Grazed from TechSling. Author: Thomas Parent.

Cloud computing technology continues to evolve at an astounding pace. As more individuals and organizations have embraced this technology, cloud computing architecture has changed to accommodate increasingly diverse requirements. Initially, cloud computing was synonymous with public clouds which are hosted on shared servers.

When security concerns were raised, many organizations adopted private clouds which are housed on dedicated servers. These developments spawned hybrid clouds which incorporate both public and private clouds. Now multi-clouds are becoming popular. The term multi-cloud refers to multiple public and/or private clouds (this generally includes hybrid clouds as well)…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Larry Walsh.

There’s nary a tech vendor in the market that doesn’t have a cloud computing story to tell. Every vendor – hardware or software – is touching cloud services in one form or another. And, correctly so, most see cloud computing and the services model as the wave of future.

The problem is cloud transformation – the conversion of revenue streams from traditional product sales to recurring revenue – isn’t easy. IBM’s most recently quarterly earnings reveal this fact, even as the company’s cloud revenue’s top $1 billion for the first time…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM recently have been battling in court over a $600 million contract to build a private cloud for the CIA. That’s a sizable contract, but it’s worth much more than its face value. Let’s briefly examine the facts in the case and their ramifications:

• AWS wins the contract from the CIA in late 2012.
• IBM protests to the Government Accountability Office in February 2013.
• GAO sides with IBM on two points and recommends the CIA rebid the contract.
• AWS sues the government to stop the re-bid. IBM files as “intervener” in the case.
• On Oct. 7, a federal judge rules in favor of AWS…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

"I can’t tell you how excited I was to get the call to come speak here," said Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for cloud and enterprise engineering, Tuesday as he faced the Oracle OpenWorld audience filled with several thousand potential Windows Azure cloud users. No Microsoft executive had ever made an OpenWorld keynote before.

Oracle and Microsoft, for the last decade, have bitterly vied to see which would be the dominant database on Windows: Oracle or SQL Server. The stakes grew higher as Windows Server became more strongly entrenched in the enterprise data center. At some point, both decided neither was ever going to own the market outright. At the same time, the rise of Amazon Web Services showed what had been brewing while they grappled with each other. If some database users were finding a home on AWS, they potentially weren’t using either Oracle or SQL Server. It might just be time for a strategic re-alignment…

Grazed from Barron’s. Author: Tiernan Ray.

The fervor for disruption has become a fever. Last week I noted that cloud-computing software companies such as Salesforce.com (ticker: CRM) and Workday (WDAY) are the new stock-market darlings because they are disrupting the traditional businesses of Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) and the like.

But the market’s appetite for everything cloud is rapacious, and those current darlings will have to soon make way for a flood of new stock issues. Some of the new players are essentially building the cloud itself: They’re building the infrastructure that is allowing computing work to move off of the server computers stored in an enterprise’s own data center, and instead be run at the facilities of a telecommunications operator or a hosting provider…

Grazed from ExecutiveBiz. Author: Mary-Louise Hoffman.

VMware has unveiled a series of updates to its virtualization software portfolio that will work to help enterprises manage workloads in multiple cloud computing-based platforms, Network World reported Tuesday.
Brandon Butler writes the company updated its vCloud Automation Center that is built to automate information technology services delivery.

Version six of the automation tool is built to work with Red Hat OpenStack in addition to Microsoft‘s and Amazon‘s cloud infrastructures, according to the report. Butler reports vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 incorporates analytics technology that is designed to help users monitor configuration issues in cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and VMware…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.executivebiz.com/2013/10/vmware-updates-multi-platform-cloud-mgmt-products/

Grazed from F5. Author: PR Announcement.

F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced today it is joining the OpenStack Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor. By supporting the rapidly emerging and popular OpenStack cloud software, F5 is demonstrating its commitment to evolving standards-based cloud platforms and providing customers with greater choice and flexibility in deploying public and private cloud solutions.

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that helps organisations manage compute, storage, and networking resources in private and public cloud environments. Service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions around the world use OpenStack to power demanding production workloads…

Zadara Storage, Inc., provider of enterprise-class private cloud storage by the hour, today announced that its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service is now available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EU (Ireland) region through a new relationship with eircom, Ireland’s largest telecom services provider. eircom is an AWS Direct Connect location in Ireland with unparalleled access into the AWS Cloud directly from its state of the art data center in Dublin. The Zadara Storage VPSA can provide customers of both eircom and AWS EU with access to and use of private block- and file Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) services at hourly rates. In addition to AWS customers, customers of eircom colocation and fiber circuits now can take advantage of Zadara’s award winning enterprise Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution.

"European organizations big and small are ready for a transformative solution like Zadara’s".

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Carl Weinschenk.

In a way, the emergence of cloud computing is really what unified communications was about all along. Or, more precisely, doing all the heavy lifting in a place logically “above” the enterprise itself fits in perfectly with the concept of unified communications because it avoids the silos and boundaries at the lower levels.

The best may be yet to come. ARN, in a story about the UC environment in Australia, describes the impact of the cloud and Microsoft Lync on the overall UC environment. The story focuses on Frost & Sullivan research that says premise-based UC grew 2.4 percent last year and now is worth $698.5 million. It calls that growth moderate, and suggests that the pace was partly a result of organizations waiting to judge the stability of cloud-based approaches…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

After first allying with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to build the servers for its next-generation cloud platform, Verizon today revealed it has enlisted NetApp to provide the storage. According to Tom Shields, director of service provider marketing for NetApp, the Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage platforms will be the first live instances of the hybrid storage cloud technology called Clustered Data OnTap that NetApp previewed last month.

Chris Drumgoole, senior vice president of global operations for Verizon Terremark, says Verizon chose NetApp because, for the foreseeable future, most cloud computing deployments in the enterprise are going to be of a hybrid nature. Clustered Data OnTap will provide customers with a way to holistically manage storage across their own and Verizon data centers…