Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

You’re a large organization, using cloud computing to your advantage. You’ve enjoyed your cloud experience and see how this model is helping you evolve. Still, you wish you could make your cloud infrastructure run a little bit better. You’d love to experience better performance and utilize your cloud resources a bit more efficiently. But how can you upgrade your cloud experience without recreating your entire architecture?

Many shops have now migrated to some type of cloud model for many different reasons. There are lots of use cases emerging which make cloud a powerful platform to utilize. Still, like everything in technology, solutions right out of the box have the potential to be optimized. So let’s take a look at five technologies which have helped organizations of all sizes utilize their cloud infrastructure more intelligently…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware is trying to convert its large presence as the virtualization supplier for federal agencies and become a supplier of public cloud services to the US government. The company on Tuesday is launching vCloud Government Service. Well, almost. Stopping just short of that, it’s announced a bid to secure FedRAMP Authority to operate a hybrid cloud service for the government.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Program (FedRAMP) is a set of security and operations requirements drawn up by National Institute of Standards and Technology that must be verified as being in place at a service provider by a third-party audit. Getting FedRAMP approval "requires a lot of time and can hinder innovation and drive up costs," wrote Sean Applegate, director of federal technology strategy at Riverbed Technology, in a recent posting on InformationWeek.com…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Pivotal spun out the Cloud Foundry Foundation last week, marking another instance where a commercial effort turns into an open source play. It’ll be interesting see how this move works, given that both OpenStack and Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS platforms are aimed at the same users. There are three hurdles for the CFF to get past:

• The PaaS market is relatively small compared to the IaaS and SaaS spaces. Having three or more open source standards may be too many for the market to support.
• IT organizations and developers are already confused about what PaaS brings to the cloud computing table. Having three open source versions won’t help clarify matters.
• Inevitably, somebody will end up on the right side of the wrong standard, adding risk for those adopting PaaS…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: John Grady.

Cloud computing has experienced exponential growth over the last few years. As of December 2013, almost 60 percent of current small-to-medium businesses (SMB) use cloud services, and 72 percent of these businesses virtualize substantial portions of their servers. The growth is only expected to increase over the next few years. Here are just a few of the major current trends in the industry today.

1. Hybrid clouds. There has been an ongoing debate between the merits of public and private cloud models for quite some time now. Hybrid clouds feature an infrastructure that combines private cloud security with cost-effective, powerful and scalable public cloud attributes. IT executives get more choices for personalized solutions while big data advocates and security experts are still satisfied. As hybrid models become mainstream, more companies are likely to adopt this cloud deployment model and drop the old debate…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies. Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening. The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for. I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014. Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the following analysis was completed…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies. Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening. The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for. I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014. Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the following analysis was completed…

Grazed from ODCA. Author: PR Announcement.

Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today announced it has published 2.0 versions of cloud deployment usage models in the areas of service orchestration and Compute Infrastructure as a Service (CIaaS). The alliance has also updated its conceptual model document map, which provides an overview of the organization’s usage models, particularly how they fit into a larger cloud computing and next generation data center context.

The documents that have been updated include:

* Open Data Center Alliance Master Usage Model: Service Orchestration Rev. 2.0-describes the processes, interfaces and aspects to be considered when deploying services on cloud platforms. This usage model includes 19 usage scenarios of a cloud service engagement as well as the foundation for the next phase of usage development including bursting between clouds and other areas that include Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The Service Orchestration Rev. 2.0 usage model is available for free download on the ODCA website…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Keith Townsend.

I’m wondering if the battle between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is even worthy of debate. That’s because it seems that the ultimate goal of any IaaS platform is to give organizations the ability to abstract the data center and run its resources from anywhere, on any service. I’m asking a larger question: What happens when you are able perform a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion of the entire data center?

Let’s fast forward the conversation around cloud computing by a few years. What happens when Moore’s Law, which dictates that computing capabilities double every 18 months, catches up with cloud? There will be an unavoidable effect on cloud computing. If we draw an intersection between the virtual data center and cloud computing, we come up with a model of computing that’s much more abstract than it is today…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Ophir Shalitin.

Modern innovations in networking technology, virtualization, Big Data processing, storage, and analysis, along with cloud computing, are giving new shape to the information technology realm of today and the future.  Organizations have, for many years, effectively sourced a number of non-core business functions to outside service providers.

Marketing, accounting, customer service, sales and administrative staffing are just a few examples of such outsourcing; today, organizations can also get computing services on demand in virtually any location, and tailor those services to their specific needs. Such "micro outsourcing" can apply to functions such as processing, storage, software, security, and support…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Dennis Smith.

In a Computer Weekly article, Archana Venkatraman discusses why Virgin Management opted for an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. We’ve seen similar successes with other companies. There are several common threads among cloud computing adoptions that ensure successful outcomes, including cost, scalability, and capability.

As with many IT projects, simply deploying on existing infrastructure is seldom an option. Upgrades are usually needed, which can include increased server bandwidth and storage capacity, and new/additional software licenses. When a change is underway – as was the case with Virgin Management during office relocation – it becomes an opportunity for IT teams to identify new ways to optimize their resources. Cloud computing represents a significant opportunity to offload new or existing workloads…