Grazed from ChannelInsider.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Quantum is moving to make it significantly easier for channel partners to offer a backup service in the cloud powered by the company’s Q-Cloud off-site backup service.  Announced last year, the Q-Cloud service leverages the virtual backup appliance software that Quantum developed to manage the backup process without requiring a physical system to be deployed at each customer site.

In addition to Q-Cloud, Quantum’s backup-as-a-service managed service provider (MSP) program includes an online marketing kit designed to help Quantum channel partners promote their service. And partners have the option of reselling Q-Cloud or applying their own brand to the service.  "We really want to make it easier for partners to brand their own services," said Eric Bassier, marketing director for Quantum Data Protection…

Grazed from MasterTheBoss.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In this world of computers and connectivity, viruses and Trojans are always an issue. They come in all shapes and sizes and may be extremely difficult to decipher. Windows firewall provides protection against viruses and anti hacking services. It is a component software of Microsoft Windows that provides packet filtering. Firewalls continually navigate through programs to ascertain whether there are any viruses or intruders in the system.

A few years back, most individual computer owners and businesses did not know about the advantages of Windows Firewall especially with reference to the Internet. But nowadays, nobody can ignore firewall services. It acts like a barrier against all types of infiltrators, and also provides security to a computer…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Ed Scannell.

As IT professionals retool their data centers to accommodate more sophisticated cloud computing environments, many lean toward a scale-out strategy built on Wintel server hardware, steering away from proprietary, scale-up servers.  This means trouble for Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) and IBM’s RISC-based systems — as both companies are working to reinvent their server roadmaps.

The primary reasons driving IT pros toward Wintel are costs, both upfront and hidden, and the risk of moving to a new platform and dealing with a new vendor that a data center team may not be familiar with…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Ignacio Llorente.

Time flies, and we are once again celebrating our anniversary. Let me take advantage of this opportunity to describe the progress of the project during the last 6 years by using the slides of the opening talk "Unleashing the Future of Open-source Enterprise Cloud Computing" in the first OpenNebula Conference held in Berlin one month ago.

Our Vision: Flexible Enterprise Cloud Made Simple

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Leonardo da Vinci

When the OpenNebula project started in 2008, we intended to create an open solution to make Enterprise Cloud simple. From the beginning, we understood enterprise cloud computing as en evolution of data center virtualization to host both cloud-aware and traditional applications. So we aimed to combine existing virtualization technologies with multi-tenancy, automatic provision and elasticity, following a bottom-up approach driven by the real-life needs of sysadmins and devops, and the following main principles:…

Grazed from InfoStor.  Author: Henry Newman.

Today I woke up to find that Microsoft’s 365 has some issues for users worldwide, but not me as I’m not using 365.  It seems like it’s case of “another day, another high reliability cloud down.”  Clearly, vendors either have very poor test procedures and plans or they do not have an adequate test environment.  This is not a surprise to me, given the size of installations, the complexity of the configuration and the cost of maintain a test environment. 

This might be a reason to not go to the cloud.  I have not seen that testing procedures and infrastructure listed as a reason to not deploy to the cloud, but the more I think about it, it makes sense to me that it should be a factor.  So what do Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the other providers have for systems, configuration and workload generation that will give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the cloud?…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

However big and ambitious you think Amazon’s plan to run the world’s computing may be, you should probably think bigger.  In a startling talk Thursday evening, a vice president who oversees the internal engineering of Amazon’s global computing system described how Amazon is building its own specialized computers, data storage systems, networking systems, even power substations and optical transmissions systems. In every case, he said, Amazon Web Services had developed ways to make its computers run cheaper and more efficiently than standard commercial products.

“We’re changing everything everywhere,” said James Hamilton, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services. “All of our engineers are focused” on reducing the costs of computing. He was speaking at Amazon’s second annual gathering of A.W.S. customers, partner companies and analysts, an event that drew 9,000 people…

Grazed from Investors.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Shares of Citrix Systems (CTXS) and VMware (VMW) were down for a second day following Amazon.com‘s (AMZN) announcement that its Amazon Web Services unit will enter the desktop virtualization market to boost its cloud computing business.

VMware’s virtualization software is widely used in corporate data centers to increase the flexibility and capabilities of computer servers, but it’s also moving onto desktops. Citrix has focused its virtualization technology in desktop PC environments.  AWS said in a blog post Wednesday that it plans to offer Amazon WorkSpaces, a desktop virtualization product. Analysts expect AWS virtualization platform to be ready in the first half of 2014…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading, vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, announces a preview of next-generation Bright Cluster Manager® at SC13 featuring support for Hadoop clusters, OpenStack clouds and more. Now, in addition to its leading HPC cluster management capabilities for datacenters and AWS clouds, Bright provisions, monitors and manages Big Data clusters and private clouds making it an even more comprehensive management solution.

Big Data

Using your choice of leading Hadoop distributions, Bright Cluster Manager provisions, monitors and manages Hadoop clusters. It employs Bright roles to make it easy to configure Hadoop services such as HBase, YARN and ZooKeeper. Bright collects metrics and performs healthchecks for Hadoop that target HDFS, JVM, job and network activity. Bright integrates with MapReduce and YARN to manage Big Data workloads efficiently, and ensures high availability of vital Hadoop services…

Grazed from FierceHealthIT. Author: Susan D. Hall.

Advances in big data and cloud computing are providing more democratic access to the reams of information the government collects, federal officials said at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association annual health IT conference in Bethesda, MD. Before, data would be shipped to researchers on encrypted hard drives. Now any vetted research institution can access the same data through the cloud, reports the Federal Times.

With better tools and improved access through the cloud more scientists and researchers will be able to use the data in productive ways, said Mike Tartakovsky, the chief information officer and director of the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology at the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance and enterprise computing solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Scyld HCA™, its new HPC Cloud Appliance. This appliance turns any HPC Linux cluster into a fully managed HPC hybrid cloud environment, which adds the ease of use and automation of a public cloud to an existing HPC cluster and has the added benefit of seamless hybrid access to Penguin Computing on Demand (“POD”) to support burst out compute and storage capability.

Scyld HCA™ is a fully integrated solution (software, hardware and managed service) that combines the flexibility and ease-of-access typically associated with a cloud based solution with the performance of “bare-metal” computing. Built on open standards including OpenStack and Ceph, Scyld HCA™ provides virtual login host lifecycle management, object and data storage, user and group administration, metering and reporting, authentication, a Web-based portal, and an interactive Web GUI for hardware and workflow management…