Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

SaltStack is a Salt Lake City startup that beat out five other startups to win the Structure 2013 LaunchPad competition. Actually, the two companies committed to DevOps types of systems emerged as the winners. A three-judge panel of venture capitalists — Luis Robles of Sequoia Capital, Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad and Bipul Sinha of Lightspeed Venture Partners — selected SaltStack for its comprehensive deployment management system and its early traction and rapid buildup of customers. The Salt open source project on which it is based is only two years old.

CEO and co-founder Marc Chenn said developer interest in Salt, a Python-based system, has propelled it into the top 10 open source projects in the world, ranking just behind the big cloud project, OpenStack, according to a GitHub ranking in December. SaltStack itself is "cloud agnostic" and can be used on top of multiple cloud systems…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat OpenStack was mentioned 32 times during the Linux company’s Q1 2014 earnings call earlier this week. The open source cloud platform is receiving tons of hype. But here’s the reality check: Red Hat (RHT) concedes OpenStack will NOT drive any material revenues, billings or bookings for the next 12 months. Does that mean Red Hat partners and customers can ignore OpenStack for now? Not necessarily. Here’s why.

When asked about Red Hat OpenStack during the earnings call this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst offered these revealing sound bites:

• "Regarding OpenStack, we’re very excited about the momentum we have around OpenStack, the interest, the early customers who we’re working with on it. But I also want to temper expectations."
• "My guess is we will do a lot of POCs [proof of concepts] in the next year on OpenStack, but people don’t start writing even 6-figure checks for software. They may for some services, but for software, until they get a little closer to production, that’s probably still a year or 18 months away."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

"I’m really surprised when people say they’re not doing SOA now, they’re doing ‘cloud.’ Statements like that really concern me. Because it reflects a lack of understanding that these are not in any way competing or alternative approaches to building and evolving IT enterprises. It’s the opposite."

Those are the cautionary words of Thomas Erl, co-author of the just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, who points out that a lot of the work that took place behind creating and building service oriented architecture is now serving to better plan and deploy cloud computing-enabled systems. I recently spoke with Thomas, who is also CEO of Arcitura Education, an SOA an cloud certification and training firm, about the evolving cloud architecture space, as well as his latest book…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Some consolidation in the area of cloud services for enterprises: Intuit, the business services company that targets SMEs, is buying Elastic Intelligence, creators of Connection Cloud, a product that helps SMEs create DIY cloud-based apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Elastic Intelligence was founded by Roger Sippl, the serial entrepreneur who also founded Informix (sold to IBM for $1 billion), Vantive (now a part of Oracle) and Visigenic. He’s also an investor in IFTTT, among other things. Sippl is joining Intuit as part of the deal.

Intuit says that it plans to integrate the Connection Cloud technology with Intuit QuickBase, its web database software platform. The idea, says Sippl, will be to attract more SMBs to the platform with the promise that apps will be easy for them to develop, “without the need for expensive developers or complex API programming.”…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph F. Kovar.

Dell wants to be a major player in the cloud industry, just as long as it doesn’t involve building its own public cloud. That’s the essence of Dell’s cloud strategy since it said in late May that it is discontinuing its own multi-tenant public cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering in favor of working with partners to develop private, public, and hybrid clouds.

It’s a strategy that Dell’s channel partners, particularly those who spent time with Dell at this year’s Dell Enterprise Forum, applauded as one more channel-friendly than one in which the vendor offered its own public cloud. Dell is leveraging its resources to help partners develop private clouds, said Joel Carlson, an account manager at Syntax, a St. Paul-based Dell partner…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

Virtualization brings numerous security issues apart from the enormous benefits and productivity. Most of the organizations are reluctant to migrate to the cloud just because of the massive security vulnerabilities of cloud computing. Hypervisor, which is used in any virtualization environment to elevate the virtual machine collaboration, can be easily breached if not secured optimally. Hypervisor based cloud servers are always exposed to the Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the “single point of failure” weakness of the hypervisor based cloud servers can easy be exploited to take down the whole cloud along with its resources. We will give you some state of the art yet simple ways to secure a cloud based virtualization environment which is using a hypervisor for virtual communication. You can use any one of the tips keeping in view the organizational needs and suitability.

Depleting the emulation frequency of the hypervisor and minimizing its remote calls to the resources across the cloud is one of the most useful and easy ways to secure a cloud. “NoHype” architecture makes sure that hypervisor does not have to interact with the virtual machines constantly. Allocation of the resources, I/O calls and assigning of processor cores is done before the start of the collaboration thus minimizing the active interaction time of the hypervisor…

Grazed from All Things Digital. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison previewed a series of announcements next week concerning the company’s aims in the cloud computing and software-as-a-service business. During a conference call with analysts to discuss Oracle’s Q4 earnings results, Ellison said Oracle will next week make a series of “startling” announcements with several companies, including Microsoft and Salesforce.com.

“Next week we will be announcing partnerships with the largest and most important SAAS companies in the cloud, and they will be committing to our 12C technology for years to come,” Ellison said. He went on to name Salesforce and Microsoft among those companies…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: David Strom.

Cloud computing and data storage have quickly become tools of the trade for businesses of all sizes, and now a growing number of service providers have stepped up their game to deliver the next level of data security solutions to their customers via the cloud.

Traditionally data security was about having robust on-premises systems and software maintained by an in-house team. That’s changing. The non-profit industry group Cloud Security Alliance promotes advances in security using traditional models alongside web-based solutions…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Jack

Cloud computing has been changing the way businesses achieve greater innovation and agility, but it has also been impacting the way that actual employees interact with business tools and are able to do their work. 20 years ago, employees would typically have very powerful work stations, in the sense that the local, personal computer was where all the heavy processing and apps resided.

Today, moderately powerful workstations are the launching point for a broader mix of workloads, some local, some web enabled. Upwards of 75% of workloads employees are handling are now web-based, whether we are talking about email, CRM, analytics, etc. Some apps (I’m looking at you Quickbooks and Excel) are still local, but that’s changing, too…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

During yesterday’s Reuters cloud panel discussion, executives talked about confusion and information overload in the cloud market that might be causing a bit of a growth stall, as businesses try to figure out their next moves. I agree, if only based on a couple emails I’ve gotten lately from IT admins struggling to suss out which vendor to go with given the rapid pace of change in the market.

It was John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO, who dubbed it “analysis paralysis.” Businesses are struggling to build their cloud strategies, including which vendor to choose and how to get started. “Things are in such a state of change right now I don’t think they can feel confident they’ve made the right decision at any point,” he said. “Every day there’s so much change coming at them. It’s happening at a lot of large enterprises, they don’t know who to partner with.”…