Grazed from Network Computing. Author: Gary Hilson.

Extreme Networks is ramping up its efforts to expand into the converged data center by partnering with EMC. The company’s Open Fabric Ethernet switches are now validated for VSPEX, EMC’s architecture geared toward virtualized and cloud environments. Extreme’s switches support OpenStack and include its Summit X670 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch.

The VSPEX validation places Extreme in the company of major vendors such as IBM, VMware, Dell and Cisco, and is a positive step for the company, said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, because it gives it the opportunity to play in what ESG describes as the integrated computing platform (ICP) ecosystem. The validation could help drive incremental revenues for Extreme, he said. Combined with its recently announced reseller deal with Lenovo, “it’s a big foot in the ICP door," he added…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Rackspace President Lew Moorman is stepping down from leading the company, he announced in a blog post today, but will remain on the board of directors of the cloud computing and managed hosting company. Moorman has been with the company for 13 years. He has played an important role in developing OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform that Rackspace and NASA jointly founded three years ago. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier will add president to his title once Moorman officially steps down in the coming weeks.

Cloud watcher Larry Carvalho, an analyst and consultant at Robust Cloud, says he’ll be interested to see what, if any impact, Moorman’s move has on OpenStack. Rackspace is an important member of the open source community, he says, hosting one of the few public cloud offerings based on OpenStack code, and being one of the chief contributors of code to the project…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Bertolucci.

The proliferation of consumer devices and machine-to-machine sensors is ushering in a new era for IT: a cloud-computing age that enables services to be deployed more rapidly thereby attracting an ever-increasing number of users and devices. Intel has coined a name for this epoch, the "Virtuous Cycle of Computing," referring to a system of events that reinforces itself in a continuous loop.

The driver of this cycle: big data. In her Monday keynote at Intel’s "Reimagine the Datacenter" event in San Francisco, Diane Bryant, senior VP and general manager of Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said the dramatic upsurge in end-user and machine-to-machine devices — two areas commonly associated with big data — is good news for the IT industry…

Grazed from SolidFire. Author: PR Announcement.

SolidFire, a Colorado-based maker of data storage hardware, announced yesterday that it raised $31 million in venture capital. The Series C funding brings the four-year-old company’s total raised to $68 million. Samsung Ventures, NEA, Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Ventures Partners participated.

Of interest is the company’s flash memory storage devices, which are used in datacenters focused on cloud computing applications. The company’s proprietary technology promises to speed up the retrieval of data from shared servers, and positions it nicely as more enterprises replace on-premise tech with as-a-service applications…

Grazed from CXO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Organizations can’t stop singing praises of cloud computing. Many cite benefits like cost savings, flexibility, elasticity, scalability, load “bursting”, storage on demand. These are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for using either third-party services or a virtualized datacenter.

But after the agreements are signed, systems and processes are set up, and users are retrained, something unexpected happens. The initial use cases are realized, but then additional benefits begin to emerge—sort of like the icing on the cake, but often, these unforeseen benefits provide far more value to the business than initially planned. Joe McKendrick, a contributor for Forbes, writes that the unexpected benefits that emerge as cloud projects are immense. They include:…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP Enterprise Services has announced new and enhanced services that help clients streamline the integration and deployment of critical applications to cloud environments, while maintaining business continuity and addressing data security.

To quickly deliver new services to market, enterprises need to deploy new applications and modernise legacy applications. However, IT teams managing the migration to the cloud are struggling with limited capital, tight deadlines and increased complexity. Additionally, once the migration is completed, they must ensure the continuity of those critical applications…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft is opening up an early, limited adopter program for the experimental "Orleans" cloud-programming framework built by its eXtreme Computing Group. Notice of the early adopter program came via a July 25 post by Windows Azure Architect David Gristwood. At the bottom of his post, which highlights a video shown at Microsoft’s Build conference about how the 343 Industries team used the Orleans framework in building some real-time services for Halo 4, Gristwood added this: The “Orleans” team are opening up a small early adopter program. If you want to be considered for access to this program and the “Orleans” code, please email me via this blog.

I mentioned the Halo team’s use of Orleans in one of my posts in January 2013. While neither Halo itself nor Xbox Live run on top of Windows Azure, supporting Halo services — like presence, stats, achievements and more do. As part of its recently announced reorg, Microsoft is moving the Xbox Live and the Xbox operating systems teams into the same OS engineering group as Windows and Windows Phone…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

A number of companies have yet to take full advantage of cloud computing, according to Accenture. Cloud computing has been hyped up in the IT industry for some time, and many Australian enterprises have accepted it into their businesses. But some businesses haven’t really explored the full potential of this technology, Accenture managing director for cloud in Australia and New Zealand Alison Cairns told ZDNet.

"The conversation is really about growth and what cloud is going to do for the clients’ businesses," she said. "The by-product is cost savings, but that’s a far less interesting conversation." Cairns noted that one of Accenture’s customers, a banking organisation, had already commenced its journey into the cloud when it complained that cloud computing didn’t meet its expectations of improving efficiencies within the business…

With the CloudSigma 2.0 cloud comes many additional features that let customers further tune their cloud servers for additional performance boosts. Advanced CPU options, including CPU emulation and full non-uniform memory access (NUMA) visibility, hypervisor timer settings and virtual core size control, along with full-SDN support and all-SSD storage, all combine to offer high network throughput with ultra-low latency to achieve greater speed and stability for its customers. It’s this level of innovation that allows CloudSigma to continually improve its public cloud price/performance margins with unparalleled flexibility and customer control.

Grazed from Anturis.  Author: PR Announcement

Anturis Inc., a vanguard IT solutions company, today announced it has been selected by ReadySpace, a multi-national provider of cloud and managed hosting services for businesses. Anturis will provide ReadySpace and its customers with its enhanced cloud-based monitoring and troubleshooting solution for web services and IT infrastructure. ReadySpace can offer Anturis’ solutions as a powerful and integrated addition to its Managed Service packages.

Anturis delivers enterprise-grade IT infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting in a simple, easy-to-setup and use browser-based cloud solution. ReadySpace will deploy Anturis to support its over 5,000 business customers, primarily in the Asia Pacific region, and especially in Singapore and Hong Kong.