Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Dell has ditched the public cloud IaaS [infrastructure as a service] offerings it built on the OpenStack platform and on VMware’s vCloud suite, in favour of converged infrastructure, private cloud and a cloud partner programme. But will the strategy help the troubled supplier secure a future in the cloud era?

At its Enterprise Forum 2013 event in San Jose, Dell made its biggest storage and server announcement in a long time, which included products such as VRTX, Active Infrastructure 1.1, modular datacentre, Dell Compellent SAN 6.4 and flash arrays…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced enhancements across its systems portfolio that are designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward Software Defined Environments (SDE). Enhancements to IBM’s Smarter Storage line of Flash, disk and tape systems give clients faster access to business critical information and Big Data insights. New High Performance Computing solutions bring HPC capabilities to mainstream servers to help more clients crunch their ever-mounting volumes of data faster.

New capabilities added to the IBM PureSystems family expert integrated systems are designed to help clients reduce the security risks often faced when deploying cloud solutions, as well as enable quick recovery and restoration after disasters. A new mobile solution based on IBM Worklight server on PureSystems for both Power and x86 was created to accelerate clients’ access to millions of mobile users by allowing mobile applications to be deployed in as little as 30 minutes…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

While cloud computing has many advantages, too few organizations weigh the long-term impact of over-reliance on vendors providing cloud services. The goal of cloud computing should be to reduce dependence on vendors — but the opposite seems to be happening.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Thomas Erl, co-author of the just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, about these concerns. Erl’s latest book is intended to explore the building blocks, or “concrete, well-defined, models, architectural layers, and technology mechanisms” of cloud…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Shamus McGillicuddy.

F5 Networks strengthened its relationship with Microsoft’s network virtualization and IaaS technologies by adding NVGRE gateway functionality to its BIG-IP application delivery controller and the availability of a virtual BIG-IP for the Windows Azure cloud.

Network Virtualization using Generic Routing Encapsulation (NVGRE), the tunneling protocol analogous to VMware’s virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN), is the foundation of building network virtualization with Microsoft Hyper-V. F5 Networks will start by offering NVGRE gateway functionality on the virtual edition of its BIG-IP application delivery controller (ADC) and later add support on hardware appliances…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Andy Gottlieb.

Having spent the last several columns looking in depth into why MPLS is no longer the only answer for building enterprise WANs, this time let’s go up a few thousand feet and look at the bigger picture, before any further dives down into the details.

"The cloud" is happening. We’ll leave aside for the moment exactly what "the cloud" means, as it tends to mean different things to different people, but I think readers here have at least a "kinda sorta" understanding of what it is. As it relates to wide area networks and enterprise IT, let’s go for now with Gartner’s definition of cloud "as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service using Internet technologies."…

Grazed from ThinkStrategies. Author: PR Announcement.

THINKstrategies, Inc., the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the Cloud Computing services market, announced today that FrontRange, the only provider of Hybrid IT Service Management solutions, has been named a winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. This program promotes the measurable business benefits delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards is an ongoing program administered by THINKstrategies’ Cloud Computing Showplace to recognize SaaS companies that are delivering measurable business benefits to specific user organizations. These benefits can include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: James Stirling.

A new Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering from Progress Software will make it easier for organisations to build and manage ‘connected apps’ on any cloud, mobile or social platform, the company has claimed. Dubbed Progress Pacific, the offering is built on technology the company gained through its recent acquisition of independent software vendor Rollbase.

It is, Progress claims, the foundation of a major PaaS transformation for the software vendor and will address customer and partner demand in the fast growing cloud market. Progress Pacific is designed to give users the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environments and business logic tools that best fit their needs and allows them to avoid vendor lock-in…