Grazed from BusinessTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

There’s a perception that cloud computing has a fuzzy “edge” that makes it difficult to tell where being online ends and the cloud starts.  This makes it easy for the unscrupulous to pull the wool over the eyes of the uninformed and pass off online solutions as being in the cloud.

And because so many IT managers and CTOs don’t really understand the cloud, it is easy to sell them solutions that don’t match even the most basic criteria of being a cloud solution.  What are these criteria? At the most basic level, a cloud solution must be:

• immensely scalable on demand;
• immediately flexible;
• only pay for what you use when you use it…

Grazed from HPCWire.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Big data is pretty much useless without high performance computing power. And until now, there wasn’t a good solution for small-to-mid-sized organizations with a lot of data to analyze and relatively little hard drive capacity. This is where an expert custom computer builder comes in.  Ace Computers is the first company to both identify and meet the need for better on-premise computing power capable of supporting video-rendering, animation, large-scale engineering, and other graphic intensive applications for both traditional HPC systems and virtualized/Cloud-based applications.

Ace Computers CEO, John Samborski, explained, “We have been active in the HPC space for nearly two decades. Earlier this year, we identified a gap in the market for systems that use internal or direct-attach storage to handle big data computing. We wanted to escape the limitations of the traditional solution, which is to keep adding isolated hard drives.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Larry Carvalho.

When you think of IT vendors and cloud computing, companies like Amazon and Google first come to mind because they are very successful with start-ups that leverage their cloud services. HP, IBM and Oracle are making big strides primarily by targeting large enterprises with private cloud solutions. Cisco, EMC and Intel are primarily technology vendors serving as arms providers to cloud service providers.

Microsoft falls in a unique category that dominates certain IT segments and covers customers ranging from start-ups, consumers and large enterprises. The recent Microsoft Build conference provided many opportunities to learn about a range of the company’s cloud computing capabilities…

Grazed from Atelier.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Has Cloud computing become a practical reality among French companies yet? The simple answer is yes, even though this does not hold true for every firm and few companies are showing signs of having a real strategic approach to the Cloud. These are the findings of Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) in the first edition of their CloudIndex*, whose purpose is to assess on a half-yearly basis the state of play among French companies in terms of Cloud computing. In June 2013, the maturity rating was 443 out of 1000 on the basis of a survey of over 220 firms. The results of the first CloudIndex show that migrating to the Cloud is first and foremost motivated by firms’ desire to increase flexibility rather than reduce their costs.

Flexibility, number one benefit of Cloud computing

This is especially the case for the adoption of software as a service (SaaS), the spearhead of Cloud computing in France, as it simplifies the deployment of applications in the fields of Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management and office automation, dispensing with initial financial investment by shifting the necessary expenditure from capital investment to operating costs…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Cynthia Harvey.

At its Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft launched a "smart city" initiative it calls CityNext. The goal is to make cities more efficient and responsive through big data and cloud computing technology provided by Microsoft.

InformationWeek’s Michael Endler reported, "Microsoft on Wednesday announced CityNext, a global initiative intended to develop ‘smart cities’ around the world. Unveiled at the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, the plan leverages Microsoft’s Partner Network to help cities become more efficient even as they struggle with austere budgets and decaying urban infrastructure. If CityNext succeeds, cities will improve efficiency by installing Microsoft products that harness the cloud and big data."…

Grazed from CBR. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle has launched a new version of its Cloud Application Foundation together with updated 12c Java technologies including Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse.

Integrating application server and in-memory data grid capabilities into a base for cloud computing, the new Cloud Application Foundation offers a platform that enables launching latest applications, shorten operations, ramp up time-to-market and reduce overall ownership cost, while obtaining more value from their existing application infrastructure…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

DigitalOcean is a different kind of cloud supplier. It’s added nearly two terabytes of solid state disks (actually 1,920 GBs) to each of its cloud hosts, letting customers spin up a server in 55 seconds. And that seems to score with Ruby developers, a core customer group who like to see their Rails applications running with the click of mouse. Digital Ocean has also made it easy to deploy a server through its Web-based management console.

When Ronald van Woensel, a veteran user of Amazon Web Services, did a benchmark workload with DigitalOcean, he found that it ran slower than another startup he was testing, but faster than Amazon. "DigitalOcean is about half the speed of Linode, in spite of their fast SSD disks. But they are still six times faster than Amazon," he concluded in a July 2 blog on his benchmark, which was picked up and published on Hacker News…

Grazed from BroadBandBreakfast. Author: Josh Evans.

A panel of experts discussed the potential for the use of cloud computing by federal agencies at an event held by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation on Wednesday morning. The security of cloud computing was a primary concern for many of the panelists. Matt Wood, General Manager of Data Science for Amazon Web Services, described the cooperative approach that Amazon takes to security on its cloud services. He said Amazon secures the infrastructure itself, but customers are responsible for securing its systems that utilize cloud computing.

Terry Halvorsen, Chief Information Officer of the Department of the Navy, also suggested careful consideration of what data to put in cloud storage as another solution to security concerns. Data that is accessible to the public under the Freedom of Information Act can be placed on public storage without fear, he noted…

Grazed from MBTMag. Author: Patrick Carey.

A few weeks ago I was trying to update some files I have stored on a cloud storage service (that will remain nameless). I had moved my files there a while back as a way to make it easier to access them from my various devices and to avoid losing them during the next inevitable hard drive failure. For the most part I’ve been happy with the service, but on this day, I was unable to access the site. Not good, as I was rushing to make some changes and send the files to a colleague.

Frustrated by my situation, I asked a co-worker to see if he was also having problems. He was, so we did the next logical thing you would expect. We went to the service provider’s status page to see what they had to say. According to it, the service was healthy and there were no current service or maintenance notices…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Cliff Saran.

Steve Ballmer has unveiled plans to reinvent Microsoft with a big push to develop hardware from phones to set top boxes, as it attempts to remain relevant in the era of IT consumerisation. In a memo to staff, the bullish CEO stated: “The bedrock of our new strategy is innovation in deep, rich, high-value experiences and activities. "It’s the starting point for differentiated devices integrated with services. Our family will include phones, tablets, PCs, 2-in-1s, TV-attached devices and other devices to be imagined and developed.”

Addressing the success of Apple in creating a homogenous hardware and cloud environment with desirable devices, Ballmer said: “No technology company has as yet delivered a definitive family of devices useful all day for work and for play, connected with every bit of a person’s information available through one cloud.”…