Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

As cloud computing goes mainstream, businesses of all sizes are looking for a fast, intuitive and easy way to leverage the incredible power of the platform.

To meet this demand, BMC Software today launched two new programs aimed at making it easier for customers to get from "zero-to-cloud" in as little as 30 days. BMC ZipKit and BMC Express Cloud are designed as a solution bundle that delivers a cost-effective starter cloud to enterprises with a 30-day implementation time, giving the customer a quick cloud project win while providing the foundation of a scalable, long-term enterprise cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Nebula, which produces hardware loaded with a preconfigured version of OpenStack, and GigaSpaces, which supplies an application deployment system, have teamed up to ease the strain of migrating enterprise applications onto a private cloud.

Nebula is the OpenStack company that was co-founded by Chris Kemp, former CIO of NASA Ames Research Center and former CTO of NASA. He was instrumental, along with a team from Rackspace, in founding the OpenStack project. Nebula announced Thursday that it is offering its Nebula One hardware/software systems with both OpenStack and GigaSpaces’ Cloudify system…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Eric Blattberg.

A high-profile legal battle over a $600 million spy agency contract has finally come to an end. IBM has withdrawn the injunctive action it filed after Amazon received a favorable ruling regarding its $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA.

“In light of the government’s recent submissions emphasizing its need to move forward on the contract, IBM has withdrawn its motion,” reads a statement provided to VentureBeat by an IBM representative. “IBM maintains its position that the [Government Accountability Office’s] findings were appropriate.”…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Jason Cumberland.

Migrating a traditional application to the cloud isn’t always as complex as it appears. Here are three of the most common misconceptions about moving from a dedicated server deployment to a cloud environment.

Myth 1: The cloud won’t support networking for multi-tier applications.

While software-defined networking (SDN) is undoubtedly white-hot in IT, the reality is that it’s still a developing and unproven technology among enterprise buyers. One hurdle is the unforeseen risks associated with new concepts, such as security groups that are usurping traditional enterprise security rules and firewall designs. For companies delivering SaaS or other enterprise applications, clients are likely to be uncomfortable with the security delivered through these designs. Case in point, this August Amazon Web Services’ security group policies resulted in virtual machine connectivity losses, among other glitches. For end-users in industries such as banking, financial services and healthcare, this kind of concept and security risk can be a deal-breaker…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform experienced problems Wednesday, as customers were unable to perform management functions or upload files to web sites hosted on Azure. The Windows Azure status dashboard reported issues with using FTP to upload files to web sites, although sites could publish content using Web Deploy or Git. The dashboard also reported widespread management problems for the Azure Compute cloud.

“We are experiencing an issue with Windows Azure Compute that may impact Service Management operations in the North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US sub-region,” Microsoft reported at 6:20 pm Eastern time…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Eucalyptus has updated its namesake software to make it easier for organizations to set up their own, in-house versions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, letting users run Amazon workloads in private cloud deployments. Eucalyptus 3.4, available now, also comes with a number of new tools to ease system administration management in the enterprise.

The open source Eucalyptus platform allows an organization to set up cloud services that duplicate all of the AWS application programming interfaces (APIs), guaranteeing that any workload running on AWS can also run on a Eucalyptus platform. The point is that users who like using AWS but who are afraid of getting locked into the service can deploy Eucalyptus as an in-house alternative…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

While agility and responsiveness are important factors for any midsize company considering a move to distributed computing, cloud pricing remains the top priority. But in a segmented market where any start-up can purchase servers and start to offer managed services, it is difficult to accurately evaluate cost: What is a unit of the cloud really worth to IT professionals?

Grab a Stopwatch

There is no exact date for the birth of public cloud computing though most experts use 2006 as a solid starting point since it marked the first time that cloud deployments were available to companies and consumers at large. Clouds have since struggled through an adolescence riddled with hype and expectation and have finally matured into a stable market with a host of players from technology mainstays to mom-and-pop start-ups capable of providing national and international compute power. The problem, according to a recent eWeek article, is that no one ever sat down and defined how cloud computing should be measured, let alone priced. The result is a market with providers who charge whatever businesses will bear…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

The National Security Agency broke into secure networks owned by Google and Yahoo, which gave the US spy agency “back-door access” to hundreds of millions of private records, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The report, based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said the NSA infiltrated links connecting data centers of the two web giants around the world, yielding more than 181 million records over a 30-day period earlier this year…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CSC has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ServiceMesh, an enterprise cloud management company. This strategic acquisition enables CSC to continue its transformation into a next-generation IT company that helps its clients migrate their applications into cloud computing environments.

"The future of next-generation IT infrastructure will involve a set of multiple clouds utilized simultaneously by enterprises," explained CSC President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Lawrie. "ServiceMesh allows us to catalogue enterprise applications and orchestrate those applications dynamically to run in different clouds based on the characteristics of the applications. From our unique position as an independent global technology company, we will integrate those workloads for our clients through our portfolio of services and technologies."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Moving applications to a public IaaS or PaaS cloud may simplify your hardware management, but it opens new issues around software licensing. Some of your contracts may not address cloud computing specifically because a vendor’s licensing model may predate cloud. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other cloud vendors offer cloud-specific software licenses, they introduce their own complications. Here are five things to keep in mind as you assess how your cloud migration plans can affect your software licensing.

1. What licensing model does your software vendor use? Sometimes it seems there are as many software licensing models as software vendors. Some vendors’ license models are based on the number of named users, while others prefer to charge based on the number of concurrent users. Other providers use the server processor or number of cores for determining fees…