Grazed from YourIndustryNews.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb announces the launch of a fully-managed Cloud hosting service based on OpenStack®. The managed Cloud service is the first OpenStack public cloud deployment in Canada and the first in the industry to provide guaranteed disk speed as a standard, a key element of overall system performance. The other key components of this breakthrough service are worry-free system management, rapid deployment, Cloud elasticity, scalability and soon, a robust application-programming interface (API).

"This service would not have been technologically possible even 12 months ago," says Mike Gero, Director of Product Management. "When we looked at the market we couldn’t find a cloud that met all our customers’ needs. By engineering this cloud with the best vendors and technologies, we are delivering something I am sure customers will enjoy and competitors will envy. We truly believe this will meet our customer’s performance, availability and support requirements. Due to our use of SSD drives our standard disk performance is on average 2x that of other Cloud providers and the security of customer data is maintained with data replication and redundancy."…

Grazed from MuleSoft.  Author: Editorial Staff.

MuleSoft, provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform to connect the New Enterprise, found in a survey that 57 percent of enterprise IT professionals indicated the need to modernize legacy applications using APIs to make it easier for applications outside the firewall to access their data. While respondents agreed that mobile and SaaS are critical to their long term IT strategies, exposing their existing applications to be consumed by mobile and other external applications remains a primary obstacle.

"There is massive buzz around SaaS, mobile and Big Data, but the secret nobody talks about is that you can’t make it work without connectivity," said Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy at MuleSoft. “This survey shows there is powerful market demand for integration solutions, driving a new era of hyperconnectivity. In 2012, 60 percent of MuleSoft’s new revenue involved SaaS and/or mobile integration – proof that we are making good on our mission to alleviate the $500 billion integration pain point.”…

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…