Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Soon after I became a cloud computing reporter for Network World I signed up for a bunch of different cloud services including Box, DropBox, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services. One other service I used, and liked quite a bit, was SugarSync. The platform is very similar to Box and DropBox, offering a folder on your desktop that you simply drop files into that are then stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.

SugarSync has an intuitive mobile app and I set it up to automatically copy some folders form the hard drive of my computer so that I could easily grab a document on my phone if I ever needed to. I used it a couple times and was glad I had it. SugarSync gave me 5 GB of free storage when I signed up in September 2012 and there was no word of a pay service would be required down the line…

Grazed from TechWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

In its continuing drive to capitalize on opportunities presented by the rush of businesses to "cloud computing," Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is forming a formal partnership with Hortonworks, one of the leading providers of essential cloud software known as Hadoop. SAS already is a partner with Hortonworks as the Cary-based software firm aggressively pursues its own Hadoop technology for use with "big data" analysis.

A beta software version of a joint solution – the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) combined with Red Hat Storage – is already available. The deal comes as no surprise. Hortonworks told WRALTechWire in October that undisclosed work with the world’s top Linux software developer was already underway…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, PhD.

Cloudera recently announced the general availability of Apache Spark for Cloudera Enterprise. First developed at UC Berkeley, Apache Spark is a parallel data processing framework that supplements Apache Hadoop by facilitating the development of big data applications related to machine learning, interactive analytics and real-time analytics.

Spark allows users to write parallel sets of code in Java, Scala and Python that operate on Hadoop clusters with a speed up to 100 times faster than MapReduce. Moreover, applications developed in Spark tend to require 2 to 10 ten times less code than a corresponding MapReduce application…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Public cloud, private cloud: Increasingly, these terms are losing their meaning, as enterprise cloud-computing solutions blend the best features of both approaches into one. That strategy is evident in the latest product from EnterpriseDB, an open source database provider that has now expanded its Postgres Plus Cloud Database to include support for Amazon (AMZN) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). EnterpriseDB is pitching the new functionality as a solution that offers enterprises several advantages over competing cloud databases:

• Greater scalability, since "Postgres Plus Cloud Database is based on an architecture purpose-built for the cloud so that it scales automatically in response to fluctuations in demand for processing power, server capacity or network capacity," according to the company.
• A dedicated management console for adminstering the database.
• Support for the product from staff who specialize in Postgres.
• More granular control, since the solution provides users root access to their data…

Grazed from GlobalNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond, Inc., the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced its TotalCloud Foundation (TCF) cloud computing service platform won the Best in Show (Best Development Tool) Award at ITExpo Miami, held January 28-31, 2014, at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. Top products and solutions on display at the show were recognized for their raw innovation and creativity in categories ranging from service provider and cloud solutions to enterprise and open source platforms.

Launched in December 2013, Cbeyond’s TotalCloud Foundation (TCF) is a customizable, robust and secure service platform that allows businesses and managed service providers (MSPs) greater flexibility and control of cloud computing through a fully managed or full self-service model…

Grazed from TheInformationDaily. Author: Phil Turner.

The rise of cloud computing and the increasing demand to access applications anytime, anywhere has transformed the IT landscape and for many decision makers, it’s a struggle to simply stay in control. At the heart of any IT strategy is the need to uphold data security. Yet the rise of cloud computing has allowed the battle lines, once clearly marked as ‘us’ versus ‘the outside world’, to become blurred.

While the cloud provides employees with the freedom to choose, control and manage their own applications, both its openness and accessibility, whilst advantageous, presents a new set of challenges.Businesses now have to contend with a whole host of different devices, not all of which are vetted by the IT department. Similarly employees are increasingly using the tools and applications most familiar to them to complete their job, rather than those provided by the organisation…

Grazed from Nebula. Author: PR Announcement.

Nebula, the enterprise private cloud company, today announced that Cloudwick Labs, an independent test lab for cloud computing, has confirmed that Nebula delivers Cassandra workloads to span multiple data centers and validates multi-site hybrid cloud interoperability with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

Apache Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database technology, provides multi-site distributed computing of big data across multiple data centers. Tests were done with DataStax DSE – the commercial provider of Cassandra. Cloudwick Labs certified DataStax’s Cassandra NoSQL operation on the Nebula One in private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments with AWS and Rackspace. To replicate enterprise workloads, Cloudwick also used Gazzang for data encryption and Datameer for analytics…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced 10 and 40GbE NIC support for the Microsoft OCP server and storage specification which are based on hardware used to power Microsoft’s global cloud services, including Windows Azure, Bing, and Office 365. Available now, the ConnectX®-3 Pro OCP-based 10/40GbE NICs with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and overlay network offloads offer optimized application latency and performance while maintaining extremely low system power consumption.

"The growth of hyperscale computing requires new paradigms in infrastructure, and Mellanox Ethernet NICs provide rich performance and efficiency features, such as overlay network offloads and RDMA/RoCE to provide the best infrastructure return-on-investment," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We’re pleased to collaborate with Microsoft in delivering 10/40GbE NIC technology to their OCP server and storage designs to enable superior cloud productivity, efficiency, and sustainability."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

In 2013, enterprise organizations spent a great deal of time offloading servers into infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service models. Software-as-a-service was just as popular, but you can look for the software-centric cloud to thrive as companies hand over more of the IT management reins.

IaaS and PaaS gained popularity primarily because they allowed organizations to test cloud providers without giving up complete control over managing applications. IT decision makers often pushed brand-new applications and services into a SaaS model, but they were hesitant to offload the full management of highly customized and mission-critical software in production. As a compromise, they experimented with IaaS and PaaS to offload infrastructure to a third party while allowing application-level management by in-house IT staff…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Three years after the US government implemented a ‘Cloud First’ mandate that would require federal agencies to consider cloud-based IT services for certain systems, the federal public service continues to struggle with cloud implementations according to recently published research from Accenture. Annette Rippert, managing director of technology solutions and Accenture’s lead on federal cloud work said a lack of critical skills is the leading factor at play here.

In early 2011 the then US chief information officer Vivek Kundra released the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, which became known as ‘Cloud First’ because it required agencies to evaluate cloud-based IT solutions in many cases before making any new IT investments…