Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Chinese IT giant Huawei is embracing the open source OpenStack cloud platform. During the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong last week, Huawei officially became a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. In an exclusive video interview with Enterprise Networking Planet, Haiying Wan, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Huawei, explained why his company plans to play a key role in pushing OpenStack forward in China and around the world.

Becoming a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation isn’t just a matter of paying a membership fee. The OpenStack Foundation only votes in Gold corporate members that have demonstrated that they will contribute code and technical expertise into the OpenStack development process. Wan is keen to help OpenStack improve and mature…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

IBM on Wednesday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Fiberlink Communications, a provider of cloud-based mobile-device management and mobile security services. IBM said the acquisition will advance its ability to support organizations adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobile programs.

Fiberlink’s MaaS360 cloud services are used by financial services firms, healthcare organizations, and manufacturers worldwide, reportedly offering fast, self-service enrollment of BYOD in less than five minutes. IBM said the technologies will enable it to offer cloud-based or on-premise mobile device management, mobile content management, and mobile application management capabilities. The software can also separate personal from enterprise data and content on mobile devices…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: John Rath.

At the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week Red Hat (RHT) announced an expansion of its OpenShift Online public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and services for its partner ecosystem. Red Hat is now expanding OpenShift Online’s global availability, and introducing new pricing and memory options.

Red Hat is expanding Silver tier commercial availability of OpenShift Online to 14 new Eurozone countries, including Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta. With this expansion, Red Hat’s technical support and additional platform resources is available for developers and application providers in more than 30 countries…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

At Amazon Web Services re:Invent, Riverbed Technology (RVBD) introduced Stingray 9.5 on AWS GovCloud, bringing the traffic manager software to the government sector on the popular cloud platform. Riverbed has made a lot of inroads into the public sector space and currently serves hundreds of government organizations around the world. The introduction of Stingray on GovCloud will open up additional opportunities and provide AWS channel partners serving government departments and agencies with the ability to optimize, scale, secure and improve the performance of mission-critical apps in the AWS cloud.

Designed as a virtual, software-based Layer 7 application delivery controller with integrated web content optimization, Stingray was optimized for cloud environments and is meant to be easily integrated into an application stack. For GovCloud, what it provides is a way for U.S. federal, state and local government agencies and departments to gain agility and cost savings while also improving their performance and scale of application workloads and services…

Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Brian Deagon.

Founded in 1992, NetApp (NTAP) is the second-largest provider of external data storage systems and software, behind EMC. Besides its data storage hardware, NetApp’s core software offering is Data OnTap, an operating system that helps users manage companywide data operations, including cloud-computing environments. Software now plays a larger role in data management, a trend called software defined storage.

NetApp says Data OnTap is the leading storage operating system worldwide. The emergence of cloud computing — where data is stored and apps reside in the Internet cloud — presents both challenges and opportunities for NetApp. It created a boom in new storage startups that might challenge the company. But it’s also advanced the rapid expansion in data creation in an increasingly digital world. The emergence of flash storage also altered the playing field. Flash is chip-based storage, instead of disk drives…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Basu.

This is the third posting in my cyber awareness series for small to medium-sized business owners. One of the biggest buzzwords being used right now is “the cloud.” So, what is the cloud? There are many different definitions you can find, but for the small business owner it means essentially outsourcing your IT infrastructure (possibly including applications, servers, data storage, etc) remotely. Why would you move to the cloud? The most commonly cited reasons are focused upon the core business and cost savings, but in reality every company should consider carefully any move to the cloud to ensure it is the correct move for them.

For small to mid-size business owners migrating some or all of their systems to the cloud environments presents the usual IT issues, but the problems are compounded by having data stored and managed remotely, by external organizations and often in multiple locations. Among these issues are special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity, and security…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Kevin Benedict.

The middle-class jobs of the past, the jobs you and I could start with and retire from, are mostly gone today. It is much harder to find jobs that require simply hard-work, responsibility and dedication. In today’s world, in order to live a traditional middle-class lifestyle that supports home ownership, cars, a college education and a family, it takes a different mindset and inventory of skills. A set of skills our education system has yet to fully understand and embrace. These are the skills of a digital nomad.

Being a digital nomad means we depend less on company issued laptops, smartphones and tablets, as we desire our own personal tools (BYOD) that can travel with us from job to job and employer to employer. We depend less on companies for our software applications and seek cloud-based applications and services that are tied to us personally, not just our current employer. We seek recognition for our work beyond the four walls of our employer…

Grazed from CIO. Author: David Geer.

As everyone knows, cloud provider Nirvanix recently fell apart, declaring bankruptcy and leaving its customers in the lurch. Nirvanix gave enterprises less than a month to move their data to a new home. To avoid the fate of those customers, follow these best practices for safely moving data in and out of the cloud.

Due diligence: financials first

The Cloud Security Alliance’s February 2013 report, "The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013" has identified a lack of due diligence as a continuing threat to cloud computing. When enterprises do look into cloud providers, their view of things is a bit lopsided. "Cloud consumers place too much emphasis on information assurance and privacy, or focus on cost reduction and savings at the expense of investigating the financial health of candidate providers," says John Howie, COO, the Cloud Security Alliance…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

What do you do if you need more than 150,000 CPU cores but don’t have millions of dollars to spend on a supercomputer? Go to the Amazon cloud, of course. For the past few years, HPC software company Cycle Computing has been helping researchers harness the power of Amazon Web Services when they need serious computing power for short bursts of time. The company has completed its biggest Amazon cloud run yet, creating a cluster that ran for 18 hours, hitting 156,314 cores at its largest point and a theoretical peak speed of 1.21 petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.)

To get all those cores, Cycle’s cluster ran simultaneously in Amazon data centers across the world, in Virginia, Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. The bill from Amazon ended up being $33,000. USC chemistry professor Mark Thompson needed the cluster to design materials that might be well-suited to converting sunlight into solar energy…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthor Cole.

Cloud architectures come in many forms, but in general they can be broken down into three distinct categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). The difference lies largely in the functionality you hope to derive from the cloud and the degree to which you are willing to move traditional data architectures to either internal or external clouds.

So far, SaaS has proven popular for those who hope to lessen their burden in supplying leading business applications like customer resource management (CRM) or business intelligence (BI), while IaaS has gravitated toward Big Data storage and backup/recovery applications. PaaS has gotten off to a slower start primarily because it centers largely on custom application development and is therefore the most difficult to design and provision…