Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

The cloud is becoming a popular and sometimes integral part of everyday business operations for many companies these days; but according to Forbes Technology contributor Joe Weinman, who focuses on the business value of technology, this trend is growing so fast that a customizable intercloud will be the most viable strategy for users going forward.

Flexibility of Service

Small and midsize businesses need to do more with less, and that is why this technology can greatly improve IT solutions. Getting a secure solution that is always available, requires little to no setup and that can be up and running with little to no initial expense are a few key factors to consider for the midsize market to consider. When considering an IT contract, making sure that the company providing services is flexible enough to work with the client to find optimal solutions is in the best interest of all parties…

Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Radware, a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced its participation in this year’s OpenStack Summit at Asia World Expo in Hong Kong, November 5-8.

Scheduled to present is Dr. Gilad Zlotkin, vice president of virtualization and management products for Radware. On Tuesday, November 5(th) , Dr. Zlotkin will discuss a presentation entitled: Bringing Mission and Performance Critical Applications to OpenStack. He will outline several use cases for load balancing as a service (LBaaS) and the benefits for using Radware’s Alteon load balancer in OpenStack for driving truly multi-tenant, efficient and agile "enterprise grade" LBaaS…

Grazed from OpenShift. Author: Krishnan Subramanian.

PaaS and DevOps are much discussed topics these days in meetups and conferences around the world. The ambiguity around the very definition of DevOps is pushing people to wonder if there is any connection between DevOps and PaaS. I want to briefly touch on this topic in the hopes of generating a conversation on the role of DevOps and PaaS.

Putting the discussion in context
From my vantage point (as someone who was an analyst up until four months ago, viewing the industry from 30,000 feet), I see two schools of thought inside the DevOps movement:

• Hosted "NoOps" PaaS – This school insists that operations ceases to exist on the side of enterprise IT and defines DevOps narrowly as developers using code to manipulate the underlying infrastructure. For example, analyzing application performance and performing on-the-fly optomizations to underlying components for delivering a more seamless end user experience. From this perspective of DevOps, operations in enterprise IT is unnecessary…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

Gartner predicts “By 2015, at least 20% of all cloud services will be consumed via internal or external cloud service brokerages, rather than directly, up from less than 5% today.” Thus, it is important to understand what a cloud broker is and what they do; however, before we can do that, we need to clear up some confusion between different definitions and implementations of cloud brokers.

The term “cloud broker” was defined by NIST in Special Publication 500-292, the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, as “An entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumers.” The use of the word “entity” makes it ambiguous as to whether a broker is a person or a software service; however, most interpreted this “actor” as a person or persons in a business. NIST divides the broker’s services into three categories service intermediation, service aggregation, and service arbitrage…

Grazed from EUKHost. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud has become the backbone for most IT Infrastructures and sure that as a company you have heard a lot about the benefits of the cloud and want to move there. This would certainly be a big change and many of your thoughts should focus on this. We want to help you with 10 points to consider before we move you to the Cloud Computing services.

1. Ask yourself: Why do I have to be in the cloud? Go to the cloud is a big change for the company, so before you decide to be in the cloud should check if you really need to be there. Try to think and analyze how and if the cloud would help you in your work…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

One of the funny things about the cloud is that it’s often difficult to know what’s behind the curtain. Before IBM bought IaaS provider SoftLayer in June, we were hard-pressed to determine precisely what sort of IaaS Big Blue was offering. Yes, they had a virtual server configurator similar to Amazon’s, but the self-service stopped there: you’d tally up your config, submit it, and IBM would get back to you.

Then there was that fuss in July about the SEC investigating IBM to discover exactly how Big Blue was calculating the 70 percent increase in cloud revenue it reported for the first half of 2013 (although, to be fair, cloud-washing like this seems commonplace)…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

The service will be lumped into Rackspace Data Service, which consists of SQL and NoSQL database offerings. The overall goal for Rackspace is to tap into big data workloads. Rackspace offers managed hosting services as well as cloud computing services and big data workloads could be a boon. Rackspace offers a cloud big data platform, a managed version and a private cloud offering.

Here’s a look at the pricing for Rackspace’s Hortonworks offering…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/rackspace-plots-hortonworks-apache-hadoop-services-7000022506/

Grazed from Centrify. Author: PR Announcement.

Centrify Corporation, the leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today announced the Centrify Alliance Partner Program (CAPP), providing developers, cloud and mobile ISVs the ability to jointly develop integrated solutions leveraging Centrify’s leading Unified Identity Services to provide secure access to cloud and mobile apps for mutual customers. In addition, by formalizing its partnering efforts via CAPP, Centrify and its ISV partners such as Dropbox and Zoom are now better able to drive joint go-to-market activities.

Centrify is making this announcement from its pavilion at the Samsung Developers Conference, where it is demonstrating how ISVs and mobile application developers can leverage its cloud-based mobile authentication service that has been selected by Samsung as a built-in Zero Sign-on solution for its Samsung KNOX platform…

Grazed from CloudComputingPath. Author: Pravin Anchan.

While configuring system architecture IT professionals may not give storage the recognition and importance it deserves. In turn this could affect performance and future costs. Today enterprises realize the value of storage and go in for enterprise SAN as a cost efficient, reliable way to store and access data.

Storage can be direct attached storage, network attached storage or storage area network (SAN). SAN lies in between DAS and NAS; DAS forming the underpinnings of the storage system and NAS overlaying SAN. Enterprise SAN takes the concept a step further in the form of centralized storage under common management and security but connected to a number of computer systems to permit data sharing…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

NTT Communications Corp said it will gain control of two U.S. cloud computing firms in takeover deals worth a combined 85.5 billion yen ($880 million), as Japanese firms ramp up efforts to improve overseas networks through acquisitions.

The unlisted long-distance and overseas calling unit of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp will buy Virtela Technology Services Inc, which provides communications services to corporations, and acquire an 80 percent stake in RagingWire Data Centers…