Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Brandon Butler.

Dell has dramatically shifted its cloud computing strategy, canceling plans it once had to launch a public cloud service based on the OpenStack open source platform, and discontinuing a VMware-based public cloud it already has on the market.

Instead, the company will focus on selling OpenStack-powered private clouds that run on Dell hardware and software. Using technology it acquired from cloud-management company Enstratius, Dell says its customers will be able to deploy resources to more than 20 public cloud providers. In announcing this change in strategy, Dell also said it has a new "partner ecosystem," consisting of just three providers now, but with plans to increase that number, which will provide integrations between those partner public cloud services and Dell customers’ private clouds…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As announced at Google I/O last week in San Francisco, Google Compute Engine is now available to everyone. This means you, not just the customers who pay $400 per month for Google Gold support. This is Google’s answer to IaaS compute services — Amazon Web Services in particular.

As revealed by Google, the features include:

• Subhour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use.
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads.
• Advanced routing features to help create gateways and VPN servers that let you build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Alistair Barr.

Amazon Web Services, known as AWS, was certified to operate as a cloud service provider for three years under the government’s new FedRAMP program. The accreditation covers all AWS data centers in the United States, the company said on Tuesday. "This will cut the cost and time for agencies to deploy our systems," said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector at AWS. "It cuts costs for AWS too."

Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has moved aggressively into the business of renting remote computing, storage and other IT services in recent years through AWS. The business has been a hit with startups, but the company is now going after big corporations and government agencies, a much larger opportunity. However, these organizations are more demanding, especially on issues like security and regulatory compliance…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Alexei Oreskovic and Jennifer Saba.

Yahoo Inc(YHOO.O) will buy blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion cash, giving the Internet pioneer a much-needed social media platform to reach a younger generation of users and breathe new life into its ailing brand.

The deal, announced on Monday, is a bold bet by Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revitalize the company by co-opting a Web property with strong visitor traffic but little revenue.
The combination of Yahoo and Tumblr creates an online powerhouse with roughly one billion users, which will draw in more advertisers and help Yahoo keep visitors on its properties for longer periods of time, Mayer told Reuters in an interview…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings. “Joyent is pleased to have been selected by Dell as a strategic cloud infrastructure partner. As long-standing partners with Dell, Joyent is fully aligned with the Dell DNA of providing customers quality, performance, flexibility, and value”

“Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance, and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud. “The partner approach offers increased value to Dell’s customers, channel partners and shareholders, as part of our comprehensive cloud strategy to deliver market-leading, end-to-end cloud solutions.”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Amanda Kondolojy.

When you think of high cloud energy consumption, the image of the crowded and stuffy data center likely comes to mind. However, new research from AT&T’s Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne has revealed that traditional data centers only account for 9 percent of the cloud’s overall energy consumption, which is in stark contrast to conventional wisdom and the push by some environmental groups to minimize data centers because of their energy consumption. However, looking at the whole picture of cloud computing energy consumption, data centers definitely are not the energy beasts they were once thought to be.

So where is all the cloud energy going? ZDNet Reports that 90 percent of the overall cloud energy consumption is taken by wireless access network technologies. In fact, on average, wireless networking, including Wi-Fi access and 4G connections, takes up a whopping ten times more power than data centers…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

The Department of Defense (DOD) is taking tentative steps with Google to tackle one of the primary obstacles to adopting commercial cloud computing: the need to reliably authenticate users.
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) confirmed that it is developing a proof of concept Authentication Gateway Service (AGS) that would allow for secure translation between DOD public key infrastructure (PKI) common access card authentication and Google-provided cloud services.

"This is a pilot effort to validate the ability to use DISA’s Authentication Gateway with external cloud solutions using the standards-based Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) protocol as well as explore interoperability and usability issues in commercial cloud-based email services," said David M. Mihelcic, CTO for DISA…

Grazed from ReadWrite Cloud. Author: David Sobotta.

As cloud computing services become ever more popular, you might begin to wonder how much you can really trust them to perform when you need them? I decided to find out – by testing the top file-transfer/file-storage/file-backup services.

In many ways, getting a file from one computer to multiple computers is the most challenging task for the cloud. And because I like to use multiple computers running multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows and the Mac, that function is particularly important to me…

Grazed from Information Week. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google I/O 2013 has come and gone without major developments affecting the company’s two primary platforms, Android and Chrome, but the developer conference nonetheless demonstrated how Google is outpacing its competitors. Certainly, that’s evident in the numbers Google provided, 900 million Android activations to date and 750 million users of Chrome worldwide. But such statistics only sketch the outline of Google’s success.

Google began as a search company and seventeen years later, the head of the company’s search technology, Amit Singhal opened his portion of the Google I/O keynote by taking about the end of search as we know it. Even if that’s more rhetoric than reality — Google will still be in the search ad business no matter how search changes for the foreseeable future — it reveals a willingness to take risks that Apple and Microsoft seem to be unwilling or unable to match…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

SaaS-based CRM is in demand. A new survey by Gartner shows that one out of every four customer relationship management software tools sold were SaaS based. As midsize firms consider new CRM software or seek to upgrade their current systems, this growing trend could be of interest in their decision.

Market Share

The report by Gartner, called Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, was recently featured in Cloud Tech, and found that customer relationship management software sales grew last year at an impressive rate from $16B to $18B. With an increase of 12.5 percent, the category scored three times the average of other software categories. According to the results, clients are mostly turning to CRM software to improve customer service and support as well as sales. Gartner also found the majority of customer relationship management software (80 percent) is being sold in North America and western Europe. Growth markets include China and Latin America. Top customer relationship management software vendors include Salesforce.com, SAP, and IBM…