Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Matt Prigge.

When weighing whether to go to the cloud or which cloud service to use when you do, it’s a no-brainer to make sure the service’s reliability, cost effectiveness, and security track records match your requirements. However, many cloud buyers don’t carefully consider two other critically important characteristics of any cloud service: the degree to which you can control your services without intervention from your vendor and the degree to which you cede responsibility for day-to-day management tasks to your vendor.

When I think back to some of the more well-publicized failures of megascale cloud infrastructures (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure), each has been followed by enraged forum posts from users who had incurred downtime, lost production data, or both. It’s entirely understandable for customers to be irate when a service they’re paying for fails. However, it’s also an excellent indication that these cloud users didn’t fully understand that they still bore a large responsibility for managing and protecting their systems…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Colin Steele.

IT departments reevaluating their server virtualization spending have another free option to choose from.  Citrix Systems Inc. today released its XenServer 6.2 hypervisor to the open source community. All of the features previously in the XenServer Platinum Edition will be available at no charge.

Citrix had made parts of XenServer code open source in the past, as part of various cloud computing initiatives, but this marks the first time the entire product has been made available to the community.  "That’s pretty substantial," said Francis Poeta, president and CEO of P and M Computers, Inc. a Citrix partner in Cliffside Park, N.J. "It’s a great move. They’ve got to do something."…

Grazed from Salesforce.com.  Author: PR Announcement.

Oracle has once again agreed to a cloud computing project with a former rival by signing a collaboration deal with Salesforce.com.  The companies said in a joint statement that Salesforce would be migrating the core technology of its cloud computing platforms to Oracle products including Database and Java Middleware. Additionally, the company will adopt Oracle Exadata systems and integrate Fusion HCM and Financial Cloud into its services.

The deal could end what has become a frigid relationship between Oracle and Salesforce.com. Driven by growing competition in the cloud and CRM markets, the two firms have engaged in a very public war of words led by chief executives Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison.  Most recently, the two companies squared off at the 2011 Oracle OpenWorld conference when Benioff was unceremoniously removed from his scheduled keynote address shortly before the conference kicked off…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Doug Henschen.

Cloud computing made strange bedfellows out of Microsoft and Oracle on Monday as the longtime rivals announced a strategic partnership whereby customers will be able to run Oracle software and Java on Microsoft’s Azure platform.

The partnership, which was jointly announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Oracle president Mark Hurd, will see Oracle certify and support Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Java, Oracle Linux and Oracle applications on Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure. Oracle’s software already runs on Windows Server in hundreds of thousands of on-premises deployments, but the partnership extends that capability to Microsoft’s cloud. It’s a step Ballmer described as crucial to customers of both companies…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft has platform-as-a-service. VMware has PaaS. Savvis has PaaS. Why shouldn’t Progress Software have PaaS too?  The other parties offer PaaS as part of their cloud service offerings. Progress, until now, hasn’t been viewed as either a cloud service or cloud software provider. That’s why it needs PaaS. Earlier this month, Progress announced its Progress Pacific PaaS system for cloud application and mobile developers. The system won’t become available until July.

Progress already has a presence in on-premises development. The company name springs from what was originally the Progress 4GL language, which it changed in 2006 to OpenEdge Advanced Business Language (ABL) to escape the limitations of being classified as a fourth-generation language. However, ABL maintains an English-like syntax and access to a built-in relational database, like its 4GL predecessor…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Starting Tuesday, Joyent is offering a new type of storage combined with compute services. Joyent Manta Storage Service will keep data stored close to the servers that will analyze and work with it. That description might be applied to Hadoop, which runs big data batch jobs on a single cluster. Joyent Manta will use MapReduce to bring data and compute together on one or several clusters. The clusters may be located in one or several data centers. And unlike Hadoop, the data will remain close to the compute resources on a persistent basis, eliminating the long extract, transform and load (ETL) processes that often accompany the execution of a big data job.

Thus, Manta Storage Service will be able to do a single job or a series of jobs, some of them batch, some of them near real-time analytics. Manta, in fact, could fit a Hadoop job into its compute and object storage system, and run a wide variety of other applications as well, depending on what its users want to do. As a service from Joyent, customers will be charged — by the second — for the Manta services they use…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

Puppet Labs, a provider of IT automation software for system administrators, has made Puppet Enterprise 3.0 available. It delivers a complete cloud automation solution for enterprise customers, providing scalability and orchestration capabilities and a unified, software-defined approach to automation of compute, network and storage layers. This enterprise edition enables customers to reap the full benefits of cloud computing.

“Some of today’s largest and most successful SaaS clouds use our solutions to automate their infrastructure,” said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. “With Puppet Enterprise 3.0, we’re making the scalability, orchestration and software-defined capabilities that power those SaaS clouds accessible to any IT organization, enabling customers to take full advantage of their dynamic infrastructure.”…

Grazed from Centrify. Author: PR Announcement.

Centrify Corporation, a leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today announced the availability of Centrify for Dropbox for Business, an easy-to-deploy cloud service that offers the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based single sign-on (SSO), access control and mobile management. Centrify eliminates password sprawl with Active Directory-based SSO for Dropbox for Business across users’ various choices of computing and mobile devices, while giving IT centralized control over access to hosted applications and resources. Centrify is a preferred SSO and identity management partner for Dropbox.

"We’re excited to partner with Centrify to offer single sign-on and integration to Dropbox for business customers of all sizes across the world," said Ari Friedland, head of business development for Dropbox for Business. "We’re leveraging the SSO industry standard, SAML, and working with Centrify to let our customers leverage their Active Directory identities for Seamless access to Dropbox, with one less password to remember and maintain."…

Grazed from Logility. Author: PR Announcement.

Logility Inc., a leading supplier of collaborative solutions to optimize the supply chain, today announced Logility Cloud Services, a comprehensive deployment portfolio that provides a flexible menu of services to accelerate the benefits of supply chain initiatives. Building on more than 10 years of cloud deployment experience, customers are able to tap into the industry-leading and award-winning capabilities of Logility Voyager Solutions either as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Hosted or On-Premise deployment.

Today’s enterprise environment is growing more complex and each company is unique in their market, challenges and opportunities. Logility Cloud Services provides companies a choice in deployment methodology and services that best suit their individual needs and allows them to evolve as their business changes; moving between SaaS, on-premise, and managed services as their IT strategies transform…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

eXo, the Enterprise Social Platform company, today opened access to eXo Cloud. Built on the experience acquired with its previous SaaS offering, Cloud Workspaces, eXo Cloud offers online, instant access to all the features of eXo Platform 4. It integrates social and enterprise collaboration features in a single on-demand offering. This release of eXo Cloud is offered free of charge, and users can sign up for accounts at http://cloud.exoplatform.com.

A year and a half after launching Cloud Workspaces in beta, eXo launches its production-ready social intranet SaaS: eXo Cloud. The beta campaign of Cloud Workspaces enabled eXo to acquire valuable feedback on both its product and its cloud service, leading to visible improvements on eXo Platform 4 and its SaaS counterpart, eXo Cloud. These improvements include a design overhaul, an easier user experience and a more robust and flexible multi-tenant platform…