Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Doug Bonderud.

Although often misunderstood, cloud computing ultimately relies on the same technological underpinnings as traditional server and storage options. While software, platforms and even infrastructure are farmed out to third-party providers, their ability to operate efficiently is constrained by the same physical laws as those which govern local server stacks. IT professionals and service providers, therefore, both have a vested interest in making the best use of the physical hardware available – and that means thinking outside the power box.

Keeping Costs Down
One of the most-touted benefits of cloud computing is reduced cost. By offloading server management to a public or hybrid providers, admins can save themselves the price of hardware upgrades, and bypass the costs of local energy. This can result in a significant savings over time, but represents only a transfer of responsibilities, rather than a re-imagining – the price of running multiple servers still exists; it is simply split between multiple users…

Grazed from Web Host Review.  Author: Nicole Henderson.

Cloud infrastructure company Joyent announced on Thursday an expansion of its product line as well as reserved pricing plans.  As part of the announcement, Joyent has introduced 13 instance types that mimic Amazon’s most popular virtual server types, according to a report by Information Week. Joyent president and CEO Henry Wasik says that the idea is that as people abandon AWS, they will have an equivalent instance to move to.

The new instances and pricing options for Joyent IaaS come as Dell decided earlier this week to discontinue its in-house multi-tenant public cloud in favor of offering IaaS from partners including Joyent…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s not exactly shocking that Amazon cloud competitors are polishing up their PR talking points about the benefits of hybrid cloud. And turning up the volume on their pitches.

Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon…

Grazed from TechWorld.  Author:  Sophie Curtis.

Amid a slew of product announcements designed to enable “mobile workstyles,” Citrix is already looking ahead to the next phase of enterprise innovation, with a focus on cloud computing as a platform for new mobile services.  Speaking to Techworld at the Citrix Synergy conference in Los Angeles, Martin Duursma, VP of Citrix Labs and CTO Office Chair, described a project called “Crystal Palace,” which aims to break down barriers between operating systems that prevent devices from interacting in a seamless fashion.

Crystal Palace is a cloud service that all of the user’s devices are registered to – say for example an Android smartphone, an Apple iPad and a Windows laptop. An agent runs on each device, and can send instructions to the agents on the other devices via the cloud service…

Grazed from Technorati.  Author: Mary Dumon.

San Francisco-based Boundary is the first cloud-based IT operations management system and the company is leading the way in an evolving field.  This past week, Boundary CEO Gary Read discussed his company’s cloud-based innovation with San Francisco Business Times.  Read believes that his ops management software is on the cusp of a major disruption in the systems management market. 

Boundary is a unique SaaS offering that collects and analyzes data center monitoring information from a variety of data center environments.  The company’s analytics consolidates data from a number of “new stack” leaders including AppDynamics, Joyent, New Relic, Opscode, Plexxi, Puppet labs, Splunk, and others and processes this data in real time and delivers information in a single dashboard…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

Even as enterprise adoption of cloud-based alternatives accelerates, IT and business executives are learning that fully capitalizing on these new ‘on-demand’ resources entails extensive systems integration, staff training and process reengineering.  Despite these obstacles, my travels have confirmed that enterprises of all sizes across nearly every industry are moving quickly to take advantage of cloud services to achieve their corporate objectives.

In fact, in most cases they are not expecting to reduce their operating costs by adopting cloud services. They are hoping instead to improve the responsiveness of their business operations, so they can be more agile and competitive. They remain committed to their ‘cloud first’ initiatives because they are convinced that the end results justify a long, multi-stage migration process…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Mark Say.

Dell is tying its fortunes in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market to Citrix with initiatives to support the latter’s XenDesktop 7 under the DVS Enterprise banner. It is launching three deployments to tie in its hardware with the management platform, saying that they can support mobile working and the use of cloud computing.

XenDesktop 7 provides a management platform for desktop PCs, hosted VDI and applications, and supports virtualised workloads based on Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012.
Dell has built on its converged infrastructure platform – that combines servers, storage, networking, endpoint devices and management software – to automate the deployment of XenDesktop 7 though its Active System 800 infrastructure system…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company, today announced that it has been listed on the Cloud Security Alliance’s (CSA) Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR). As an official STAR member, Evolve IP customers will know that in addition to receiving high availability, mission critical cloud computing services on an award-winning, unified platform they will also gain the highest levels of transparency and controls regarding data security, confidentiality, and integrity available.

An Inc. 500 company, Evolve IP provides organizations with a unified option for cloud services. Today, tens of thousands of users primarily in the US and globally depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications, contact centers, and more…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Joyent president CEO Henry Wasik keeps a recent news story on the wall of his office "to remind the staff of what we’re up against." The headline reads, "Amazon to Cloud Rivals: Try To Catch Us." Joyent is determined to catch Amazon. Wasik said the Joyent cloud was initially equipped with a basic set of 10 virtual server selections. On Thursday, the company introduced 13 instance types that closely align with Amazon’s most popular virtual server types, from AWS Micro up to Standard Extra Large and Quadruple I/O Extra Large.

"As people move off of Amazon [Web Services], we want them to be able to slide over to the equivalent instance" in Joyent, said Wasik. Joyent is actually increasing its virtual server selection with additional choices, 71 in all, to make its cloud service more attractive to customers. That means Joyent now has a match for AWS Store Eight Extra Large and AWS High-CPU Extra Large, along with many other options…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alyssa Wood.

Citrix VDI administrators will finally get the unified XenDesktop and XenApp management and deployment model that they have expected for years. Details of XenDesktop 7, previously codenamed Excalibur, were released here at the Citrix Synergy 2013 conference. It is the first release of Project Avalon.

Bringing virtual desktops and apps under the same umbrella, this release unifies XenDesktop and XenApp management and deployment under the FlexCast Management Architecture. XenApp previously ran on the Independent Management Architecture. "The days of having to deploy extra agents, extra consoles, extra databases — gone," said Simon Plant, a director of product management at Citrix Systems Inc…