Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What kinds of metrics should you demand from your cloud provider or data center? In their just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, authors Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood and Ricardo Puttini spell out some of the key varaibles that make for a successful service level agreement for cloud services.

Quality of service is essential to meet cloud consumers’ business requirements, and the following are examples Erl and his co-authors provide as ways to measure and ultimately assure this quality:

• Availability Rate Metric: "Percentage of service uptime; measured as total uptime against total time"; expressed in percentages.
• Outage Duration Metric: "Duration of a single outage"; measured by date and time outage began and ended, expressed in hours and minutes.
• Mean-Time Between Failures (MTBF) Metric: "Expected time between consecutive service failures"; measured by normal operational period duration and number of failures; expressed as average number of days…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cost savings… 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 data center. 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. Over the past couple of years, I have spoken with many CIOs and executives who not only talk about the unplanned challenges, but also cite pleasant surprises as well. Here are some examples of such unexpected benefits that emerge as cloud projects roll along:..

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge.  Author: Rich Miller.

This week’s Industry Perspectives represented an intersection of top-of-mind topics for data center professionals and executives. If you missed any, here they are in a neat package. Enjoy!

Are You Up in the Air with Cloud Computing Benefits? – It’s going to take some time for the entire IT world to get on board with cloud computing, but the benefits are well worth it. A mix of private and public cloud services is a great compromise for companies who are worried about security issues, writes Alan McMahon of Dell…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today, e2b teknologies, a Sage Software partner and developer of cloud business applications, announces that the company will exhibit the e2b anytime apps product line this week in booth #1155 at Sage Summit 2013. The annual conference for Sage customers and partners will be held July 21-26 at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Washington, DC.

The product line to be exhibited at Sage Summit includes cloud business applications such as Anytime 500, Sage 500 ERP extensions for distributors and manufacturers; Anytime Collect, accounts receivable credit and collections management software; Anytime Supply Chain, integrated supply chain management system; and Anytime Commerce, a fully configurable B2B ecommerce storefront that integrates directly with Sage ERP. Product information and e2b teknologies’ representatives will be available at booth #1155 from July 21-26 to answer any questions regarding the products listed above…

Grazed from NewsWire.  Author : PR Announcement.

Napier Healthcare Solutions, a leading healthcare software provider, today announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft based on a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering which will help hospitals deploy Napier’s flagship Hospital Information System (HIS) on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. The HIS is an integral part of Napier’s comprehensive EHRm product suite.

Hospitals of any size can benefit from Napier’s HIS on the Windows Azure platform through seamless and secure access from anywhere in the world. Built on a rock-solid foundation that powers some of the biggest businesses in the world, the platform is built to handle millions of requests per day and offer incredible stability and automatic load balancing…

Grazed from The Economist.  Author: Editorial Staff.

WHEN senior European Union officials recently went to America to seek answers about Edward Snowden’s claims of wholesale snooping, including on EU institutions, they were told to mind their own business. Didn’t the visitors know how much spying was done by their own members? Britain, too, warned the European Commission that security matters were outside its remit. The Eurocrats’ only consolation is that the world’s spooks still think them important enough to be spied on.

Yet at least one person cheered the disclosure of PRISM, which helps American spooks collect information held by big internet firms such as Google and Facebook. “Thank you, America, for PRISM, which has helped us to make a very strong data protection law in Europe,” declared Viviane Reding, the justice commissioner, whose campaign for new EU-wide rules on data privacy has unexpectedly revived. Ms Reding is a loose cannon…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Colin Steele.

Open source virtualization is still a niche technology, despite the rise of multi-hypervisor infrastructures.  Recent open source virtualization software releases have packed in new features with impressive specs, and there’s a clear appetite for VMware Inc. alternatives in enterprise data centers.

One might think these two factors would combine to provide a major boost in open source virtualization’s market share, but that hasn’t happened. Among VMware competitors, only Microsoft’s proprietary Hyper-V has benefited, according to data and several solution providers and analysts who work with multi-hypervisor clients…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Irmee Layo.

Open-Xchange has been in the market for more than 10 years, since it began its operations in 2005. The company was one of the pioneers of SaaS (software-as-a-service) that provided innovative, open-source and cost effective means of business management and cloud solutions. Since then, email handling and other web-based communication, document management and collaboration, contact’s listing and calendar posting and many other office productivity applications were never the same for businesses.

Open-Xchange has helped revolutionize business transactions and integrate them with social networks, mobile access and media advertisements. This was made possible via the company’s groupware cloud application and email database…

Grazed from NetworkComputing.  Author: Tom Hollingsworth.

It seems like all IT hardware is now being defined by software. In the network, software defined networking (SDN) is a daily topic of debate. On the storage side, discussions about abstraction and programmability are starting to be lumped into the category of Software Defined Storage (SDS). And now a term is emerging to denote the convergence of all these things into something much bigger: the software defined data center (SDDC).

SDDC was coined by the former CTO of VMware, Dr. Steve Herrod. The first mention was at Interop 2012. Dr. Herrod was talking about the convergence of networking, storage, and server virtualization and how it would affect engineers and architects and change their vision of the data center…

Grazed from SBWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

MarketsandMarkets recently conducted a study on the Cloud Based Business Analytics Market: "Cloud Analytics Market [Cloud BI; Cloud Business Intelligence] – Text; Web; Speech; Machine; Video; Predictive Analytics: Global Advancements, Delivery Models, Market Trends, Enterprise Roadmap, Market Forecasts and Analysis (2013 – 2018)", which analyzed and studied the major market drivers, restraints, and opportunities in North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, Japan, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Browse:

– 118 Market Data Tables
– 10 Figures
– 247 Pages and in-depth Table Of Content on “Cloud Analytics Market”…