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."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Cloud computing and data services specialist EMC announced products and technologies designed to address the continuum of data protection requirements facing users today and as they address the challenge of transitioning to software-defined data centers. The software releases from the VPLEX and RecoverPoint product lines combine to deliver MetroPoint topology, a three-site business continuity capability for mission-critical applications.

MetroPoint topology combines VPLEX Metro continuous availability with RecoverPoint remote replication and continuous data protection (CDP) to deliver operational and disaster recovery over any distance. EMC also introduced a new product, VPLEX Virtual Edition, a virtualized solution to market that offers continuous availability and data mobility in a software deployment platform…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Pamela DeLoatch.

You’ve got a great idea for a product and you’re ready to launch it into the world. What’s the best way to create the IT infrastructure that will allow you to get it out there quickly and cheaply? Contemporary wisdom says cloud computing is the way to go — but before you go forth blindly, take a moment to assess your business needs to see if you can find public cloud value and how and if cloud will benefit you.

Startup ventures eager to get their businesses off the ground often find that using public cloud allows them to basically rent the infrastructure they need to get the business going quickly. "The sign-on and pay-as-you-go model certainly has very attractive offerings," said Christian Hestermann, research director at Gartner Inc…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Nicole Hemsoth.

Danish energy company, Maersk Oil, has seen a number of technology trends evolve since its founding in 1962, particularly in terms of its ability to stay ahead of the unending race to new sources of hydrocarbons. The company’s research and technology team hasn’t been immune to the promises of cloud computing in its evaluations of potential options for powering critical simulations. In a recent experiment in conjunction with the software company behind one of their core codes, Eclipse, which is a product from Schlumberger and Amazon Web Services, Maersk put the cloud to the test for its reservoir simulation runs.

While this experiment didn’t yield a great deal in terms of surprises performance-wise, it did raise some important questions about critical side topics in cloud for high performance computing codes. License models, overall cost, and the potential for “cloud gateway” services as delivered by companies like Panzura made this test use of public cloud resources noteworthy, even if the goal was not to come up with a world class-level infrastructure alternative…