Metacloud, Inc., which delivers the industry’s first on-premise, private cloud as a service, today announced it has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round. Canaan Partners led the round and was joined by existing investors Storm Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures.

The financing will be used to accelerate the company’s growth, pace of innovation and global expansion to meet the rapid demand for Metacloud’s Carbon|OS OpenStack-based private cloud solution.

Parallels (www.parallels.com), a leading hosting and cloud services enablement provider, today announced the availability of Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 and Parallels Web Presence Builder 11.5, the newest versions of the company’s control panel and presence builder software. Building on the success of Parallels Plesk Panel 11, the fastest growing hosting control panel product in company history, Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 further enables hosting providers to grow their businesses with rich hosting plans and to use innovative technologies to provide the most intuitive experience for customers. Parallels Web Presence Builder 11.5 further helps hosting providers attract new customers and differentiate their offerings with more advanced tools to convert active prospects into buyers.

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5

Grazed from Defense Systems.  Author: John Edwards.

The Defense Department’s long-term IT strategy calls for storing and distributing virtually all data, even its most sensitive information, in the cloud. In January, the agency reported that it is fully committed to shifting to a cloud computing environment, citing cost, efficiency and user accessibility benefits.

The CIA is already on the path to secure cloud services. After attempting to build a private cloud, the agency and other intelligence organizations opted to turn to commercial sources and awarded a contract to Amazon Web Services in late January. IBM protested the award to the Government Accountability Office, and GAO ruled in IBM’s favor. Negotiations to determine the final resolution are still under way, but observers expect the CIA to continue its migration to a cloud-based system…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Shakespeare declared, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” He might be right about the flower, but in the cloud-sphere, I’m not so sure the same principle applies.  Lately, I’ve talked to many of my colleagues who are offering public or private cloud services. The thing that struck me was the variety of ways they are presenting these services to their customers. Some use “cloud” while others refer to “hosted” or “off-site” or “centralized” or “as-a-service” or … the list goes on.

If cloud is such a hot trend, why aren’t we shouting “CLOUD” from the mountaintops?

Is it because people don’t like the cloud? That doesn’t seem to be the case. CompTIA’s Third Annual Trends in Cloud Computing report (July 2012) reported that 85 percent of respondents feel “more” or “significantly more” positive about cloud computing compared to the previous year…

Grazed from CSRWire.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Increased use of cloud computing services will reduce the dependence on energy and help reduce global environmental damage with savings of over US$2.2 billion (€1.65 billion) and is 95% more efficient where 1 tonne of greenhouse gas (GHG) created by cloud leads to 20 tonnes abatted from customers according to the findings of a study released today by a research team from Harvard University, Imperial College and Reading University, sponsored by Microsoft Europe and the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI).

The study claims that 11.2 TWh less energy will be consumed annually by the time 80% of public and private organisations in the countries studied opt to provide cloud-based email, customer relationship management and groupware solutions to their staff, beyond current levels of adoption. This translates to 75% of the energy consumed by the Capital Region of Brussels or 25% of the energy consumed by London. It is equivalent to abating 4.5 mega tonnes of CO₂ emissions annually or taking 1.7+ million cars off the road. 60 per cent of these potential savings relate to small or micro-sized firms…

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Jack Clark.

Google has instrumented its infrastructure to the point where it can predict future demand 68% per cent better than previously, giving other cloud providers a primer for how to get the most out of their IT gear.  The system was outlined in an academic paper AGILE: Elastic distributed resource scaling for Infrastructure-as-a-Service which was released by the giant on Wednesday at the USENIX conference in California.

Agile lets Google predict future resource demands for workloads through wavelet analysis, which uses telemetry from across the Google stack to look at resource utilization in an application and then make a prediction about likely future resource use. Google then uses this information to spin up VMs in advance of demand, letting it avoid downtime…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Matt Prigge.

On the list of things that IT pros would rather never have to think about, software licensing takes a close second behind backups. Holding frequent license compliance checks and ensuring that licensing is purchased as it’s needed is frequently a challenging, time-consuming process. All too often, these tasks are neglected, leaving many enterprises open to substantial legal liability.

As I’ve noted before, the licensing landscape is no better when you move into the cloud. In fact, it gets substantially more confusing, both for users and for the cloud providers seeking their business…

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."…