Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Public cloud computing is all the rage, and cost is a big driver. It’s not the only driver, mind you, or even the top reason that developers turn to the public cloud, which is primarily about development agility. Still, cost is a serious consideration nudging enterprises to forsake building out data centers to rent space in Amazon, Rackspace, Google or others’ clouds. Given this, just how low can public cloud pricing go?

Cheap And Getting Cheaper

Pretty darn low, if Bernard Golden’s analysis is correct. Golden looks at hardware and software infrastructure, Internet bandwidth, energy, labor and cost of capital and finds public cloud trumps data center in every category. That cost savings isn’t small, either:…

Grazed from SWTrends. Author: Editorial Staff.

Most of the discussions on Big Data begins and ends with Hadoop. It is the commercial version of HPC (High Performance Computing), whose underlying technologies have been around for years: clustering, parallel processing, and distributed file system. In today’s parlance you can read Hadoop clusters on commodity hardware, map-reduce algorithm, and HDFS in that order.

There is no doubt that Hadoop has taken off in a big way, but it does not address one big emerging area called real time query and analysis on data that is moving all the time. Data can be categorized into three buckets – transactional data, analytics on data at rest, and analytics on data in flight (streaming, real time). We are talking about the last one here…

Grazed from HeroldOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud Carib Ltd., an Offshore Cloud Provider, today announced that its Bahamas-based public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud® Powered status, illustrating to customers that the company’s cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualization and cloud computing technology, namely VMware vSphere® and VMware vCloud Director. A member of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), Cloud Carib Ltd. provides its VMware vCloud Powered service as a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering distinctive application mobility uniquely available from VMware.

“We are thrilled to receive this important validation for our service”, said Stelios Xeroudakis, Director with Cloud Carib Ltd. “We believe with the increased global awareness for data protection, the demand for advanced cloud services in offshore jurisdictions is only going to grow. This validation exhibits our commitment to provide advanced, secure cloud services based on VMware’s leading technology to customers looking for data protection in the cloud.”…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Eyeing enterprise demand for more agility, automation and scalability in cloud computing and Big Data, SolidFire is bringing new features to its all-flash storage system with the release this week of version 6 of the company’s Element OS, as well as enhanced functionality for its storage arrays. With a focus on what it calls the "Next Generation Data Center," SolidFire hopes to court additional enterprise customers by adding new features to its flash storage arrays, including:

• Fibre Channel Connectivity, which deliver up to 16Gb performance, a significant boost from the 10Gb iSCSI connectivity that SolidFire previously offered (and will continue to provide as an option alongside the Fibre Channel solution).
• Real-time replication for automatically copying data to remote locations, to provide better disaster recovery functionality…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Jason Verge.

The U.S. Navy is shifting large amounts of data to the Amazon Web Services cloud, and expects the move to produce huge savings. “We are in the process of putting most of our public-facing data in an Amazon cloud service,” said Terry Halvorsen, the Chief Information Officer of the Department of the Navy, in a keynote at Meritalk’s Data Center Brainstorm event Thursday. Halvorsen said the move could save the Navy as much as 60 percent versus the cost of managing that data in its own data centers.“There is still a place for the data center non-cloud solution,” Halvorsen said. “Getting that balance right is my mission.”

Cloud First

The Navy’s use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the latest example of how organizations focused on security and compliance are finding ways to use public cloud services. Halvorsen said this is part of a larger shift of IT assets to commercial service providers as agencies seek to slash costs under mandates of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Effort (FDCCI) and the Obama administration’s “Cloud First” focus…

Grazed from ArnNet. Author: Brian Karlovsky.

CommVault has signed 12 Australian partners as part of grand new Cloud strategy set to underpin the company’s future business model. The company has unveiled a three-pronged global Cloud business strategy – led out of Australia – which has so far attracted more than 200 managed service providers.

The 12 managed service providers based in Australian include Infoplex, Brennan, Harbour IT, Rackspace and NTT. This vision is underpinned by CommVault’s early investments in cloud technologies in anticipation of the shift now taking place in IT consumption and Infrastructure-as-a-Service…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

The global PaaS market is estimated to grow from $1.28 billion in 2013 to $6.94 billion in 2018 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.54 per cent in this period, according to the recent study done by MarketsandMarkets. PaaS has been the smallest market among the cloud computing segments. But now the trend is experiencing a drift where PaaS market is growing faster in terms of revenue.

Though PaaS market is not as huge as IaaS and SaaS which are the other two segments in cloud computing, the proportion of this market is very significant. Also many small players specializing in providing PaaS solutions have emerged and made the market so dynamic and competitive. This trend has benefited most of the application users and has increased the demand for PaaS on various sectors…

Grazed from NexGov. Author: Aliya Sternstein.

Sometimes consolidation can be a good thing for the federal workforce. Centralizing networks in the cloud has allowed human eyes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to weed through 1.2 billion cyber transactions per day for signs of hacking. Typically, federal executives name cost and energy savings as the main perks of shutting down government data centers and shipping operations to the Web.

"We ultimately will save not only money in terms of our electricity bill — we’ll have better security and better safety," said Darren Smith, who manages the 5 megawatt NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center, home to a supercomputer called Zeus that models weather and climate changes…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Andrei Maguleanu.

Startups have a ton of things on their plate, and IT services should be working for them, instead of wasting time, money and other precious resources. If you want a safe, inexpensive and useful cloud storage solution for your startup, there are solutions out there. Here are the three major players in the cloud storage game and here’s what each has to offer:

Google Drive: If your company has Android phones, it’s a no-brainer – Google integrates so smoothly into the mobile OS that it just blows competition out of the water. They offer 15 GB free storage right off the bat, but you can store an unlimited number of photos in your drive if you compress them to 2048 px – which is definitely more than enough for most uses. If you want more storage space, Google has larger plans that come with a monthly rate:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Everything the cloud stands for is diametrically opposed to what enterprise computing stands for. But that’s okay — cloud promises to free up and expand enterprises in ways never imaginable with traditional systems. That’s one of the key takewaways of a talk given by Chris Kemp, founder of Nebula, co-founder of OpenStack and former CTO of NASA, speaking at the Compute Midwest conference.

Following the definition established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing “as an on-demand, elastic, metered and accessible resource computing service,” says Kemp. However, from an enterprise computing perspective, “this is exactly the opposite of the way you think about computing,” he continues…