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.  

SendGrid, the leader in email deliverability, today announced it has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as a Technology Partner. SendGrid is the first non-native email solution available to Google App Engine customers as part of the partner program, giving developers a trusted third-party option for adding transactional email management and delivery to their applications. 

The collaboration provides a scalable transactional email platform and set of services that allow developers to focus on building exceptional applications rather than committing time and resources to ensuring app-triggered emails reach their users.

CloudShare, the leading provider of virtual environments in the cloud, today announced the general availability of two new plugins. One for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 and the other for Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2012 (TFS). These tools combined with the already easiest-to-use cloud for development and testing, allow developers to spend less time building development infrastructure, and more time using it for development.

As is true with all productivity tools, .NET developers who use Visual Studio want to spend more time utilizing the tool than setting it up. The new CloudShare Explorer for Visual Studio allows developers instant access to virtual machines in the cloud directly from the Visual Studio interface. When connected to a TFS Build Controller, code deployments can happen with a click of a button to cloud environments, and access to those environments via RDP with another click.