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…

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."…