Grazed from TechCentral.ie. Author: Editorial Staff.

Two of the bigger names in cloud computing, VMware and Rackspace, have released low-cost or free trial versions of their cloud offerings.

The news follows an announcement by Red Hat earlier that it too would offer a free version of its cloud computing platform. Red Hat’s and Rackspace’s offerings help users build private clouds based on the OpenStack software code, while VMware is offering a free trial version of its vCloud software, which allows access to public cloud resources.

The moves signal an effort by cloud service providers to entice businesses that may have virtualised environments to expand to a public or private cloud, one analyst says…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Consumers store their personal content everywhere online — Evernote, Gmail, Dropbox, Flickr, Facebook, just to name a few places — but getting stuff from one place to another can be a pain. Need to set a profile picture for a new service, but all your good photos are sitting in Facebook albums? That probably means downloading the photo locally, maybe editing it, and then finally uploading it to the new service. Filepicker.io, a Y Combinator company headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks it can turn this process on its head with just two lines of code.

The way it works is actually pretty simple: App developers integrate with Filepicker by inserting a few lines into their source code, and Filepicker gives them API access to a broad range of cloud services where consumer content is stored. Users can then upload and download content — photos, documents, whatever — straight to and from the app. Essentially, it cuts out the middleman…

Grazed from The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel. Author: Miro Cassetta.

Cloud computing’s cost savings and quick return on investment is frequently making headlines in many sectors, including legal.[1] With litigation and e-discovery on the rise, it’s important to cut costs without sacrificing quality, and cloud computing is the new “go-to” solution. Yet some litigators are hesitant to switch e-discovery databases to the cloud for fear of risks such as security breaches or data loss.

By understanding what cloud computing is, how it can benefit you and what to look for in a service provider, your corporation’s legal department can make the best decisions regarding the use of this powerful technology…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Robert J. Mullins.

Competitors like SAP and Oracle used to scoff at the business model of Salesforce.com with its software as a service delivered in the cloud. Now they are emulating Salesforce’s model and they, along with Microsoft, are trying to apply more competitive pressure on the cloud enterprise application company.

Salesforce upped its game Aug. 14 with the introduction of Salesforce Communities, which is built on its Chatter enterprise social media platform and is designed to better integrate social media with a company’s actual business processes…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Klint Finley.

Back in 2006, cloud computing company Joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $500. Now, according to an e-mail sent to customers, Joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. Customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Here’s what’s going on: Joyent acquired a web hosting company called TextDrive back in 2005. TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, creator of the content management systems Textile and TextPattern, and Jason Hoffman, who also co-founded Joyent. As Watts Martin explains, TextDrive sold lifetime subscriptions to customers to fund the company rather than raise venture capital. Customers felt like investors in the company. Drew McLellan wrote on Hacker News:…

Grazed from TheHuffington Post. Author: Robert Holleyman.

When Congress created the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) in 2008, cloud computing was unfamiliar to most people outside of the IT industry. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the information economy. In the interim, recognizing the potential to capitalize on efficiencies of scale and capture maximum benefit from federal IT spending, the Administration has been implementing a “Cloud First” policy to guide its procurement. Now, as IPEC gears up to issue its second Joint Strategic Plan on IP Enforcement, there is an opportunity — indeed, a necessity — to ensure we are guarding against misappropriation or infringement of IP rights in the cloud.

In its first Joint Strategic Plan, the Administration made substantial progress in marshaling the combined resources of the federal government to enforce the IP protections that have long encouraged US technology innovation. Among other noteworthy accomplishments, US officials raised end-user software piracy as a top-tier international trade issue, developed guidance on technology neutrality in federal software procurement, worked with other countries on Special 301 lists to develop concrete action plans for reducing piracy, launched US Embassy IP interagency teams for 17 countries, and worked with payment processors and advertisers to stop doing business with pirates and counterfeiters…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

IBM is buying Texas Memory Systems, a privately held flash memory maker. Houston-based TMS is known for its RamSan rack-mount flash storage line.. IBM already offered SSD from third parties in some of its storage systems and servers, although a spokesman said TMS was not one of those sources.

There is no doubt that flash or solid-state memory is a hot commodity with industry giants like IBM and EMC buying up expertise. EMC purchased XTremeIO last spring for a reported $430 million…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: John C. Dvorak.

Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I am not a huge fan of cloud computing and its implications. I’m even less enamored by the idea of paying a monthly fee to use my word processor.

That said, I must admit that Adobe may have found the sweet spot. I actually like what the company is doing with its new Creative Cloud. Less cloud computing than other architectures, it’s designed to fast-track people into the newest products rather than having them spend about the same amount of money to ride the Adobe roller coaster.

Ride the Adobe roller coaster? It’s when you buy Adobe Creative Suite 2, skip CS3, and get CS4. Or, skip CS4 also and spring for CS5. Now, you have so many new features that you wind up behind the curve. With Creative Cloud, for $49.99 a month, you’re always up-to-date. The system was unveiled in April and since then, new components have been added. Everything is included in the $2,599 master collection, plus free websites and other cloud-only services including Muse, a fascinating Web development tool…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Mike Fratto.

Rackspace has released its Private Cloud software distribution as a free, installable ISO file. Enterprises can sign up for commercial support for a starting fee of $2,500 and a monthly charge of $100 per node. Private Cloud includes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server operating system; a KVM hypervisor; Opscode Chef, which automates the installation; and OpenStack Essex’s Compute, Image Service, Identity Service and Dashboard modules. The only thing missing is OpenStack Storage, which Rackspace says will be available in the next release.

Private Cloud is the same software configuration that Rackspace runs in its Open Cloud service, which we analyzed in "Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS." While installing Linux and OpenStack isn’t difficult–there’s a complete set of instructions on OpenStack.org–Rackspace Private Cloud simplifies installation by pre-configuring most common options, reducing some 2,000 variables to 10 installation steps for the controller node and seven steps for the compute node. This allows a company to launch OpenStack faster, and also means Rackspace has a known configuration, which simplifies its commercial support…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Pure Storage netted $40 million in Series D funding and will use it to build out European operations and staff up its sales, marketing and engineering teams. The new round, led by Index Ventures with contributions from current backers Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, brings total capital raised to a healthy $95 million.

Mountain View, CA.-based Pure Storage is one of a handful of companies evangelizing use of solid state storage — which is faster but more expensive than disk storage — nearly everywhere. Many companies, including storage leader EMC, preach a tiered approach, using flash where it makes sense but disks and even tape where that is the more appropriate and cost-effective choice. (EMC itself may be wobbling on this stance, given that it spent a reported $400 million on Israeli flash storage player EXtremeIO.)…