Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

SPARC, which provides software development services for the government and commercial sectors and develops commercial software products, today announced a collaboration with Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, focused on enabling the use of cloud throughout the federal government. Through the collaboration, SPARC is utilizing Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, for its internal demo team and for testing with its internal customers.

Headquartered in Charleston, S.C., SPARC boasts a culture of innovation and adoption of the latest technologies such as OpenShift for PaaS and OpenStack for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and an alignment with the open source community mirroring the same commitment of Red Hat. The collaboration between the two companies is a key strategy in SPARC’s government and commercial services businesses, and has enabled SPARC to hit the ground running…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Reliance on legacy IT infrastructure is having a significant impact on productivity, reliability and costs, with constant upgrades needed to keep up with the networking requirements of virtualisation and cloud computing. This is one of the key findings of a global study of 1,750 enterprise IT decision makers and office workers into the networking problems faced by companies today.

According to the report, commissioned by networking vendor Brocade, dependence on out-dated datacentres means one third of respondents admitted their organisations experience multiple network failures per week. Additionally, while 75 per cent of IT decision makers surveyed said they had updated their IT environments in the last three years, 91 per cent said their existing infrastructures still required substantial upgrades to meet the standards required for integration with virtualisation and cloud technologies…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Amazon today announced that it is dropping the prices of dedicated instances on its EC2 cloud computing platform by up to 80%. Dedicated per region fees, which are charged on top of the regular EC2 fees, will now set developers back $2 per hour instead of $10, for example. That’s a large price cut, even by Amazon’s standards – and the company has a long history of lowering the prices of its cloud computing services.

Today’s price reduction, Amazon says, is an example of its “tradition of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our customers.” The new prices will be take effect on July 1 and will apply to all supported instance types and AWS regions…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Kaseya is adding business service management and monitoring for both private and public clouds to its catalog of capabilities with the acquisition of Zyrion, a provider of cloud and IT service monitoring software. Kaseya’s focus has been on the remote monitoring and management space, and the company has worked with VARs and managed service providers (MSPs) for some time to empower partners in their own businesses. The vendor also provides an online backup service for its partners that leverages Amazon S3.

With this latest acquisition, Kaseya is adding addition service montoring software to its portfolio. Zyrion monitors and manages IT services using ITIL-based business service management technology for distributed and complex data center environments. Combined with Kaseya’s technology, Kaseya expects to be able to offer a complete portfolio of business services for monitoring and managing private and public clouds…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

Barracuda Networks Inc., a leading provider of security and storage solutions, today announced deeper integration of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall within Windows Azure. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is one of the first Web Application Firewalls (WAF) available that is integrated into Windows Azure and can be deployed as a single instance or as part of a scalable security platform. This announcement further strengthens the relationship between Microsoft and Barracuda, first announced in February 2013.

As customers accelerate the migration of applications to cloud providers such as Windows Azure, they often overlook application security requirements. The vast majority of successful attacks, including modern application layer risks like SQL injection, application DDos, cross-site scripting and session tampering, target the application layer. Windows Azure provides organizations with a secure cloud infrastructure platform that is augmented by the Barracuda Web Application Firewall to provide customers strong application security within Windows Azure…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon.com and its Amazon Web Services unit appear to have hit a growth inflection point. Last September, Amazon.com became the largest hosting company in the world, based on the number of its Web-facing servers, as measured by online Web crawling and measurement firm Netcraft. Eight months later, Netcraft reported in May, it had grown by more than 33%, to 158,000 servers.

The Netcraft survey is limited in how much it can see and must estimate the number of computers that operate behind the "Web-facing" servers of a given company. It says on its website that its counts miss those servers that don’t respond directly to an HTTP call, such as the database servers, firewalls, proxy servers, load balancing servers and others that lie behind the ones it sees at a given address. It estimates that it counts about two-thirds of the servers in use at a large hosting service, such as Amazon…

Grazed from BroadWay World. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Xen Project, a Collaborative Project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the availability of Xen Project hypervisor version 4.3. The Xen Project powers more than 10 million users across enterprise and cloud computing in addition to embedded and mobile devices. Xen Project is backed by some of the largest names in computing including Amazon Web Services, AMD, Google, Oracle, Intel and many other hardware and hosting service providers.

The Xen Project open source virtualization platform is licensed under the GPLv2 with a similar governance structure to the Linux kernel. The investments the Xen Project has been making in further opening up development, culminating with the decision to be an independent Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation, have resulted in increased collaborative development and the inclusion of the following new capabilities and improvements in the Xen Project 4.3:..

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Germany’s interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich — the country’s top security official — cautioned privacy-conscious residents and organizations to steer clear of U.S.-based service companies, according to the Associated Press. As InfoWorld’s Ted Samson has reported, "Friedrich is by no means the first E.U. politician to issue this type of warning, and as details continue to emerge about the U.S. government’s widespread surveillance programs, such warnings are certain to garner greater attention."

The blowback in Europe around NSA surveillance is no surprise. Privacy has always been a huge issue in Europe, as demonstrated by confrontations with Google, among others. However, the real privacy wars in the cloud have yet to be fought, both in the United States and in Europe. This battle will likely occur in courtrooms and in government regulatory agencies…

Grazed from Information Week. Author: Charles Babcock.

The OpenStack cloud community will find it has a major addition to its membership as IBM converts SoftLayer Technologies’ existing 13 data centers in North America, Europe and Asia into an implementation of the open source code cloud. And with that conversion, IBM will have the vehicle it needs to compete with Amazon Web Services for enterprise-level, cloud computing customers. SoftLayer, a seven-year-old, rapidly growing infrastructure-as-a-service provider, will give IBM greater IaaS core competence and extend its reach as enterprise users start to spend on cloud services.

SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby welcomed the changes Monday, as IBM completed its acquisition, first announced June 4. Crosby said he and the rest of the SoftLayer executive staff will remain in place with multi-year contracts, along with their 700 employees, as they transition into becoming "a foundation unit" in IBM’s new Cloud Services division, which will consist of SoftLayer plus existing SmartCloud services. The division will be a unit of IBM Global Services…

Asigra Inc., a leading Cloud Backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986 today announced cloud-to-cloud backup support for Google Apps. With this new capability, Asigra now supports multiple Tier One cloud applications and platforms, including Salesforce, IBM SmartCloud, Google Apps and others. Now included in Asigra Cloud Backup version 12.2, this new functionality ensures data recovery while ending the requirement for multiple application/platform centric backup solutions to protect physical, virtual, cloud and mobile computing platforms.

Organizations using Google Apps for business operations are enjoying the benefits that a move to a SaaS-based application presents. However, even as companies transfer their capital expenditure and IT management tasks to Google, they are ultimately responsible for the data stored in these environments.