Grazed from CIO. Author: Jonathan Hassell.

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve heard pundits proclaim the death of the PC. As consumers move to tablets and stop buying laptops and desktops, and as companies pinch IT budgets even harder than they have in the past, it’s easy to paint a doomsday scenario for hardware. Even the hardware companies play into this myth — look no further than AMD to see weakness portrayed. For many, it seems, hardware has lost its sexiness.

Not so fast. Hardware is back. There are two clear catalysts for hardware in this era: Mobile devices as well as the explosion of cloud computing as a way to host applications, infrastructure and services. Let’s unpack the promise of hardware from these two perspectives a little more…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The cloud hasn’t killed the company-owned data center. Companies from General Motors to Fidelity are taking the best infrastructure ideas from Web giants such as Facebook and Google and adapting them to their very different business needs in order to build a new generation of data centers.

To highlight the different approaches and strategies these companies are taking, we looked at six companies beyond the Web giants that have made or are planning major data center investments. Our point isn’t that data center construction is booming; Gartner forecasts only 2.3% growth in data center spending in 2014, to $143 billion. Companies will spend more than twice that on enterprise software, by comparison, at a growth rate of nearly 7%…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudwords, the first cloud-based marketing globalization platform, announced today that Michael Meinhardt, Co-founder and CCO, will participate in the panel titled, "Localising in the Cloud: Over-hyped or the Real Deal?" at the Localization World Dublin 2014 conference to be held 4-6 June at The Convention Centre Dublin. Meinhardt joins panel participants from Agilent, GoPro, and SAP, as well as other cloud technology vendors, to discuss best practices, as well as the benefits and challenges, of leveraging cloud technology to manage the translation and localisation of global content.

"Enterprise organisations are increasingly challenged by the enormous amount of content that requires localisation in order to communicate with customers, engage audiences, and stay ahead of the competition. To solve this challenge, they need to implement a better business process, one that enables transparency, visibility and accountability. Cloud technology delivers that today. I look forward to a compelling and informative discussion with my fellow panel participants at Localization World Dublin," said Meinhardt…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Eric Knorr.

The appeal of making your own data center cloudlike is easy to understand: Who wouldn’t want an entirely flexible commodity infrastructure, where you can pour on compute, storage, and network resources as needed? From the early days of the cloud, CIOs saw promise in the cloud’s magic combination of reduced cost and vastly greater agility and wanted to capitalize on cloud architecture in their own organizations.

But those closer to the ground in enterprise IT have always had a tendency to roll their eyes. They see the advantage of scale-out, self-service architectures for some applications — such as dev and test — but the return on investment in other areas is not always so obvious. Part of that resistance is the usual allergic reaction to change, because major shakeups mean fewer resources to meet project deadlines and keep legacy systems humming…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

Larger companies are among the fastest-growing segments of OpenStack users and advocates. In fact, a survey conducted by Metacloud, Inc., which deploys and supports private clouds for some of the world’s largest companies, reported that 72 percent of respondents at the OpenStack Summit 2014 in Atlanta last week were attending this event for the first time.

Of those first-time attendees, 65 percent are employed by companies with 2,500 or more employees, signifying a shift in the sizes of businesses that are embracing OpenStack as a private cloud option. "The fact that the majority of all respondents are from companies with more than 2,500 employees demonstrates what we’ve known all along – OpenStack provides the scalability and security that large businesses need when deploying cloud solutions," said Steve Curry, co-founder and president at Metacloud…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

AvePoint, the established global leader in enterprise-class cloud management, governance, and compliance software solutions for next-generation social collaboration platforms, today announced a partnership with Cloud|AG, an Atlanta-based products and services company specializing in Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration and business applications. The agreement will enable the two companies to offer best-in-class managed services for modern businesses seeking enhanced backup, recovery, and administration of their Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365 and Azure.

AvePoint Online Services, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) management platform for Microsoft Office 365 and any cloud-hosted SharePoint environments, in tandem with Cloud|AG’s commitment to helping businesses of all sizes implement Microsoft’s strategic cloud platforms, will provide organizations worldwide a set of robust products and services designed to help customers implement and manage their Microsoft cloud-based solutions…

Grazed from WatersTechnology.  Author: Max Bowie.

Any discussion of return on investment relies on the ability to measure two things: the return generated, and the amount spent to achieve it. In the world of market data, the question is, “How much money can I make as a result of buying and using dataset x, net of the cost of that dataset?” In many cases, this is quantifiable, and traders have used this very argument to justify buying expensive data services.

However, over the past few lean years, one of the main drivers of any meager spend increases has been regulatory compliance—an area of spend that firms are reluctant to swallow because it is not something that offers any monetary return on their investment, unless you count avoiding non-compliance fines. So, many firms are looking to cloud computing to deliver cost savings around these initiatives as the “least bad” option to reduce a cost burden that didn’t exist until recently…

Grazed from TelcoReview.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Every cloud provider has its own technologies, its own buzzwords, its own APIs – and that’s a challenge for enterprises.  High on their cloud shopping lists are ideas like portability, compatibility and interoperability.  So far, cloud providers have been unable to address those demands. That’s about to change, thanks to standards work being done by the CloudEthernet Forum, a relatively new nonprofit organization spun out of the well-established MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum).

The CEF previewed two new programs at the NetEvents Cloud Innovation Summit, held here in late March 2014: the CloudE 1.0 Framework and OpenCloud Project.  The CloudE 1.0 Framework defines a set of standardized services to be offered by cloud service providers…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Ben Kepes.

Yesterday it was the news that former bitter rivals, Salesforce and Microsoft, has found new love and respect and had entered into a broad-ranging partnership. Today Salesforce scored another coup with the announcement that it is the first vendor to be granted Federal Certification for both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has long been the holy grail for cloud infrastructure vendors – since its introduction back in 2011 a number of infrastructure vendors have obtained certification. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard among them.

But until now FedRAMP hadn’t covered the higher levels of the cloud stack, SaaS and PaaS. While this might sound like a confusing series of acronyms, it is actually pretty important. Infrastructure as a Service allows organizations to essentially buy servers on demand. Instead of having to buy physical boxes, build data centers and wrangle the details of running the same, they can instead “hire” infrastructure from a cloud vendor…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Paul Ferrill.

What do you get when you combine four independent servers, lots of memory, standard SATA disks and SSD, 10Gb networking, and custom software in a single box? In this instance, the answer would be a Nutanix NX-3000. Pigeonholing the Nutanix product into a traditional category is another riddle altogether. While the company refers to each unit it sells as an "appliance," it really is a clustered combination of four individual servers and direct-attached storage that brings shared storage right into the box, eliminating the need for a back-end SAN or NAS.

I was recently given the opportunity to go hands on with a Nutanix NX-3000, the four nodes of which were running version 3.5.1 of the Nutanix operating system. It’s important to point out that the Nutanix platform handles clustering and file replication independent of any hosted virtualization system…