Grazed from Datamation. Author: Editorial Staff.

So, you’ve survived the onslaught of social networking, cloud computing, Big Data, and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon. You fought back against the "consumerization" of IT, and are feeling pretty good about yourself. Welcome to your next nightmare – the Internet of Things (IoT)!

The new year is only a couple of weeks old, and the latest hype-cycle is already in full gear. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) catapulted the promise of connected cars, homes, appliances and other devices into the forefront of consumers’ and the corporate business crowd’s consciousness. All of a sudden the old-world ideas of machine-to-machine (M2M) commercial use cases of tracking vehicles to improve logistics have been replaced. The new world dreams: monitoring the driving patterns of everyone to better understand their buying behavior and preferences…

Grazed from NewsFactor. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

The sky didn’t fall but the cloud Relevant Products/Services was dark over the weekend as Dropbox faced service disruptions that angered many users. The company reported its online storage service went down on Friday evening during scheduled maintenance and was back up and running about three hours later, with core service fully restored by 4:40 p.m. PT on Sunday. So what happened? And what can we learn from the outage? Akhil Gupta, head of infrastructure at Dropbox, offered his insights in a blog post Sunday.

Gupta said Dropbox relies on thousands of databases to run — and each database has one master and two slave machines for redundancy. The company performs full and incremental data Relevant Products/Services backups and stores them in a separate environment. The trouble came during an operating system upgrade to some of Dropbox’s machines…

Grazed from 4-Traders. Author: Editorial Staff.

Egenera, a leader in converged infrastructure and cloud management software, today announced a new release of Egenera Cloud Suite featuring enhanced workflow automation, simplified administration, and enhanced security through integration with Microsoft Active Directory. As Egenera continues executing on its cloud vision and product roadmap, the new capabilities benefit both service providers and enterprise customers for mission critical cloud services. Cloud Suite’s unique ability to provision and manage physical, virtual and public cloud resources from one management interface drove significant customer adoption in 2013.

The new release follows a year that included the acquisition of Fort Technologies and integration of Fort’s cloud management software with Egenera PAN Manager; the signing of new enterprise and service provider customers; new strategic relationships with key resellers and technology partners; and integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Runa A. Sandvik.

Rich Mogull, CEO at information security research and advisory firm Securosis, was working on a piece of code to accompany his presentation at the upcoming RSA Conference when he accidentally published the credentials for his AWS account-Amazon’s cloud computing service-online. A mistake that would later cost him $500.

In a blog post titled "My $500 Cloud Security Screwup", Mogull writes that he only learned about the issue when he received an email from Amazon’s AWS team one evening. The email said that both his access and secret key were publicly available on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects. In addition, the AWS team had reason to believe someone used the credentials to set up a number of unauthorized servers in the Amazon cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Editorial Staff.

Computing requirements can fluctuate dramatically from workload to workload. Some applications need to crunch through data, while others perform more-mundane functions such as serving customer-facing web pages. Only the demands of each workload should dictate its underlying infrastructure. Therefore, the flexibility to choose and easily manage exactly the right combination of components is critical. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to IT infrastructure. Choice matters.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the economics associated with the cloud can best be maximized through a hybrid design incorporating bare metal. Combining dedicated servers with your cloud instances can both reduce the costs of crunching data and improve performance. This may also reduce compliance and security concerns with single-tenant components in the background for your sensitive databases and multitenant cloud instances for your customer-facing front end…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Lenin VJ Nair.

In the past, think about how companies used to do business. Manpower was one entity that simply needed to be fetched as per necessity from wherever it is available. Whichever industry you work on?automotive, technology, construction, media?you needed to gather critical expertise to work for an organization in your area. Organizations also needed to expand, set up operations in the third world to find personnel that could work for optimum wages in order to maximize profit.

The advent of the Internet was one real relief for professionals as it first introduced the idea of work from anywhere. Today, the technology, especially that of distributed computing we now know as the cloud, has advanced so much that everything, from applications to professional talent, can be coordinated from the cloud…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced that its inventors received a record-setting 6,809 patents in 2013 — the 21(st) consecutive year the company topped the annual list of U.S. patent leaders. IBM’s 2013 patent results represent a diverse range of inventions poised to enable significant innovations that will position the company to compete and lead in strategic areas–such as IBM’s Watson, cloud computing, Big Data and analytics.

These inventions will also advance the new era of cognitive systems where machines will learn, reason and interact with people in more natural ways. "We take pride in being recognized as the U.S. patent leader, but patents are only one gauge of innovation. Equally significant is the impact that our patented inventions have when they are used to enable solutions that help clients and societies solve problems," said Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and VP of Innovation…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware (VMW) has snagged two Citrix (CTXS) employees who have had their heads in the clouds. Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager of End User Computing at VMware, announced in a blog post that VMware had hired Bob Schultz, formerly group vice president and general manager of Desktop and Applications at Citrix, and Sumit Dhawan, formerly group vice president and general manager of Enterprise Mobility at Citrix.

Both Schultz and Dhawan easily can be considered two of the top minds involved in cloud computing at Citrix, so it’s a big deal for VMware, as well as for Citrix. And just when Citrix and VMware seemed to be playing so nice together, too. Citrix even attended VMworld last year?something that would have been thought highly improbable not all that long ago…

Graze from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), a trusted leader in high performance computing and big data and an SAP global technology partner, today announced plans to develop an in-memory appliance based on the SAP HANA® platform, working in collaboration with SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the market leader in enterprise software and software-related services. Using the scalable shared memory architecture of SGI’s next-generation UV™ system together with SAP HANA, the new in-memory appliance from SGI will be designed to streamline database management for single large node environments, which require extremely high capacity and scale to meet the needs of in-memory databases.

Today’s enterprises are experiencing rapid increases in database size, precipitating an immediate need for superior performance and accelerated transaction times to manage and analyze big data more efficiently and cost effectively. The new SGI computing system is expected to help enable businesses and government agencies running high volume databases and multi-tenant environments to leverage high performance…