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…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced a series of enhancements across its systems portfolio that are designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward software-defined environments (SDE). At its IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas on June 10, IBM announced enhancements to the company’s Smarter Storage line of flash, disk and tape systems, new high-performance computing (HPC) solutions and new capabilities for IBM’s PureSystems line of systems, among other things.

In addition, IBM released its FlashSystem series today. Announced in April, the series of all-flash appliances has been enhanced to deliver less than one-tenth the cost per transaction while using 4 percent of the energy and 2 percent of the space compared with hybrid disk and flash systems, IBM said…

Grazed from Business Wire. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the commercial availability of OpenShift Online, its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud offering, beginning June 11, 2013. Since its debut in developer preview in 2011, more than 1 million applications have been created on OpenShift Online. Responding to customer demand for a supported, enterprise-class public PaaS offering, the new commercial offering will enable OpenShift Online’s users and developers to access Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services.

This new offering makes Red Hat one of the only technology vendors to offer a full family of open PaaS solutions: OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project; OpenShift Online, a commercial public PaaS offering; and OpenShift Enterprise, an on-premise private PaaS product. OpenShift Online enables developers to quickly build, launch and host innovative applications in the public cloud. The elastic, multi-language, PaaS architecture of OpenShift Online automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications so developers can focus on writing the code for these applications for their business, startup, or next big idea…