Grazed from WSJ. Author: Elizabeth Dwoskin.

Cloud storage provider Nirvanix announced it was shutting down on Monday, giving customers just two weeks to move their data elsewhere, two customers said. The exit of Nirvanix, a San Diego-based company that has said it stores data for Fox Networks and National Geographic, among others, means more market share for giants like Amazon and Microsoft.

It also offers a warning about the downsides of shifting computing to the cloud. Two weeks is not a lot of time to move valuable business data. Steven Ampleford, chief executive of Aorta Cloud and Aorta Capital, a Nirvanix partner, said he received a phone call from Nirvanix officials with the news on Monday. “Armageddon is about to happen,” he said. Nirvanix officials didn’t tell him what would happen if customers don’t get their data out by the end of the month, he said…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is touting the benefits of leading with public cloud infrastructure when adopting a cloud computing strategy, claiming that "old guard" private cloud providers cannot offer key benefits such as pay-per-use and scale on demand. The firm was also keen to highlight its security credentials in light of recent revelations of NSA snooping and the like.

At Amazon’s AWS Enterprise Summit in London, senior vice president Andy Jassy told an audience of corporate technical leaders that cloud computing was the future of IT delivery, and that it made more sense to outsource this to a public cloud provider such as AWS than to build it themselves. "The reason customers typically get started with the cloud is cost…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing networking is in greater demand among IT professionals. According to a new survey, the majority of IT professionals are familiar with cloud networking and its benefits.

Cloudification and the Network

The survey, titled "The Cloudification of the Network," by Pertino and Spiceworks, was recently featured in CloudTech. It found that cloud networking tools were being considered for implementation within the next year by 45 percent of IT professionals. The rest of the respondents plan to consider cloud networking software within the next two years. The survey also found that more than 70 percent of the IT professionals interviewed said they are familiar with cloud networking. They pointed to easier management, mobile access and the option of disaster recovery as the top reasons for planning a solid networking strategy…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

When it comes to cloud computing, one of the biggest challenges faced by IT organizations is that the cloud creates another isolated stack of computing to manage. In fact, the total cost of managing that additional stack of computing can wind up negating any of the savings derived from leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the cloud.

What most enterprise IT organizations need in the cloud is an environment that looks and functions in much the same way their own internal data center does. Looking to help IT organizations achieve that goal, NetApp today previewed a federated instance of its Clustered Data OnTap storage management platform that can be deployed across private and public cloud computing environments…

Grazed from ABA. Author: John Ginovsky.

With 90% of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to new research from CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information technology industry.

As cloud computing becomes a default part of the IT landscape, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59%), business continuity and disaster recovery (48%), and security (44%), CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study reveals…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudius Systems today announced a breakthrough open source approach to application deployment. The new open source project, OSV, is designed to run efficiently on top of hypervisors, allowing operating systems to better optimize CPU consumption and overhead memory. By running on a single application, resulting in unparalleled throughput and latency, OSV minimizes operating costs by reducing the need for administration, template management, patching and tuning of applications. OSV has been developed by a team of OS veterans including Avi Kivity, Dor Laor, Benny Schnaider—creators of the KVM hypervisor.

The Need for a New OS

Unlike new infrastructure such as hypervisors, NoSQL, PaaS, etc., the operating system has been virtually unchanged since the introduction of cloud computing. Typical cloud workloads run application servers using Java, Ruby, Python and JavaScript (node.js). This historical evolution is not ideal – the run time (JVM), the OS and the hypervisor implement parallel/duplicated mechanisms for protection and abstraction. Together, these mechanisms are redundant and impose a large overhead in terms of CPU and memory…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

In December 2012, Cary Landis and I made 10 predictions about how cloud computing was likely to evolve this year and how those changes were likely to impact enterprise computing. But things are moving fast in the world of cloud computing, reaffirming some of those predictions and altering others. Here’s a recap of what I predicted then and an update of how I see those trends unfolding now.

1. Cloud technologies will converge.

The cloud will continue to forge a massive convergence of technologies — similar to the evolution of the cellphone to the smartphone. The lines between platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud services brokerages will blur into a conceptual operating system for the "Web as a platform" — providing tools to allow users to take advantage of multiple cloud solutions at once, and bringing the cloud closer to the end user in more meaningful ways…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

IBM and automated server migration software developer Racemi have partnered to provide customers with a free automated migration path to any IBM cloud offering for a limited time. Racemi’s Cloud Path software automates migration of existing Microsoft (MSFT) Windows and Linux servers to public cloud services. Infrastructure to deploy or manage is not needed on a customer’s site with this software as a service (SaaS).

Customer data is secured and compressed using AES/RSA SSL encryption over firewall. Racemi Product Management Vice President James Strayer said in a prepared statement that the partnership "ensures there is a fast, easy way to move existing workloads to IBM’s cloud computing platforms."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

On September 17, IBM will announce at LinuxCon 2013 that it will invest $1 billion in new Linux and open-source technologies for its Power Systems servers. This announcement comes 12 years after IBM famously announced that it was backing the then unproven Linux with a billion-dollar investment.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said, "The last time IBM committed $1 billion to Linux, it helped start a flurry of innovation that has never slowed. We look forward to seeing how the Power platform can bring about further innovation on Linux, and how companies and developers can work together to get the most out of this open architecture."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Foley.

The market for government clouds is rapidly advancing. I recently highlighted 10 game-changing developments in government clouds, and now there’s another: Oracle ORCL +1.57% has unveiled Oracle Government Cloud, a new offering for federal, state, and local government agencies.

Oracle Government Cloud is an enterprise-class cloud environment and family of cloud services designed specifically for the needs and requirements of government organizations. It gives CIOs in federal government a new and better way to meet Uncle Sam’s Cloud First policy, which requires agencies to use cloud computing where it makes sense in lieu of dedicated, do-it-yourself systems. “A quick look at what Oracle is offering shows that it dovetails nicely with the US federal government’s 2010 Cloud First policy,” writes CMSWire…