Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft have been consistently dropping their prices in the battle to become the low cost provider of compute, network, and storage cloud services. You can bet that if one of them drops their price, the other two will announce price reductions within days. The reality is that the consumption of these core cloud services has become commoditized. The real differentiator is the features that provide agility to developers. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud providers are in a war to create the best platform for developers to quickly build and launch applications. There are two key categories of features that they are focusing on to win the hearts and minds of enterprises: hybrid clouds and PaaS (Platform as a Service) capabilities.

Building the bridge between public and private clouds

For startups and small or midsized companies, public clouds are a no brainer. These companies don’t have large investments in data centers or the people needed to run them. SMBs also have more limited IT budgets. Enterprises, on the other hand, have complex heterogeneous environments with years of legacy, tons of existing infrastructure, and cultures that are used to owning and controlling infrastructure…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Toshiba is a household name when it comes to personal computers, but it’s certainly not the first company that pops into mind when people think of cloud computing. But earlier this year, the Japanese consumer electronics giant launched a new cloud service, one targeting the virtual desktop market and focusing on distribution exclusively through the channel.

Today, Toshiba Cloud Services and Solutions, a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, announced a new partner program that reaffirms this commitment to the channel. The Toshiba Solutions Partner Program offers managed service providers recurring monthly revenue, extensive marketing support, custom product configurations, and the ability to fully white-label the entire product that they offer their customers…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Scott Lowe.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, you’ve no doubt witnessed the tremendous surge of interest in the use of various container technologies. One container technology in particular — a project called Docker — has received enormous attention over the last few months.

The comments I’ve heard about Docker have been almost unanimously positive, with some folks even suggesting that organizations building out cloud computing environments should abandon virtual machines (VMs) for containers due to their lower overhead and potentially better performance…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that the Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution was launched at the Huawei Network Congress 2014 (HNC) in Beijing on May 25. The Cloud Connect Solution is designed to simplify the process for the construction of cloud service systems among enterprises by using Huawei’s advanced CloudEngine series of data center switches, Huawei Agile Controller cloud applications, cloud platforms, and data center network resources that can be integrated with improved automation.

"With the rapid development of cloud computing, Big Data, and mobility, data center infrastructures are facing unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities. Currently, enterprise servers, storage devices, and switches in data centers are highly virtualized. These devices form a virtual world to support cloud computing. However, there are still a large number of independent physical network devices in data centers, and the distinction between the virtual and physical worlds makes it difficult to implement fast service deployment, unified resource allocation, fault isolation and diagnosis, and automated service optimization," said by Mr. Liu Shaowei, president of Huawei Enterprise Networking Product Line…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mitch Simcoe.

Enterprises today need WAN connectivity that can support their growing cloud and virtualization efforts. There are two main business models to choose from: A build-your-own network model based on dark fiber and the use of carrier-grade packet-optical technology, or a managed private network service that is outsourced to a service provider.

To decide which option to pursue, enterprises must carefully analyze the two deployment models against a well-defined list of capabilities that can best address their company’s long-term goals and needs. They also need to establish clear objectives for how to allocate operational and capital expenses for these initiatives going forward. In the final analysis, this may not be an either/or decision as many organizations have both models running concurrently. Here are some key factors to consider when weighing your options:…

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

Sometime in the next decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will open its compound eyes — roughly 2,000 radio dishes divided between sites in South Africa and Australia. The radio telescope will then begin staring into supermassive black holes, searching for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields and seeking clues about the young Universe.

Meanwhile, the telescope’s engineers are struggling to plan for the imminent data deluge. The photons that will stream into the array’s receivers are expected to produce up to 1 exabyte (1018 bytes) of data per day, roughly the amount handled by the entire Internet in 2000. Electricity costs for an on-site computing cluster big enough to process those data could total millions of dollars each year. So the engineers are investigating an increasingly common choice for researchers wrestling with big data: to outsource their computing to the cloud…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Rick Robinson.

A new survey confirms that mobile and cloud computing are the leading tech industry drivers — segments that tech executives and managers see as their big moneymakers. But looking ahead, these tech execs foresee data and analytics taking the lead, perhaps along with the Internet of Things (IoT). The tech industry’s moneymakers are a reflection of where the demand is, and much of that demand comes from IT at midsize firms.

Follow the Money

Consulting and auditing firm KMPG recently asked 100 top tech industry executives what their top moneymakers were in 2013. Responses, according to InfoWorld, showed that mobile and the cloud were the biggest revenue generators, and that they were also running ahead of projections. Of the firms surveyed, 53 percent said mobile revenue exceeded expectations, and 47 percent said the same of cloud computing…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

When putting together a cloud strategy for your company, it is easy to overlook some of the organizational challenges that must be overcome in order to be successful. Every company that has taken the plunge into the world of cloud computing has a war story or two to share. There is no user manual or instructional video to prepare you for some of the obstacles that must be overcome.

The best you can do is talk to people who have travelled down this road and learn from their trials and tribulations. The following is a short list of war stories that either I have personally encountered or a client has shared with me over the years. I call these the cloud’s dirty little secrets because all of these were learned the hard way…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Antony Savvas.

The number of people using cloud services will increase to 3.6 billion by 2018, according to Juniper Research. The firm says that 2.4 billion people currently use cloud-based services in one form or another, with cloud-based data storage, social media, music and games helping to drive the trend upwards.

But what are the new cloud technology developments that cloud service providers will be delivering? This HP whitepaper takes a closer look and aims to help organisations get ready to make the most of them. Research firm Gartner says that organisations should not block the personal cloud services open to individuals that enable them to do their jobs more efficiently…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Alex Hamilton.

Cloud computing is the newest industrial revolution to hit the world and Europe needs to catch up, according to EuroCloud. Cloud computing will be the modern world’s equivalent of the industrial revolution, and the UK and Europe need to take advantage before they get left behind.

That is according to Dr. Tobias Höllwarth, who says the cloud is very much here to stay and that companies should begin their optimisation before it’s too late. “It has never been a good strategy to run behind someone else in a race,” Dr. Höllwarth, consultant and board member of EuroCloud, told journalists at the Cloud Enterprise Forum, Monaco…