Grazed from TheLawyer. Author: Caroline Atkins and Katherine Armytage.

Cloud computing is a major trend in today’s ICT environment. However, unlike participants in some other sectors, governments in the Asia-Pacific region have been slower to take up the significant financial benefits that this technology stands to offer. One major reason for this is the concern about privacy and security, which has received much attention from commentators to date.

However, as the technical issues needed to ensure adequate privacy and security of cloud solutions are gradually addressed and resolved, and governments become more convinced that cloud computing is a viable option for at least some of their ICT needs, it is becoming apparent that there are other contractual issues acting as barriers to the successful uptake of cloud computing by governments…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

AMD today announced that its SeaMicro SM15000(TM) server set a significant industry benchmark record for hyperscale cloud computing with a demonstration that highlights how OpenStack can quickly and reliably provision on-demand computing services at scale. The test provisioned 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts. The first 75,000 virtual machines were deployed in six hours and thirty minutes.

This is the largest known demonstration of OpenStack scalability ever. AMD achieved the record in collaboration with Canonical using the Ubuntu OpenStack (Icehouse) distribution. MaaS (Metal as a Service), part of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu OpenStack, was used to deliver the bare metal servers, storage and networking. The solution is available today and is the most scalable, automated application for deploying OpenStack in hyperscale environments…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, today announced the release of its first Agile Infrastructure (AI) reference architecture for OpenStack. SolidFire AI is a pre-validated, converged infrastructure design which enables start-to-finish deployment of an OpenStack cloud infrastructure in less than one hour, through the combination of industry-leading compute, networking, orchestration and all-flash storage technologies.

"The wave of cloud computing continues to gain strength as enterprises strive to deliver a broad set of IT services with greater speed and agility than ever before," said SolidFire’s Founder and CEO Dave Wright. "A key part of SolidFire’s value is our ability to make the complexities of cloud deployment, management and predictability — simple…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Internap Network Services has taken its OpenStack-driven public cloud into general availability. AgileCLOUD, which was announced in November 2013, was designed to be a flexible, high-performance public cloud, and Internap unveiled its general availability at OpenStack Summit Atlanta.

"OpenStack offers a flexible platform that gives providers the ability to innovate and deliver cloud infrastructure that is free of vendor lock-in," said Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap, in a prepared statement. "Building AgileCLOUD on OpenStack allowed us to focus on integrating the features that are central to our value proposition, including infrastructure hybridization and delivering best performance to end users…

Grazed from DimensionData. Author: David McKenzie.

Are you trying to compare DIY vs using a managed hosting provider to deliver your SaaS application? It’s a common comparison and yet we have found many instances where this was far from apples vs apples. I personally have had conversations with CTOs of SaaS companies who when asked about how they were going to compare a fully managed solution with an internally built solution actually seemed to be more focused on the hardware costs and not all of the other expense criteria involved in their web application delivery services. Hardware is a critical and important component of the cost model, but it is one of many items that need to be identified to properly make a comparison.

First, ask yourself these questions before you start thinking about using a service provider:

• Is building and maintaining infrastructure a core competency of yours?
• Who will do the work in-house?
• Do you feel you can trust a Service Provider with your application/data?
• Can you give up some control?

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Preson Gralla.

Reports say Microsoft is building a streaming cloud-based music service like Google Music, but if true, it won’t help the company compete against Apple and Beats music. What else can Microsoft do if it wants to thrive in the streaming music business? The Chinese site LiveSino reports that it has examined the source code for Microsoft’s OneDrive storage service, and that has found a new Music folder that can be used to upload music to OneDrive — and then use OneDrive to stream music via Xbox Music to a variety of devices. The Verge reports that the site found this text: "Meet your OneDrive Music folder. Upload your music files to this folder, so that you can play them via Xbox Music from any of your devices. You can also add files to this folder using the OneDrive app for your computer."

That capability is much like what is found in Google Music and the Amazon Cloud Player. I use both services, and they’re both quite good. But they don’t compete against Beats music, which Apple is said to be negotiating to buy, or against Spotify, because they only let you access your own music, not many millions of other tracks. For that matter, they don’t compete against Microsoft’s Xbox streaming music service, either…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

In theory at least, cloud computing is pretty much defined by elasticity. The whole idea of building a cloud after all is to make IT infrastructure resources available on demand. IBM announced today that it is applying that concept to storage on a global scale regardless of the format in which it is stored or the devices used to house it.

Later this year, IBM will deliver a truly elastic data storage capability, code named Project Elastic Storage, on top of the IBM SoftLayer cloud computing platform. Built on top of the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) technology that IBM has been using in high performance computing (HPC) environments for decades, Project Elastic Storage turns GPFS into a cloud service capable of supporting file, block and object-based storage services…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server, storage technology and green computing announces complete server and storage rack solutions configured with Inktank Ceph this week at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, May 12-16. Inktank was acquired by Red Hat in April 2014.

Supermicro’s 42U rack object-based storage clusters feature end-to-end 10GbE interconnectivity across triple redundant 1U Monitor nodes and compute/capacity balanced 3.5" HDD/SSD storage servers in 2U 12x bay, 4U 36x bay and 4U 72x bay configurations. The complete cluster solution is engineered to handle extreme scale-out storage applications with maximum performance and reliability to meet the most stringent SLAs. Fully populated rack solutions make it easy for cloud providers to rapidly implement and scale with consistent rack-to-rack layouts, simplifying the maintenance and management of multi-petabyte storage deployments…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

IBM, after a sluggish start, is moving with real urgency in building up its cloud business, as I noted in a recent article. “IBM has made big moves and done some really good things,” said Daryl Plummer, an analyst at Gartner. “But the question now is, can it win business and make money in the cloud business?”

IBM is hardly alone in facing the economic challenge of cloud computing, in which companies buy computing delivered, remotely, as a service over the Internet. The more that computing shifts to the cloud, the less that corporate customers will buy conventional software and hardware for their own data centers…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Mirantis is aiming to make it easier for enterprises to deploy OpenStack, the open source infrastructure for cloud computing. This week, the company launched a Web-based database listing vendors who offer OpenStack-compatible solutions. The database is available now as a Web-based dashboard on Mirantis’s website. The company derived the information on OpenStack compatibility from the OpenStack DriverLog, which keeps track of drivers and plugins that support OpenStack.

The dashboard does more than simply aggregate information from DriverLog into a convenient interface, however. It also offers configuration instructions for vendors’ products, information on whether a vendor’s OpenStack products have passed or failed OpenStack integration tests and contact information for vendors…