the cloud to the “zettabyte era,” according to the study.

“The study was key learning for us,” Thomas Barnett, Cisco senior manger for strategic communications, told VentureBeat. “Many users don’t realize that sending a file doesn’t generate an equal amount of traffic because the file has to go through servers and such. Sending a 5-megabyte file, for example, actually generates around 50 megabytes of traffic.”

In terms of pure data center traffic around the world, traffic is projected to go from 1.1 ZBs in 2010 to an estimated 4.8 ZBs in 2015, four times the amount. 4.8 ZBs is a hard-to-imagine number, so Cisco has quantified it to equal 66.7 trillion hours of streaming music at 160 kbps, 15.5 trillion hours of standard-def web conferencing or 4.8 trillion hours of online streaming 720p HD video.

Barnett also said the study indicated the average server will go from supporting 1.4 workloads in 2010 to 2 workloads in 2014. By that year, Cisco expects more than 50 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud instead of in local data centers, something that would indicate an enormous shift of resources and the way IT is managed for the enterprise.

The most notable reason for shifting from local data centers to cloud data centers? Cold hard cash. As an enterprise uses more servers operated by cloud companies, the cost per server greatly decreases. When a company reaches the 1,000-server mark, the cost differential between using local data centers and cloud data centers is nearly 50 percent.

Check out the accompanying infographic for more details from the Global Cloud Index study:

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