Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

For all the talk of computing as a utility, it seems that the motto ‘You get what you pay for’ applies as much to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as it does to any other commodity. The computing you get for Amazon’s low prices may not be as cost-effective as that of other providers, depending on what you’re using it for. That’s the message from a set of benchmark tests published last month by independent tester The Tolly Group, commissioned by IT and managed services provider Dimension Data.

As you’d expect from research it commissioned and promotes, Dimension Data’s cloud offering does well in the benchmarks. Let me disclose upfront too that Dimension Data’s cloud unit recently paid me for some speaking engagements; but the company arranged to brief me on these benchmarks through normal media/analyst channels. Some circumspection in interpreting the results is evidently advisable. Nevertheless, the factors that gave rise to the findings are worth digging into…

Grazed from ComputerResellers. Author: Nestor Arellano.

Avnet Technology Solutions’ reseller partners largely support the recommendation of the of global technology distributor for them to re-align their businesses towards selling more software and services, but they want the company to provide them with a viable payment scheme attuned to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

A number of the value-added resellers that attended Avnet’s IBM Compass 2013 conference said it would not be “unsustainable” for them if customers paid them on a subscription basis, which has surfaced in recent years with the introduction of the “as-a-service” model of selling technology solutions, while VARs continue to pay upfront for products they purchase from distributors…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Alex Woodie.

Since it launched last July, the UberCloud Experiment has held three rounds of trials that demonstrate the viability of running HPC workloads in the cloud. With the fourth round set to begin soon, attention once again focuses on encouraging the HPC community to invest in the development of cloud HPC resources that have the potential to benefit smaller organizations.

While the cloud computing has really started to take off in the last few years, interest in running HPC applications in the cloud has not kept up with spending and interesting levels in the overall cloud market, according to Wolfgang Gentzsch, who co-founded of the UberCloud Experiment with Burak Yenier in 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon Web Services-like public cloud infrastructure offers great scale and flexibility. What it’s not so strong on is being easy for non IT types to comprehend and use on their own without having to call in a devops or IT professional as intermediary. That’s the market Tier 3 is attacking with the latest release of its public cloud infrastructure.

In startups, devops or sysadmins typically set up (and wind down) compute resources in the cloud, but established companies want their business folks to be able to manage their cloud and oh-by-the-way self-provision the applications they need without bothering techies…

Grazed from ConsumerAffairs. Author: Mark Huffman.

Hackers and identity thieves are increasingly focused on mobile computing. With so many smartphones and tablets now in use, mobile is increasingly becoming how consumers use the web. Criminals also like the fact that many mobile devices have little or no security protection – not on the device itself and not on the data that is stored in the cloud.

Mobile data can be stored both places and security experts say both need strong protection. Chris Rancourt, an editor at NextAdvisor.com, says consumers who use an online backup service to store and share their data in the cloud need to be especially careful…

Grazed from Epoch Times. Author: Kannan Sankaran.

We live in a time where nearly everyone is participating in creating a very large amount of data everyday—from engaging with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, to watching videos in multimedia sites like YouTube and Vimeo, to performing searches using Google and Bing. What happens to this data? Where does it get stored? How does it all become relevant? Understanding big data gives us the answer. To understand big data, it is essential to first know about the three main Vs of data – Volume, Variety, and Velocity, as outlined by Doug Laney of Gartner Inc. in a report in February 2001:

1) Volume – It refers to the volume of data that is being stored everyday by companies, in data centers. According to StatisticBrain.com, a staggering 58 million tweets are sent out each day that is stored by Twitter.

2) Variety – This refers to the collection of data in various structured and unstructured formats like GPS sensors, images, videos, and blog posts. My personal Samsung Galaxy Note 2 phone has numerous sensors that are also contributing to this data…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced it will work with the United States Department of the Interior (US DOI) as the Department embarks on a decade long transformation of their information technology (IT) systems to a cloud computing model. As part of an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract, valued for IBM up to $1 billion, the Department may use IBM cloud computing technologies, services and hosting as the foundation of their next generation infrastructure.

IBM’s solution for the DOI is based on the company’s secure and high availability Federal Data Center capabilities using open computing and process standards. The US DOI will leverage IBM expertise in data storage, secure file transfer, virtual machines, database, web hosting, development testing and SAP Application Hosting. The Department will also be able to tap IBM’s Smart Cloud for Government hosted at the IBM Federal Data Center, the Smart Cloud for Enterprise (SCE) commercial offerings and the very cost competitive IBM AIX Cloud…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

6WIND, the gold standard for data plane processing in software-defined networks, today announced that it is a founding member of the CloudNFV™ initiative. CloudNFV is a group of vendors dedicated to creating a technical framework and demonstration platform for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) based on cloud computing and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies in a multi-vendor environment. Tom Nolle, CIMI Corporation President, is the architect and facilitator of CloudNFV and, in addition to 6WIND, the other founding members include Dell, EnterpriseWeb, Overture and Qosmos. These six companies each bring unique technologies and expertise to complete the framework needed to demonstrate the multi-vendor CloudNFV vision.

NFV has emerged as a key approach to maximize network resource utilization by virtualizing functions traditionally implemented in dedicated hardware, thereby minimizing both CAPEX and OPEX. Service providers are increasingly exploring SDN-based network architectures in order to improve network manageability and accelerate the deployment of new services…

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

Global investors are feeling more confident about the U.S. economy and are poised to start shoveling money into select technology investments, according to new research from Deloitte LLP and the National Venture Capital Association.

The 9th annual Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey, released today, indicates global investors are increasingly enthusiastic about technology investments in mobile, cloud, enterprise software and health care IT, all areas of significant focus for technology channel partners…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (http://www.us.logicalis.com) – and a company named “Best Cloud Consultant” at the Cloudcor UP 2012 Cloud Computing Conference – announced a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud resource, the Logicalis On-Demand Cloud.

The Logicalis On-Demand Cloud is a self-managed, multi-tenant public cloud infrastructure that provides the flexible compute resources, memory and storage necessary to complete projects such as test and development, proof of concept, training, bursting or other short-term needs. This new service is a pay-as-you-go offering with the benefit of not requiring customers to invest in building and managing their own on-premises infrastructure…