Cloud Computing offers significant benefits over traditional solutions for deploying production systems as well as for conducting development and testing activities, says Dr Thorsten von Eicken, CTO of RightScale, Inc.. Dr von Eicken will be giving a technical session at SYS-CON's "Cloud Computing Expo" (November 19-21, 2008) - a groundbreaking adjunct to the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA - in which he will distill the unique characteristics of clouds and describe how to best think about deployments in the clouds.

Before joining RightScale Inc., von Eicken was Chief Architect at Expertcity.com and Citrix Online, makers of GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToAssist. He was responsible for the overall architecture of these online services and also managed the 24/7 datacenter operations where he acquired a deep knowledge in deploying and running secure scalable online services.

von Eicken received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was a professor of computer science at Cornell University. Case studies and real experiences from his two years of cloud computing experience will illustrate the pros and cons of today's cloud offerings. His technical discussion will cover:

• Layers of cloud computing
• Cost breakdown versus traditional solutions
• IT management and development, testing benefits/examples
• Extreme, fast scalability at low cost – case study

Forrester Research analyst James Staten calls cloud computing "classic disruptive innovation - where the mainstream dismisses the product and small companies have time to create a real differentiated value." But there are so many offerings just now that what infrastructure architects are looking for above all is a set of organizing principles they can use to guide them in choosing between them all.

Such principles. and a host of associated topics, will be addressed in San Jose by:

• Dr Werner Vogels - VP & CTO, Amazon.com (Keynote)
• Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly
• Mike Eaton - CEO, Cloudworks
• Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace)
• Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces
• Don MacAskill - CEO & Chief Geek, SmugMug
• Mike Feinberg - Senior Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC
• Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath
• Dr Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale
• Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing
• Patrick Harr, CEO - Nirvanix
• David Young - Co-Founder & CEO, Joyent
  
• Dave Durkee - CEO, ENKI
• John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap
• Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra
• Lars Leckie, Principal, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Dr Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
• Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO of Hyperic
• Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems
• Alan Williamson, Founder at Blog-City.com, Creator of BlueDragon
  
• Rachel Chalmers - Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software, The 451 Group

The sessions are all listed here.