Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Hardiman.

The cloud world inherited some concepts from the mainframe world that came before it. The consumption-based pricing model, Linux virtual machines, and multi-tenancy came from that previous mainframe generation. NASA got rid of its mainframes, but these massive machines can still be found in many large organizations. In the age of cloud IT, aren’t mainframes irrelevant? Why won’t the mainframe die?

David Hodgson, SVP at CA Technologies, Inc., described the role of mainframes today. CA started 38 years ago as a mainframe software supplier and still does mainframe work. In my interview with Hodgson, he said, "The mainframe business to CA is still just over 50% of our revenue." CA Technologies is not a small company–it’s in the Fortune 500, has billions of dollars in revenue, and employs many thousands of people…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Kathy Mahady.

Keeping pace with new technologies is one of the most important things for leading telecommunication companies. Telefónica Digital, part of Telefónica, is doing just that with the company’s Instant Servers public-cloud service. Already Telefónica Digital has regional hubs in Silicon Valley, Sao Paulo, Spain, London and Israel. And the company is currently developing services in sectors such as financial services, e-health and cloud computing. I had the pleasure of talking to Juan Antonio Sánchez Cañibano, head of Cloud Information Communications Technology (ICT) Strategy.

What are business customers looking for in a public-cloud service?

When customers look at the public cloud, they look for computing resources, including storage and network, which come as a self-service in a highly-automated way, on-demand and in near-real-time. They require a low latency and easily scalable cloud services platform with quick response times, enabling them to rapidly respond to their own needs but also customers’ expectations. With our Instant Servers service, customers make significant cost savings because they pay only for the cloud services they require and the amount of time they use them…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Adrian Campos.

In the last month, shares of Rackspace Hosting have underperformed against other cloud-computing peers. The company took a beating after the news of the departure of co-founder and CEO Lanham Napier. Napier, who joined Rackspace in 2000, took the company’s top line from $1.5 million to $1.5 billion in 2013.

Under his leadership, the company became a global leader in offering hosting services, from managed servers to hybrid cloud, with hundreds of thousands of customers using Rackspace for their IT needs. However, the company now appears to be caught in the middle of a fierce fight for the promising cloud market, where giants such as Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN ) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG ) continue investing heavily in technology to capture market share. In this difficult environment, how does Rackspace plan to continue increasing its top line?…

Grazed from eCampusNews. Author: Mike Siegel.

Though it may be old hat to many higher education technologists, cloud computing still plays a vital role on campuses of every size. Cloud is basically a symbol for the internet; and cloud computing is a way for organizations, business and universities to store and retrieve data over the internet. It allows for people to store things on the internet and have access on a large-scale.

Anyone with an online connection can utilize cloud computing at any location. It is a more efficient and inexpensive way to synchronize and access data or programs, especially in the uprising of online courses for universities. Forbes recently released a list of free online cloud computing courses:…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

Red Hat has uninvited Piston Cloud Computing, a San Francisco-based startup that had signed as a sponsor for its upcoming open-source conference, apparently without explanation. Piston Cloud had paid $13,000 to be a sponsor for The Red Hat Summit, which is being held in San Francisco from April 14-17. But Red Hat has canceled the sponsorship and will refund the sponsorship fee. Its motives for doing so are unclear.

"Upon reviewing the 2014 Red Hat Summit sponsor list, Red Hat leadership has requested the termination of the sponsorship agreement with Piston Cloud," Michael Fremder, Red Hat’s global corporate sponsorship marketing manager, said in an email sent to Piston Cloud Friday, which was viewed by CRN…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

A service disruption that lasted more than five hours made key Google Web apps malfunction on Thursday. At around 2 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time, Google acknowledged on its Apps Status page a problem with its Drive cloud storage service and with its Docs word processing and Sheet spreadsheet applications, and later with its Sites intranet builder.

The company declared the problem solved at around 7:30 p.m., but didn’t explain what caused it or how many users were affected. Later on, after 10 p.m., the Slides presentation creation app also hit a glitch that lasted for about 30 minutes. Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: James Sanders.

While cloud computing in the enterprise enjoys ever-higher adoption rates, the consumer cloud has more hurdles to overcome. New developments this year have made the forecast for consumer-facing cloud technology a rather gloomy one. While corporate cheerleading of enterprise cloud remains abundant, a reality check is needed for the consumer cloud market, and the encumbrances which that market faces.

The end (for now) of net neutrality

After a ruling by a United States Court of Appeals in January 2014 that struck down the FCC’s net neutrality directive, accusations are flying that Verizon is throttling Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Netflix. The FCC ruling was not unexpected, due to the way in which the FCC classifies broadband Internet services, and hope remains for altering that definition to re-introduce net neutrality as an FCC mandate…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Linda Musthaler.

In June 2013, David Linthicum wrote in InfoWorld, “The journey to the cloud has moved from Interest and study to experimentation, and now it is moving to true production. In the next few years, we’ll see the accelerating adoption of cloud computing, though perhaps with less hype.” Linthicum asserts that this acceleration will in large part be due to the trust that enterprises are willing to place on cloud services.

But where does that trust come from? Is it simply because, as Linthicum wrote, “data has resided in the cloud for years without huge security breaches” and “businesses have figured that out”? That hardly seems like a good reason to place trust in a cloud service or application where an enterprise’s data will live…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: David Sebestyen.

As a pure-play IT cloud partner, I often am asked about the best cloud solutions telecom agents should sell to get their cloud compute practice off the ground. Hosted PBX and the like have been easy entry points into selling cloud for some telecom agents, but many are finding these "telecom extensions" provide neither a platform nor a path that leads to building a cloud computing practice. Closing this gap to the compute side is very high on most agents’ priority lists.

So, how do you jump-start your cloud computing practice? First, you need to first define what "the best" cloud product or solution means to you. For my company, it has always been about delivering those products and services that provide the highest value to the client while nurturing and protecting the long-term relationship by staying ahead of the rapidly changing technology curve and thus remaining in the forefront of the client’s mind as the "go-to person" for technology…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Chris Talbot.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) must be hoping to head competitors such as Cisco Systems (CSCO) off at the pass—specifically, the network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) pass. A memo leaked this week to Re/code shows that HP has formed an NFV group within its cloud computing business unit and shuffled longtime networking lead Bethany Mayer over to lead it.

For nearly three years, Mayer has been senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking, but the memo shows she has been given this new role. That leaves an open spot in HP Networking’s leadership, but Mayer’s new role will be an important one. Although the NFV business unit actually will be part of HP’s cloud computing initiatives, Mayer’s role still will be heavily networking-based. And it’s really an important role the seasoned executive will be filling…