Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CiRBA is aiming to tie various cloud management platforms, including OpenStack, into its capacity transformation and control software with the release of a new API. The company noted in its announcement the new API enables organizations to connect the cloud management platforms they use with CiRBA with the end goal of optimizing new workload placements within internal clouds.

CiRBA specializes in providing analytics to determine the optimal placement of virtual machines within cloud infrastructure at the environment and server levels. According to the vendor, it reduces the risk of capacity shortfalls and driving up VM density by an average of 48 percent…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Michael Kanellos.

The cloud computing era is upon us, and if you make servers, life could really begin to stink. A report today from Lawrence Berkeley Lab—which we previewed last week at Google GOOG -0.82%’s “How Green is the Internet” conference—examines what would happen if businesses around the country shifted from owning their own data centers and servers to handing responsibility for email and productivity applications to cloud providers.

The energy savings, the authors found, would be tremendous. The energy required to manage data centers (and produce the equipment used inside them) would drop by 87%, from 373 petajoules a year to 47 petajoules, a year…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Hosting, managed service and cloud providers working with Veeam now have access to the company’s Backup Management Suite. The vendor announced this as an expansion to its Veeam Cloud Provider program. Veeam Backup Management Suite 6.5 is a single, integrated solution that combines Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE with the goal of protecting organization’s investments in virtualization while increasing administrator productivity and the mitigation of daily management risks with real-time monitoring, backup and replication, document and management reporting and other features and functions.

Available now to partners, Veeam Backup Management Suite is available as a per-VM monthly rental or as a perpetual license sold in blocks of 10 virtual machines. According to Veeam, the suite was designed to be a single, integrated data protection and infrastructure management solution for VMware and Hyper-V that not only meets the requirements of organizations, but is also affordable and easy to use…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cirracore, a leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, has announced their Capacity Assessment service based on a self-contained, ultra-small appliance that provides vital information regarding businesses’ overall server and storage environment. This service allows enterprises to understand the actual capacity and the resources that are needed before migrating some or all of their infrastructure to the cloud in an easy-to-understand, graphical report.

For customers that have already virtualized their infrastructure, the Cirracore Capacity Assessment service can also assist by fine-tuning what resources are being consumed and assisting with intelligent sizing decisions. "The value of the information the Cirracore Capacity Assessment service provides has been the real driver for having so many customers and prospects have the assessment preformed,” said Fred Tanzella, Cirracore’s founder and CEO…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

IBM has trotted out a new concept it calls BlueMix, a combination of DevOps and Infrastructure as a Service, but its practical application lies far in the future. In theory, BlueMix could move cloud computing forward by uniting agile application development with the underlying infrastructure once and for all. It combines application services with a software-defined, programmable and automated underlying infrastructure that would eventually use analytics, rather than human input, to provision resources. It would all be glued together with application program interfaces (APIs), and all delivered by IBM, of course.

But even IBM’s CTO acknowledged the concept’s complexity, saying it’s not intended for every application. "Note that I didn’t say it was easy; it’s possible," said Danny Sabbah, IBM CTO and general manager of its next-generation platform group, during a keynote at Cloud Computing Expo here this week. BlueMix is in private beta under IBM’s jStart client engagement group for emerging technologies. There will be a SoftLayer region devoted to the technology, Sabbah said…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Last week, news broke that the NSA has been spying on Verizon customer in the United States. The bulletin came via the Guardian, which had obtained a copy of a secret court order allowing the NSA to spy on millions of Verizon customers. As reported by Glenn Greenwald: "The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing."

This development has multiple implications for U.S. citizens, but high-tech industries will feel a distinctive hit. It seems that we only recently addressed fears over the Patriot Act and the notion that the U.S. government could seize the servers containing your data from your cloud provider. It was certainly possible, but not likely…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Metacloud, Inc. today announced a new release of Carbon|OS, the industry’s premier OpenStack-based operating system for the enterprise environment. Representing a full year of development work by Metacloud and the larger OpenStack community, Carbon|OS combines the simplicity of the public cloud with the performance, security, and cost advantages of private cloud — all on clients’ existing hardware infrastructure. It is available immediately and has already been deployed by Fortune 5000 companies in industries including entertainment, finance, and technology.

"Metacloud has brought an entirely new delivery model to market for enterprise software — one where product and support are tightly intertwined. In the traditional consumer SaaS model, features sit atop software, on hardware, in an off-premise data center. Our enterprise SaaS model is similar, but the hardware is on premise and owned by our customers, allowing them economies of scale," said Steve Curry, President and founder of Metacloud. "This model is already rapidly gaining traction and it’s clear that the practice of shipping software to customers to install and operate on their own is on its way out."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Christine Parizo.

As more and more businesses turn to cloud services to replace on-premises applications, they must also negotiate service level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. Doing that job well requires that software architects and developers understand exactly what they need in terms of quality assurance (QA) testing, uptime and other core business functionality.

But frequently, experts say, SLA negotiations tend to focus more on price and less on function and enforcement. QA, in particular, gets short shrift. "All too often, they haven’t thought about which things are really meaningful … especially in test coverage," said Matt Johnson, chief marketing officer of Southborough, Mass.-based testing provider uTest. That misstep is particularly common in smaller businesses with less in-house development experience and fewer staffers…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell has announced a broad range of innovative cloud client computing technologies that deliver turnkey solutions purposefully built to complement and enhance corporate IT environments based on Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp.

When organisations of all sizes are increasingly looking to empower their employees with access to corporate information across application platforms and devices, Dell and Citrix’s new cloud client computing solutions provide customers with powerful tools to work securely and productively. The combination of simplicity, flexibility, and power in Dell’s technology creates an unmatched end-to-end virtual computing experience and alleviates customer pain points from the data center to the endpoint devices, including: the Dell DVS Enterprise – Active System 800 for Citrix XenDesktop, Dell DVS Enterprise for Citrix XenDesktop, Dell Wyse Xenith Pro 2 zero client and the Dell Wyse D90Q7 and Z90Q7thin clients…

Grazed from ConvergedDigest. Author: Editorial Staff.

XO Communications is launching three new cloud services that leverage its Tier III data centers and its nationwide network: XO Enterprise Cloud, XO Cloud Drive, and XO Cloud Vault.

XO Enterprise Cloud — provides enterprise-grade cloud computing services delivered over a private and secure network environment. Multiple network connectivity options are offered to access the Enterprise Cloud. The service offers multiple computing resource allocation options, such as Shared, Reserved and Dedicated. The XO Enterprise Cloud architecture is designed to provide higher levels of performance and isolation for customers with mission-critical and unique security requirements…