Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Linthicum.

According to Inquisitr.com, Just Add Water CEO Stewart Gilray says the PS4 GPU will always win over the Xbox. “The PS4 has more COMPUTE units, and faster memory and a whole bunch of things, that would make that [Xbox One / PS4 parity] physically impossible to happen.”

“But Microsoft has been showing off the Xbox One cloud computing capabilities. Both systems have pretty much the same processor, although the Xbox One CPU is clocked slightly faster, but in physics and AI heavy situations, cloud computing is claimed to make a huge difference. The cloud computing function provided by Microsoft’s Azure server is already being used in Titanfall, but a new demo shows off how physics calculations can be offloaded.”…

Read more from the source @ http://research.gigaom.com/2014/04/cloud-computing-becoming-a-competitive-advantage-in-the-world-of-gaming/

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Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nick Martin.

Cloud computing may be the next logical evolution of virtual data centers, but rushing into a private cloud design can create more problems than it solves. Unfortunately, many companies (or at least C-level executives) fall into the trap set by software vendors and believe that they need a cloud yesterday — and that building one is as simple as selecting a product.

Once on this path, it doesn’t take long for most to realize building a private cloud is much more complicated than paying for licensing and management software, said Ivan Pepelnjak, chief technology advisor at NIL Data Communications, at an Interop session. "I can’t tell you how wrong this approach is," Pepelnjak said. "And I see this happening with about 80% of the customers I see…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: George Leopold.

As cloud services rapidly become a commodity, smaller local service providers are feeling the heat as market leaders Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft engage in a price war that is quickly boiling down to who can best compete on average hourly price for storage, computing, and other cloud offerings.

Hence, smaller and mid-tier service providers looking to survive in an increasingly cutthroat cloud market are touting a “federated” approach that would allow service providers to share capacity. This, proponents argue, would allow smaller competitors to scale their cloud infrastructure services while offering customized services that would differentiate them from the likes of AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

HP announced Friday that its CloudSystem 8 is generally available. It’s a converged system, with hardware and nearby storage in the rack, virtualized and ready to go for either private cloud operations or general purpose, virtualized infrastructure. Margaret Dawson, HP cloud evangelist and VP of product marketing, talked about HP’s position in the cloud — and CloudSystem 8 in particular — in an interview Thursday at Interop (run by UBM Tech, InformationWeek’s parent company).

CloudSystem 8, she said, is based on HP Converged System 700 or 700X racks of server blades, disks, and switches. It’s HP’s way of bringing the right combination of infrastructure elements together to support large-scale VMware virtualization in the enterprise. "HP has consolidated its position as a leader in private cloud computing," said Dawson, citing a recent Forrester Research report…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What’s the best way to learn more about cloud computing? Turn to the cloud. IBM’s Gary Zeien describes how, in nicely succinct terms, one can use the cloud to learn more about the cloud. Zeien, principal cloud solutioning architect in the IBM GTS Global Cloud team, provides a handy guide to what cloud services will guide one’s efforts to better understand what is involved in enterprise cloud computing.

• Resource 1: Google it. (Or Bing it): Everything you need to know — from cloud server acquisition to scripting languages to frameworks to databases — can be found online.
• Resource 2: Check out YouTube: There are many helpful tutorial videos available on various programming, integration and architectural techniques out there.
• Resource 3: Online learning venues: Zeien calls out KahnAcademy and codeacademy.com as great places to learn new languages that form the foundations of the cloud world…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

Some new business software market numbers suggest that it is time to stop calling cloud computing a trend and start thinking about it as the next natural phase of all IT. The impressive surge of cloud-heavy software vendors proves that the technology has staying power, and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) shows that traditional solutions will simply be unable to keep up within a few years. IT managers who must plan for the next phase of computing can look to these numbers for a bit of guidance.

The Overall Software Market

The new business software market sales numbers come from industry analyst Gartner. Overall, worldwide software market revenue totaled just over $400 billion in 2013, a 4.8 percent jump from 2012. Gartner claims that existing markets were the primary driver for the growth, offsetting sluggish performance in emerging markets…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

Public cloud adoption is on the rise. This is not surprising news for midsize IT professionals who have kept a close eye on the maturing cloud market, fielded questions from curious C-suite executives and watched the development of "shadow IT" users within company walls. So why the upswing? Lowered costs and improved uptime account for much of this public interest, with both tied together by a third component: Return on investment (ROI). However, cloud technologies do not operate under the same rules as traditional hardware and software deployments. Is traditional ROI ground becoming unstable?

Not Exactly Shocking

Reporting on a recent RightScale research report, GigaOm notes that it is relatively unsurprising to discover that more and more companies are choosing the public cloud. Almost 90 percent of the enterprise and midsize companies surveyed said that they use public cloud services to power some facet of their organization, and author Barb Darrow argues that the number is probably closer to 100 percent if unsanctioned use of the cloud were to be included…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Jodi Mardesich.

Years ago, Google figured out that users prize speed above almost everything when it comes to surfing the Web. They’re now applying that insight to courting developers, too, through a tool named Andromeda. Google Compute Engine, the version of Google’s infrastructure it rents out to developers, is getting access to Andromeda, a set of technologies the company uses to speed up its own networking. Last week, it turned Andromeda on in two of its four Compute Engine zones this week.

Enter Andromeda

Andromeda’s not a product Google’s cloud customers can sign up for, and it doesn’t have APIs developers can write to directly. So, what’s the fuss about? Google Distinguished Engineer Amin Vahdat described it in a post: Andromeda is a Software Defined Networking (SDN)-based substrate for our network virtualization efforts. It is the orchestration point for provisioning, configuring, and managing virtual networks and in-network packet processing…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProKarma, a global IT solutions company, today announced a partnership with Scalr, providers of the leading open-source enterprise cloud management platform, to deliver private and hybrid cloud management to its cloud computing customers. Scalr’s open source Cloud Management Platform(CMP), offered as either a hosted or on premises solution, provides a single pane of glass management portal that enables both an enterprise’s IT operations staff and developers to provision and manage application environments across the most popular clouds, including Amazon EC2, Google CE, OpenStack and CloudStack.

"We are pleased that ProKarma has added Scalr’s Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to their enterprise cloud computing solutions," said Sebastian Stadil, chief executive officer, Scalr. "Together we can provide ProKarma customers with private and public/private hybrid cloud solutions that deliver the flexible infrastructure and platform capabilities they require."…