Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

That’s one big check for Big Blue. IBM won a federal cloud-computing contract with a maximum value of $1 billion, its largest such agreement with the U.S. government, according to an article on Bloomberg.com. The Interior Department awarded similar, 10-year pacts to nine other suppliers, including Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), which also described the agreement as its largest federal cloud contract.

The deals might reach a combined $10 billion, allowing the agency to speed its efforts to move information to the cloud, a Web-based pool of shared resources such as data storage and software. Other U.S. departments may eventually tap the program…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

VMware brought out its new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, the vCloud Hybrid Service, to US customers several days ago. Now it has to persuade as many of them as possible — and foreign customers, too — that running certain applications in external data centers, or using those centers for testing, or backing up data, makes a world of sense.

Fortunately, vCloud Hybrid Service customers Bechtel and Digital River had good things to say about the product at VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference in San Francisco today. While some developers appear to be interested in porting workloads among different public clouds, Christian Reilly, manager of EPC Systems at Bechtel, said he sees the new VMware public cloud as a vehicle to move certain applications from existing on-premise infrastructure to external clouds…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Thoran Rodrigues.

Cloud computing brings many advantages to companies. The pay-as-you-go business model adopted by cloud service providers enables companies of all sizes to have access to very powerful resources and solutions without any capital expenditure. Furthermore, the easy scalability of cloud services allows companies to easily optimize their costs based on usage levels, instead of having to worry about peak demands.

The cloud has enabled businesses to focus more on their business, and less on the technology required to run it. By outsourcing their basic infrastructure to cloud providers, companies no longer have to worry about upgrading and maintaining data centers and servers, leaving that to companies who are focused entirely on the technology side of this issue. The same goes for cloud applications, which allow companies to worry more about using the software and less about maintaining it and keeping it updated. Furthermore, by moving infrastructure and applications to the cloud, companies set themselves up to take advantage of future economies of scale that will be on the side of cloud providers. For those companies that adopt cloud technologies, these developments mean that the cloud is rapidly making IT departments obsolete…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Today CPUsage announced the launch of public beta for their high-performance and high-throughput computing platform. CPUsage offers an easy to use Platform-as-a-Service that empowers software developers, scientists, and researchers to quickly and easily compute on any cloud, at any scale, in a matter of minutes. CPUsage eliminates the need for months of upfront engineering effort and the hours of weekly maintenance it takes for other cloud computing platforms, making powerful cloud computing available and affordable for any size organization.

CPUsage also announced today for the first time that they have closed $925,000 in venture capital from leading Silicon Valley investors. The funding round was led by Morado Venture Partners, with participation from Crosslink Capital, Demian Sellfors, Qbera Ventures, and Triplepoint Ventures…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Editorial Staff.

Over the last decade and a half, the information-rich lives we live online mean a soaring pile of bits and bytes. And it’s growing harder to manage, not easier. Experts see three related megatrends disrupting attempts to sort things out. But don’t despair—the database masters of the world are working on a solution.

The inherent problem is that not all Web interactions are built alike. Apps come in all shapes and sizes. Connecting the dots between your email, your Web search, and your online purchases, for example, requires more than just the standard age/sex/location identifiers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Security-as-a-service provider Proofpoint is extending its cloud-based security capabilities with the acquisition of Armorize Technologies, a provider of cloud-based anti-malware offerings. This comes just less than a month after Proofpoint signed a definitive agreement to acquire Armorize. Details of the transaction were not provided.

Armorize is an interesting company, at least from a security perspective. The company’s staff has more than 35 Certified Ethical Hackers on staff, and it specializes in cloud-based threat intelligence, detection of "zero-day" attacks and unknown vulnerabilities, real-time dynamic threat protection and advanced malware detection research…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Jay Desai.

While new technologies are being adapted at lightening pace across all kinds of industries, one thing has not changed: IT departments are expected to use antiquated storage solutions to meet their new storage needs. Just as we wouldn’t expect anyone to use a twenty-year old phone to communicate effectively, it is unreasonable to expect IT professionals to use tape and proprietary storage arrays to store massive amounts of data, especially in this era of powerful cloud computing.

The simple fact is that it is impossible to manage today’s storage needs with yesterday’s storage solutions because of key trends that are disrupting the storage industry as we have known it thus far. These key trends include:…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Let’s say it: Last summer was the beginning of the end for the old guard in what is still the biggest part of technology – business spending on everything from servers to software. This fall begins a new competition for the hearts and minds of corporate customers.

Consider a few of summer’s events. Dell started to go private in the face of eroding personal computer demand. Hewlett-Packard once again announced lower revenue, and had more executive reshuffles. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, resigned, then in the last big weekend of summer bought the handset business of a deeply weakened Nokia…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Altair, a global provider of simulation technology and engineering services, today announced the launch of HyperWorks Unlimited™, offering companies a fully configured hardware and software appliance for computer-aided engineering (CAE).

Altair’s HyperWorks Unlimited, a state-of-the-art managed private cloud solution, offers unlimited use of all Altair software including HyperWorks® applications and PBS Works™ workload management tools. With HyperWorks Unlimited, users no longer have restricted access to HyperWorks software applications, making high-performance computing (HPC) far more accessible for the CAE community and paving the path to infinite exploration…

Grazed from RPI News. Author: Editorial Staff.

The petabyte—a quantity of digital information 12 orders of magnitude greater than the lowly kilobyte—looms large as a future standard for data. To glean knowledge from this deluge of data, a team of researchers at the Data Science Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is combining the reach of cloud computing with the precision of supercomputers in a new approach to Big Data analysis.

“Advances in technology for medical imaging devices, sensors, and in powerful scientific simulations are producing data that we must be able to access and mine,” said Bulent Yener, founding director of the DSRC, a professor of computer science within the Rensselaer School of Science, and a member of the research team. “The trend is heading toward petabyte data and we need to develop algorithms and methods that can help us understand the knowledge contained within it.”…