Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Marine Corp is considering using a commercial cloud service provider instead of the Defense Information Systems Agency to host its version of the Global Combat Support System. Separately, the Marines on Wednesday launched a procurement to cut personnel systems costs by selecting just one system integrator to manage 15 systems.

DISA currently hosts the Global Combat Support System Marine Corps (GCSS-MC) at its Enterprise Computing Center in Mechanicsburg, Pa. The Marine Corps Systems Command said in a request for information to industry on Feb. 4 that it is considering using a private cloud service “to increase IT efficiencies, minimize risk, achieve performance objectives and reduce total cost of ownership.”…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Bill Kleyman.

SDN may sound abstract, but the technology is on target to provide concrete advantages to network infrastructure — from increased global connectivity to better content delivery. The concept of the software-defined network (SDN) initially caused some confusion in IT, but the picture gets clearer the more we learn. Similar to network virtualization, SDN allows for the direct network-related abstraction of services.

This abstraction of services can be accomplished on both logical as well as physical infrastructures, but is not actually defined by specific physical devices or logical components. How will SDN affect the future of network infrastructure? Let’s take a look at the biggest benefits…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Chris Ciaccia.

If you thought that Google (GOOG) was done innovating, and VMware (VMW) was just about cloud computing, think again. The Chromebook is trying to revolutionize the modern business world. Google and VMware today announced that the two companies are going to "modernize corporate desktops for the Mobile Cloud Era," giving businesses secure cloud access to Microsoft (MSFT) Windows applications, data and desktops on Google’s Chromebooks.

Not only does this deal expand the presence of Google Chromebooks in the enterprise, it allows businesses to cut costs as well. "Google Chromebooks can save businesses about $5,000 per computer when compared to traditional PCs," said Amit Singh, President of Google Enterprise in the press release. "Chromebooks are designed for the way people use computers today and are a secure, easy and cost-effective solution to help organizations embrace a new way of doing business. Through our partnership with VMware, businesses can now capitalize on these advantages with access to legacy applications, data and desktops they need to keep employees productive."…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The cloud infrastructure ecosystem represents a large-scale distributed computing paradigm that is driven by economies of scale in which a pool of abstracted, virtualized, dynamically scalable, managed computing power, storage, platforms, and services are delivered on demand to external customers over the Internet.

This report evaluates cloud management including types of cloud computing models, challenges facing cloud computing, implementation of cloud management, and analysis of key players in cloud management industry…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Companies are often held back by an inflexible and complex IT infrastructure that cannot keep up with the changing needs of business. These restraints result in slow deployment of critical applications and services, limited resources, poor operation management, and unpredictable system integration.

Virtualised servers and desktops hold the key to more efficient IT management. Although virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has historically been deemed too expensive, the recent surge of cloud computing offers a cost-effective, managed platform for VDI that stands to revolutionise the structure of enterprise IT…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Helping its customers meet demands of business continuity and further capitalize on the power of cloud computing, StratITsphere Data Center Solutions today announced it has completed the expansion of its modern, functionally rich data center, located in Katy, Texas, 25 miles from downtown Houston. Online and available for secure data residency now, the additional 8,000-square feet of global cloud infrastructure is capable of supporting the most comprehensive portfolio of application services.

"The expansion our high available data center in the Houston market demonstrates our commitment to our growing customer base," said Darin Cook, President, StratITsphere Data Center Solutions. "With our fortified data center offering, we allow customers to have a 100 percent Service Level Agreement while at the same time, offering a flexible cost effective solution."…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Graham Jarvis.

While it is generally recognised that virtualisation is an important step in the move to cloud computing, as it enables efficient use of the underlying hardware and allows for true scalability, for virtualisation in order to be truly valuable it really needs to understand the workloads that run on it and offer clear visibility of both the virtual and physical worlds.

On its own, virtualisation does not lend itself to creating sufficient visibility about the multiple applications and services running at any one time. For this reason a primitive automation system could cause a number of errors to occur, such as the spinning up of another virtual machine to offset the load on enterprise applications that are presumed to be overloaded…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack(TM) company, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Tokyo Electron Device to distribute Piston OpenStack(TM) in Japan. Tokyo Electron Device (TED), a technical trading firm that provides semiconductor products and business solutions, also commissions the design and development of its own brand products. The partnership combines the power of Piston OpenStack(TM), the company’s global-scale private cloud software, with TED’s superior technical support and unmatched quality assurance to help customers meet their critical business objectives.

Piston OpenStack(TM) allows businesses to easily deploy and manage an OpenStack private cloud without IT operations expertise or specialized appliances. Providing best of breed virtualized compute, storage, networking and management through self-service interfaces and APIs, Piston frees developers to focus on building applications rather than infrastructure. Piston OpenStack can be deployed on commodity hardware from almost any major x86 vendor and scales to tens of thousands of physical servers…

Grazed from Nimbix. Author: Leo Reiter.

Cloud computing is all about people quietly “spinning up” instances in some giant network on the Internet to solve all problems, right? Guess again!

Cloud Computing is Not New!

While many would argue the modern incarnation of cloud computing is only a few years old, there’s no denying that the conceptual and practical underpinnings date back at least to the early 1960’s. Things we take for granted today as “inherent” in cloud computing, such as resource pooling (first implemented as time sharing), measured service, and rapid elasticity are decades old. To say this is not new is a massive understatement – cloud computing is actually ancient by modern standards…

Grazed from OnLineTech. Author: PR Announcement.

Companies that must comply with regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI and Safe Harbor now have an instant solution to a key aspect of data security that too often goes un-met: end-to-end encryption for sensitive patient and customer information sitting in the cloud. Organizations in regulated industries that must ensure the protection of confidential information often avoid cloud computing because they have incomplete encryption strategies that leave them in non-compliance and at risk of embarrassing, costly security breaches.

The common areas of non-compliance for most hosting providers are due to a lack of encryption for data in the cloud and for backup of that data. The cloud infrastructure and backup techniques used by the vast majority of companies today leave patient and customer information un-encrypted, making it vulnerable to accidental and criminal breaches…