Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Savvis, the cloud unit of the third largest telecom supplier in the U.S., CenturyLink, has acquired AppFog, a platform as a service (PaaS) that supports deploying applications to multiple cloud environments.  As part of Savvis, AppFog will add features that let developers create applications that link to data sources across different data centers or instantly clone themselves in a new location. The AppFog platform already contains a "clone" button that replicates an application and generates an up-to-date data feed to the new location.

When placed on top of the extensive CenturyLink network, "clone" could start to take on system backup and disaster recovery characteristics. "You can not only work on an application for a single infrastructure as a service. You can pick the infrastructure you want it to work on," Lucas Carlson, founder and CEO of AppFog in Portland, Ore., said in an interview. Savvis has completed the acquisition of AppFog and Carlson will serve as VP of cloud evangelism at the parent company…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

Cloud computing is the evolution and divergence of many seemingly sovereign computing trends including SaaS, PaaS, XaaS, IaaS, virtualization, distributed computing, Web 2.0, storage, grid computing and more importantly Data Center automation.

IT organizations can no longer afford to use manual or practices of a disparate set of tools to manage physical and virtual resources infrastructure. These approaches are costly, error-prone, leaving few free resources to focus on innovation. The revolution of cloud computing means going to think about keeping the business on the basis of services that provide necessary functionality and automation is one of the criteria among them…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

MessageSolution, Inc., the global technology leader in information archiving and eDiscovery solutions, will be exhibiting at HostingCon 2013 and showcasing its high-performance cloud computing and Managed Service Provider (MSP) platforms in Austin, Texas from June 17 to 19.

MessageSolution will also be introducing its enhanced partnership program, which is designed to simplify the transition from MessageSolution hosted cloud archiving to MSP hosted platform. While MSPs are familiarizing themselves with the MessageSolution features and functions, MessageSolution hosts the partner’s clients in its cloud. After partners develop a familiarity of the functionalities, they can migrate their clients’ archived data to their own data center or cloud networks to leverage their existing MSP infrastructure for a maximized margin…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Here are some ways that cloud technology leverages Agile development: Agile took off as a philosophy because the tech industry is simply impatient by nature. What used to take two to three years to develop now only takes less than a year. And with cloud computing and virtualization, Agile development is taken to a new level. This only shows that Agile and Cloud are meant for each other.

Setup an unlimited number of staging and testing servers.

Development teams used to deploy physical staging and testing servers so they became limited because of hardware resource cost. But with cloud computing, they can virtualize an unlimited number of servers and be able to do parallel work as is dictated by the Agile philosophy…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

Australia has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, and we’re known to be early adopters of new technology, so bringing the likes of iPhones and iPads into work just seems like natural progression; the inexorable outcome. But bring your own device (BYOD) is by no means the end point; it’s just an early symptom of the wider mobility trend infiltrating the corporate world. Mobile devices being used within organisations are changing how workers do their jobs, where they’re doing their jobs, and how companies prioritise workspaces.

It’s all about the workers

Attracting and retaining staff is now a priority for many companies, as skilled and talented workers are increasingly hard to come by. According to a report by professional services firm Deloitte, for every 100 people retiring over the next five years, there are less than 125 people leaving education and joining the workforce; that’s the lowest ratio in Australia’s history…

Grazed from The Boston Globe. Author: Naila Moreira.

Long missing from the biotech and high-tech map of the region, Holyoke is finally finding an advantage in its location on the western end of the Massachusetts Turnpike: It’s much faster to reach than some of the most connected places on the Internet.

Beginning this summer, life-sciences companies in the Boston area will be able to send troves of data to a new state-affiliated computing facility in Holyoke in a fraction of the time it would take to ship it to a commercial data center. Located at the new Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, the life-sciences facility could lead to breakthrough drugs and other products by making it easier, faster, and even cheaper for companies to investigate leads involving large amounts of data…

Grazed from IT Jungle. Author: Alex Woodie.

IBM i shops and managed service providers that adopt the latest release of IBM’s SmartCloud Entry for Power software will gain several new points of control over their private cloud environments, including the capability to start and stop workloads at any time, and the capability to deploy multiple copies of an image simultaneously. IBM also divulged pricing details with the SmartCloud Entry for Power version 3.1 announcements, and made a statement of direction regarding "adopting a common technology base" rooted in open standards for SmartCloud Entry.

SmartCloud Entry for Power is a lightweight (for IBM anyway), AIX-based software product that allows organizations to turn their Power Systems servers into an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) private cloud environment. The software lets administrators create, modify, and delete virtualized slices of their server over a Web interface. It also delivers self-service provisioning for end users; provides security, auditing, and authentication capabilities; and includes basic activity monitoring and billing functions…

Grazed from Hydrapinion.  Author: Ian Grayson.

We all know cloud computing is changing the data centres of many organisations, but its impact on the corporate desktop is also increasing by the day.  Rather than shelling out for expensive office productivity packages, growing numbers of businesses are opting to provide their employees with cloud-based variants.

The trend first emerged among small and mid-sized businesses where the lower cost and reduced complexity of such an approach is particularly attractive. Now, however, the shift is becoming more prevalent inside larger outfits too…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Amy Armitage.

For the early history of computing, data tended to be kept locked down within isolated, local systems for security reasons. With the advent of the cloud however, the idea of accessing data from anywhere, using cost-effective on-demand services is now thoroughly mainstream. Indeed, the future of IT is the cloud.  As cloud computing continues its triumphant spread, one issue that has continued to get undeservedly little attention, though, is the geographical location of data. The ongoing NSA scandal is finally bringing to light just one aspect of how critically important the physical location of digital data has become.

Distance can increase risk

On the most basic level, choosing a cloud provider whose data centers are located on a distant continent will obviously increase latency and so adversely affect performance. For businesses where performance and speed are relevant that’s a major concern. But it’s also worth considering that submarine communication cables, despite all their protective layers, are regularly broken by fishing trawlers, anchors and natural events such as earthquakes and turbidity currents – more than 50 cable breakdowns a year are repaired in the Atlantic alone. So relying on distant cloud providers can add a layer of risk of service dropouts that isn’t tenable for many businesses…

Grazed from iProgrammer.  Author: Harry Fairhead.

A video from a team at ETH Zurich shows full 3D mapping in real time being performed by an inexpensive, lightweight Turtlebot. Instead of the computation being done locally it is offloading it using Rapyuta, the RoboEarth Cloud Engine.

 As depicted in the diagram below, the  robot is equipped with an RGBD sensor (ASUS Xtion PRO), an ARM-based single board computer (Odriod-U2), and an off-the-shelf wireless dongle. The robot transmits RGB images (QVGA resolution) and depth images (QVGA resolution) at 30 FPS to Rapyuta with a frame by frame compression (JPEG for RGB, and PNG for depth images). The single board computer is therefore only used for compression, communication, and low-level control of the robot.  The computation is performed in Ireland, courtesy of Amazon Web Services…