Grazed from AllThingsD. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Alan Cohen, one of the early executives of the software-defined networking company Nicira, has joined the stealthy security startup Illumio. Cohen left Cisco Systems to join Nicira in 2011, before it was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion last summer. Over the weekend, he changed his LinkedIn profile. His new title is chief commercial officer at Illumio.

Beyond confirming the change, he didn’t have anything to say about the new company. Also joining Illumio is Ben Verghese, a former VP and chief management architect at VMware. His title at the new company is VP of engineering…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Big Data and cloud computing are closely related but distinct spheres. Treasure Data, however, is hoping to integrate them seamlessly with its data analytics platform, which runs in the cloud and is based on open source Hadoop. A few days ago, the company received $5 million in series A funding from Sierra Ventures to expand its operations globally.

Treasure Data’s promise, in the company’s own words, is to deliver "Hadoop in hours, not days." It does that by hosting a Big Data service directly in the cloud with analytics tools already integrated. That saves enterprises from having to build their own Big Data infrastructure and connect it to analytics solutions afterwards…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abduhl Salam.

With all the hype that Cloud Computing is getting, more and more companies and individuals are jumping on the Cloud band wagon and enjoying the benefits. But despite its global reach, the greater majority of Cloud Computing infrastructure and service providers are still American companies. This means that they are subject to U.S. laws and regulations including the latest amendments done to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Many of the world’s business entities as well as individual internet users use some sort of Cloud technology, Cloud storage being the more common service being availed of. This includes Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox and other players in this area. But it has now come to light that all data and documents being uploaded to Cloud systems owned by U.S. entities, based in the U.S. or falls under Washington’s jurisdiction can be accessed and analyzed by U.S. security agencies without warrant or prior notice…

Grazed from The Vary Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Ceph, the open source, software-defined storage platform that is contending for its share of the rapidly evolving market for distributed storage systems for the cloud and Big Data, has chalked up a significant victory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Inktank, the company behind Ceph, partnered with the university’s College of Education to deploy a private cloud powered by Ceph, OpenStack and Ubuntu Linux to support research activities.

Mirantis, an OpenStack systems integrator, collaborated with Inktank in the deployment, which the vendors achieved using existing hardware at the university. The private cloud that they built was designed to make it easy for university faculty to deploy new server instances quickly. The infrastructure also ensured data privacy by storing information on-premise rather than in a public cloud…

Grazed from BusinessCloud News. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

International standard development bodies and governments need to work together on the development of protocols to help users migrate their data from one cloud provider to another, according to Manas Kumar, chief executive officer of Optimizer HQ.

One of the chief benefits of the commoditised, pay-as-you-grow / pay-as-you-consume model prominent within cloud computing is that it enables a certain degree of protection from lock-in. But Kumar believes that in the same way governments have moved to regulate phone number portability, a set of global industry standards are required to ensure customers can move data from one provider to another without having to deal with proprietary encryption, a key disincentive to leaving a service provider…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Another cloud-based business continuity and disaster recovery solution is currently in development. This time, VeriStor Systems and Zerto have partnered to develop a new cloud offering that will combine the VeriStor Cloud Continuity service with the hypervisor-based Zerto Virtual Replication solution.

This partnership comes about through VeriStor joining the Zerto Cloud Disaster Recovery Ecosystem. VeriStor plans to integrate Zerto Virtual Replication into its Cloud Continuity offering, which will add the ability to protect virtualized workloads in a fully automated, bi-directional manner with centralized, multitenant management of infrastructure. "Maintaining RPOs for our customers’ data is a key element in how we are measured for the quality and delivery of our Continuity service…

Grazed from Baseline Magazine. Author: Dennis McCafferty.

Business deployment of cloud computing solutions has transitioned from the experimental to the "show me" stage, according to a survey conducted by Research in Action for Compuware. Findings reveal that IT decision-makers—technology and business managers and executives—are scrutinizing cloud deployments in an effort to eliminate poor end-user experiences due to performance bottlenecks. They’re also concerned about the cloud having a negative impact on the enterprise’s revenue and reputation due to these and other cloud-related issues.

"With cloud adoption topping the list of priorities, companies are clearly seeing a benefit to the agility, flexibility and time-to-value that cloud services can deliver," says Bernd Greifeneder, CTO of Compuware’s APM business unit. "But [IT decision-makers] are right to carefully consider the impact cloud and third-party services can have on the end-user experience…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Sevcik and Wetzel.

For mission-critical SaaS applications to displace their locally accessed cousins, SaaS end-user response times must rival those of the on-premises incumbents. Achieving this goal is challenging, and requires continuous end-user experience monitoring. SaaS vendors must use performance information to continuously improve response times to meet the same performance standards as on-premises software.

The performance of SaaS applications is subject to more variables than on-premises solutions. These variables include the performance of:

• the application itself,
• the data center infrastructure on which the application runs,
• all of the network segments along the path between application and user, and,
• the browser/client software on the user’s computer or mobile device.

Grazed from GamingBolt. Author: Editorial Staff.

For all the talk we’ve heard about Cloud computing and how consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 tout the power of the Cloud and how it will improve the games we’ve played, we’ve yet to see many examples of this. Until now, as Nvidia has showcased CloudLight, a cheap way for developers to be able to imbue their games with real-time lighting using the power of the Cloud.

Nvidia explains just how CloudLight works, stating that it is “a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user’s local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways…

Grazed from OpenNebula. Author: PR Announcement.

The OpenNebula Project is excited to announce the first update of the fourth series of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.

OpenNebula 4.2 gives users and administrators an easy way to create, publish, share, and manage multi-tier cloud applications and define auto-scaling policies based on service level metrics and time schedule. The new service flow functionality converts an infrastructure cloud into a powerful environment for the execution of elastic business applications. OpenNebula 4.2 also includes improved VMware drivers, enhanced support for Xen4, a new simple provisioning tab for Sunstone, and other minor enhancements like datastore monitoring and more hooks…