Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

Treading lightly, Apple acknowledged that it has started to store the personal data Relevant Products/Services of some Chinese users on servers in China. Reuters initially reported that Apple’s success in China led to the first iCloud data center Relevant Products/Services to be located on mainland China. The center was built by Apple and a state-owned telecommunications company, China Telecom, the country's third-largest wireless carrier.

Apple told Reuters in a statement that China Telecom was added to its list of data center providers in order to improve its iCloud service, which lets users store and access photos and other personal files from multiple devices. Apple said storing the data closer to the iCloud users gives them quicker and more reliable access to it...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Koblalka.

Data center services provider QTS Realty Trust (QTS) has added hybrid connectivity features to its Enterprise Cloud service. QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity provides high-performance networking options that allow customers to integrate seamlessly with a variety of IT architectures, according to the company.

"Connectivity continues to be a key component in our customers' business strategy, and by utilizing QTS Hybrid Network Connectivity, enterprises can easily manage their public and private cloud as a single environment, creating higher performance at a lower cost," Jim Reinhart, chief operating officer for QTS's development and operations, said in a prepared statement...

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/hybrid-cloud-computing/qts-now-offers-hybrid-connectivity-enterprise-cloud-solution

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Pankaj Shroff.

SDN networks arose from a demand for connectivity that current switches, routers, network protocols and segmentation tools could not satisfy. Cloud-ready data centers enable an always-on and available-anywhere world of information and productivity. The cloud computing model delivers efficiency and value with economies of scale by pooling compute, storage and networking resources, distributing them where they are most needed, maximizing their use across multiple groups and abstracting away the underlying physical infrastructure.

Some of the biggest inefficiencies and costs of traditional networks arise from tedious, manual configuration and management, performance bottlenecks, connectivity and bandwidth costs, lack of service agility and threats to security. To fully realize the benefits offered by cloud computing, IT teams must overcome networking challenges with virtualization...

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Jeramiah Dooley.

Public cloud services have put huge pressures on enterprise IT to compete in a more agile way. When it can take days or even weeks for IT departments to procure and manually set-up necessary networking and storage hardware to support new applications, why wouldn’t employees turn to providers who can meet their needs within minutes?

To meet these demands, the hardware infrastructure needs to be more than fast; it needs to be flexible and scalable with rapid automation to meet the needs of its users. Storage has a key role to play here, with a sophisticated management layer that can separate performance and capacity - independently controlling access speeds and available drive space on an app-by-app basis - it has now become possible to virtualise performance independent of capacity...

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

To take advantage of Seattle's highly skilled workforce and experienced cloud engineering community, Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) has unveiled a new cloud development facility in the city's tech corridor. The company plans to hire more than 100 engineers in Seattle to bolster and build its growing portfolio of public cloud computing services. The new center will be unveiled during HackerX, an open house and recruitment event aimed at giving cloud developers a chance to explore employment opportunities at Oracle.

Today, Oracle unveiled its new cloud engineering center in downtown Seattle, Washington, where developers will focus on building new cloud computing services as part of Oracle's comprehensive cloud offerings. Oracle expanded its presence in Seattle to take advantage of the deep expertise in cloud computing available in Seattle's rapidly growing technical community...

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing, new applications and a lot more user connectivity are all driving forces around the data center evolution. In fact, the data center has become the home of all modern technologies. Businesses are now building their entire organizational model around the capabilities of IT. Through it all, pressure continues to mount on data center operators to run high-efficiency environments capable of good power control.

Power consumption in the data center continues to be a rising trend. The need to provide redundant power systems with high reliability and availability of compute resources is a major driving force for the increase in power utilization. Some data centers use just as much power for non-compute or “overhead energy” like cooling, lighting and power conversions, as they do to power servers...

Grazed from GCN. Author: John Moore.

With pressure on government to streamline IT operations to control costs and spur performance, a growing number of city IT managers are pursuing the latest hardware architectures and tools to renovate their legacy data centers. But while the emphasis on physical devices may seem like a hardware renaissance, the cloud is still very much a part of data center overhauls.

In such cases, agencies are using cloud in a backup role, a resource that soaks up spikes in data center workload or as a disaster recovery utility. The city of Asheville, N.C. , for example, found that traditional disaster recovery involved a high, fixed capital expense. As a consequence, city’s budget only supported disaster recovery plans for applications it absolutely needed to protect – enterprise resource planning (ERP), for example, said Jonathan Feldman, Asheville’s CIO...

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Laura Luo.

China Mobile’s Chongqing Data Center broke ground in the Chongqing Liangjiang International Cloud Computing Industrial Park on June 30th. This is one of the key projects for developing Chongqing’s cloud computing and big data industries. China Mobile’s new data center will cover an area of 120,000sqm and will be built in two phases. It is estimated that 4800 racks capable of hosting about 32,000 servers will be put into use when phase one is completed in 2016.

A total of 13,000 racks accommodating 130,000 servers will be brought online once the project is finished. The new data center is expected to provide an infrastructure and open platform for cloud computing related industries in Chongqing as envisioned by the Chongqing Municipal Government’s “Cloud Plan”. In 2011 the Chongqing Municipal government signed a strategic cooperation agreement with China Mobile in Beijing with the aim of transforming Chongqing into a smart city based on cloud technologies.

Grazed from GreenDataCenterNews. Author: Keao Caindec.

Cloud computing has swept through the IT infrastructure industry and made it easier for companies to use servers, storage and software applications on demand and “as-a-service.” But what about the data center colocation industry? It has changed very little over the last eight years and remains as inflexible as ever with multi-year term agreements and big minimum space requirements.

Businesses want more flexibility to run temporary workloads, build private clouds and have a less risky path to migrating applications to a hybrid public-private cloud model. What can be done to make colocation easier and more “cloud-like?”...

Grazed from WallStreet CheatSheet. Author: Editorial Staff.

Facebook has quietly migrated Instagram and its 20 billion photos from Amazon’s cloud computing service to its own data center. The transition took about a year in planning and a month for the actual migration, and Instagram’s 200 million users didn’t notice a thing. Wired reports that the company calls the transition the “Instagration,” and the migration was unlike any that Facebook had previously undertaken. In moving other properties that it had acquired, like FriendFeed, Facebook was able to shut down the service before migrating it to its own data centers.

But moving Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012, was a much bigger operation. The process involved moving the service from thousands of virtual machines on Amazon’s cloud computing service, where it was originally built, to a private data center operated by Facebook, all while avoiding disruptions to a service used by 200 million people. According to Wired, the move gives Instagram access to the wide range of software tools built into Facebook’s infrastructure...