Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

IBM officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of Linux in the data center and are taking a number of new steps to push along the effort. At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, IBM officials said the company will support the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization hypervisor technology in the Power servers that run Linux. In addition, IBM in July will open two Power Systems Linux Centers in the United States, which will help software developers to more easily build applications that leverage Linux and IBM’s Power 7+ chip technology.

The new KVM support and the new Linux centers, announced June 11, are the latest steps by IBM officials to enhance the use of Linux on their Power systems. Big Blue’s efforts in this area date back more than 10 years, when officials started pushing their Linux-on-Power initiative…

Grazed from IT News Online. Author: PR Announcement.

Samplify, the leading intellectual property company for accelerating memory, storage, and I/O bottlenecks in computing, consumer electronics and mobile devices, announces the availability of its APAX HDF (Hierarchical Data Format ) Storage Library for high-performance computing (HPC), Big Data, and cloud computing applications. With APAX HDF, HPC users can accelerate disk throughput by 3-8X and reduce the storage requirements of their HDF-enabled applications without having to modify their application software. The APAX HDF Storage Library works with Samplify’s APAX Profiler tool to analyze the inherent accuracy in each dataset being stored, and applies the recommended encoding rate to maximize acceleration of algorithms with no effect on results.

"Our engagements with government labs, academic institutions, and private data centers reveal a continuous struggle to manage an ever increasing amount of data," says Al Wegener, Founder and CTO of Samplify. "We have been asked for a simpler way to integrate our APAX encoding technology in Big Data and cloud applications. By using plug-in technology for HDF, we enable any application that currently uses HDF as its storage format to get the benefits of improved disk throughput and reduced storage requirements afforded by APAX."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Wayne Kernochan.

Over the last few years, common techniques for implementing a public, private or hybrid cloud have become well-known. How does crowdsourcing work with the cloud? Plugging your organization into the wealth of cloud expertise residing outside your enterprise can be a bit unnerving. There is a careful balance of the need to "vet" and monitor individual developers and the urge to seek maximum effectiveness by casting the widest net possible.

The result is a set of best practices that Sloan Management Review (Winter, 2013) refers to as "global crowd development." While these best practices apply across a wide range of product development efforts, they fit particularly well with cloud implementation. Involving, as it typically does, virtualization of existing software and customization of additional software allows it to play on the very cloud that supports the new global workforce. And it is definitely global. User case studies testify these development efforts encompass a wide area and are not country-specific, as in the days of offshoring…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Claims that most organisations have moved, or are moving, to cloud email or cloud office systems are not consistent with research by Gartner, Inc. Gartner estimates that there are currently about 50 million enterprise users of cloud office systems, which represent only 8 percent of overall office system users (excluding China and India). Gartner, however, predicts that a major shift toward cloud office systems will begin by the first half of 2015 and reach 33 percent penetration by 2017.

"Despite the hype surrounding migration to the cloud, big differences in movement rates continue, depending on organisations’ size, industry, geography and specific requirements," said Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow. "While 8 percent of business people were using cloud office systems at the start of 2013, we estimate this number will grow to 695 million users by 2022, to represent 60 percent."…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Heroku has introduced a new aspect to its status monitoring service, which allows users to review the cloud platform’s performance over the past year. Previously, the Heroku Status dashboard had focused on the present health of the platform.

The uptime review page covers both the US and Europe regions and was the top-requested feature at the launch of the Europe region in April, the company claimed. At the end of each month, the uptime of the platform is displayed as a percentage. The company claims that, as the Heroku platform is spread across many datacentres, it is rare for all applications running on it to be affected at the same time…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

According to a source within the company, CenturyLink is acquiring AppFog, a platform-as-a-service company. Terms of the deal were not revealed. AppFog will become part of Savvis, a Century Link company that offers cloud infrastructure and hosted IT services. Savvis did not reply to requests for comment about the acquisition. AppFog Co-Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson would also not comment about the deal.

AppFog is a Platform as a Service that can be integrated on-premise into a company’s data center. It is also available as a public service. The company was originally founded as PHPFog before changing its name early in 2011 after receiving $8 million in funding. In August of last year, AppFog acquired Nodester, a Node.js platform. Since last year, the company began focusing more on a private PaaS strategy. AppFog competes in a crowded market that includes Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, Red Hat’s OpenShift, ActiveState’s Stackato and Apprenda…

Grazed from Virtualization Practice. Author: Mike Kavis.

I just returned from attending the Cloud Expo in New York City this week. The conference was dominated by private and hybrid cloud topics. There were several private Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors attending whom I spent a great deal of time talking to as I walked the floor. It seems these days that many enterprises default to private and hybrid clouds and therefore insist on private PaaS as well. It is critical that consumers of PaaS services understand the pros and cons of both public and private PaaS before making a commitment to a PaaS deployment model.

Public PaaS

Public PaaS solutions are platforms that run on the public cloud. The first PaaS solutions in the market place dictated both the stack that the code would be written in and the location of the datacenter that the code would be run on. For example, Force.com requires a proprietary language called Apex, and all of the Apex code runs on Force.com’s datacenter. Google’s PaaS forces developers to write in Python and runs the code in the Google datacenters. Microsoft’ PaaS requires .NET and runs in their datacenters…

Grazed from InfoQ. Author: Zef Hemel.

Netflix, the popular movie streaming site, deploys a hundred times per day, without the use of Chef or Puppet, without a quality assurance department and without release engineers. To do this, Netflix built an advanced in-house PaaS (Platform as a Service) that allows each team to deploy their own part of the infrastructure whenever they want, however many times they require.

During QCon New York 2013, Jeremy Edberg gave a talk about the infrastructure Netflix built to support this rapid pace of iteration on top of Amazon’s AWS.Netflix uses a service-oriented architecture to implement their API, which handles most of the site’s requests (2 billion requests per day). Behind the scenes, the API is separated into many services, where each service is managed by a team, allowing teams to work relatively autonomously and decide themselves when and how often they want to deploy new software…

Grazed from ProofPoint. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular for businesses in a range of sectors. These technologies can offer a variety of benefits that promote efficiency while minimizing costs for a considerable competitive edge. However, storing sensitive information in a cloud environment opens up new risks that need to be addressed to prevent a potential breach or attack. With staff support and the right combination of technologies, companies can enjoy the flexibility and agility that comes with cloud computing without the associated threats to data protection.

Business 2 Community contributor Lindsey LaManna explained that no cookie-cutter security plan can address the unique vulnerabilities and goals within an organization. The most successful strategies, she asserted, are aligned with all departments’ long-term objectives, and consider every potential threat. She also stressed that it is critical to develop an optimal risk management program to support those goals, regardless of where data is stored. This program, she noted, should be realistic, consistent and centrally developed to minimize overall susceptibilities and offer a holistic view of the risk landscape. Next, LaManna revealed that companies need to align goals with measurable results, such as a specified decrease amount of security incidents and further, make cloud providers aware of them…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Kevin McCaney.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an encryption technique that, down the road, could make cloud computing more secure by ensuring that data remains encrypted while being processed. The system combines three existing schemes — homomorphic encryption, garbled circuit and attribute-based encryption — into what the researchers call a functional-encryption scheme, according to a report in MIT News. The result is that a database in the cloud could handle a request and return a response without data being decrypted.

A scheme that keeps data secure every step of the way would likely appeal to public-sector agencies, which are increasingly moving applications and services to cloud systems, although for the foreseeable future they’ll have to rely on current security measures. The key barrier right now is computing power — the functional-encryption scheme requires more of it than would be practical…