Grazed from HuffingtonPost. Author: Elaine Mah.

When news first broke that the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) was "operating a covert program, called Prism, which obtains email and other electronic data records from Internet companies," a furor erupted over the violated privacy of information once it enters the cloud. It shocked a nation and then the world. I’m not sure what was more shocking: the fact that it happened or that so few people were truly prepared for this possibility.

Concerns that our online information could face government scrutiny first arose over 10 years ago when the Patriot Act was signed into law, and has now raised questions for businesses as to the security and privacy which could be afforded when uploading content to the cloud. With the ongoing revelations from the NSA files, many organizations that have embraced cloud computing in recent years now face new uncertainty and may even go so far as to revert to on-site only access to information and abandon the cloud…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Tiffany Trader.

Today’s clouds are built on a mix of technologies, including virtualization, automation and orchestration. In some circles, virtualization is nearly synonymous with cloud, but above all a cloud is a pool of resources that is elastic, scalable and accessible on-demand. For the HPC community especially, much of the cloud computing that takes place is of the "bare metal" kind, aka non-virtualized cloud.

Although today’s server virtualization is a lot sleeker than in years past, nothing can beat the performance of bare metal. Some of the issues with virtualized cloud computing were detailed recently by Internap Vice President of Hosted Services Gopala Tumuluri…

Grazed from CFO. Author: David Wood.

By mid-2013 – meaning now — cloud computing will be in use by about 80 percent of about 600 companies with at least 500 employees each, according to a 2012 TNS Infratest survey. The trend is undeniable: Data management and storage are moving offsite to cloud computing vendors on a vast scale.

Touting cloud computing as a way to eliminate the costs of buying and maintaining on-site information-technology assets, vendors offer it in the form of software as a service (SAAS), a distribution model in which software applications are delivered to clients over a web-based network…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Thoran Rodrigues.

It has been about a year since I last updated the comparison of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Over the course of this last year, we’ve seen even more changes to the market, from the pricing and plans to the market players to the services being offered. Some companies, such as Softlayer, have been acquired by others (IBM, in Softlayer’s case), and yet more new entrants have appeared.

To account for these changes, and for other situations, I’ve made some changes to the comparison. First, IBM was dropped from the list, since the pricing information for its public cloud offering is no longer available online (they’ve shifted the focus onto Softlayer). Hosting.com also had to be dropped from the list since their pricing data is no longer online for anyone to access either…

Grazed from IPWatchdog. Author: Steve Brachmann.

Siemens AG is a giant European corporation involved with electronics and electrical engineering; headquartered in the German cities of Munich and Berlin, it is the European continent’s largest such company. The company has faced instability in recent months, but it’s hopeful that new CEO Joe Kaeser, appointed at the end of July, will help stabilize the company’s activities.

Recently, the company was bolstered by an announcement of a $400 million contract to deliver two power plant blocks to Pennsylvania under an order from Gemma Power Systems LLC. The scope of Siemens’ technology development makes it a recurring feature in IPWatchdog’s Companies We Follow series…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Gunnar Hellekson.

The federal government’s march to the cloud has, at times, seemed more like a cautious ballet than anything else. While cloud-based projects are slowly rolling out, much of the agency emphasis is on private or community clouds as opposed to public providers. Security and data handling concerns play a role in this “tiptoeing,” but another reason is far more insidious: the fear of lock-in.

The Federal Shared Services Implementation Guide, the agency blueprint to the cloud, makes it very clear that government entities engaging in cloud computing need a clear “exit strategy” for anything as a service. It might seem ridiculous to consider how one should migrate from a technology before it is even implemented, but when it comes to the cloud, being able to get your data out is just as important as getting it in. It’s about choice and control…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Rick Jackson is the former chief marketing officer at VMware. His exit was one of several earlier this year that seemed to say there was a mass migration going on from what had been one of the Silicon Valley’s leading companies. His followed on the heels of VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s and co-president Tod Nielsen’s departures.

Then, on the other hand, there had been regime change, with Pat Gelsinger coming in as CEO for Paul Maritz. Smart people don’t always wait around for the new boss to discover you’re closely associated with a high-profile failure of the previous administration, the vRAM pricing foray, and Rick Jackson was one of those smart people…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Chris Kanakarus.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison typically uses his annual OpenWorld conference keynotes to deliver the company’s biggest announcements and strategic positioning, and this year they will apparently involve an in-memory database and Oracle’s PaaS (platform as a service) offerings. On Sunday, Sept. 22 Ellison will deliver his first keynote, which is titled "Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Database and M6 Big Memory Machine," according to an announcement released Tuesday.

The first likely refers to something Ellison mentioned in June during an Oracle earnings call. While Oracle released an initial version of Database 12c in June, on the call Ellison referred to an upcoming product he described as a "vertical, columnar compressed, high-speed in-memory vertical database" that would be out at the end of this year…

Grazed from PoweringTheCloud.  Author: Event Announcement.

The ‘Powering the Cloud’ events: SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World is where Europe’s top CIOs, IT Managers and senior IT professional gather each year to keep up to date with the latest trends and thinking in the fast evolving worlds of the cloud, data center technologies and application delivery.



What makes ‘Powering the Cloud’ events so special for delegates is its combination of high level ‘thought leadership’ content, views and opinions from some of the industry’s top experts, analysts and vendors and most importantly the opportunity to network with their peers across Europe and meet and discuss ideas with a host of sponsors.  The Powering the Cloud events help IT professionals stay at the top of their game…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OpenNebula Conf organizers have announced the speakers for the first conference dedicated to the popular cloud computing solution. Presenters from companies the likes of China Mobile, Produban (Santander Group), Deutsche E-Post and the European Space Agency (ESA) are among the line up of 26 speakers from around the world.

Nuremberg, 01 August 2013

The program of presentations and workshops for the OpenNebula Conf on 24 – 26 September in Berlin has been finalized.
Covering a breadth of issues related to OpenNebula and private enterprise cloud environments, the three-day conference will offer developers, users and administrators a rare opportunity to learn and share best practices…