Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

AppNeta, the leading provider of SaaS solutions for exceptional performance of business-critical applications, was named the winner of the Best Cloud Management Solution category of the 2013 Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) CODiE Awards. AppNeta’s SaaS-delivered performance management solutions continuously monitor and assure the performance and delivery of cloud and web-based applications.

The Best Cloud Management Solution category recognizes the solution that best ensures cloud computing resources are working optimally. This includes performance monitoring, application management, security and compliance, storage and disaster recovery. AppNeta’s performance management solutions help customers optimize the performance of their business-critical applications including cloud and web-based services…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Phillip Spies.

The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is booming and expected to grow by 47 percent, from $6 billion in 2012 to $9 billion in 2013, according to Gartner’s Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q Update. Additionally, the overall public cloud computing market, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), IaaS and other related services, will grow from $110 to $131 billion over the same period with a CAGR of 41.3 percent through 2016. While this projected growth is significant, cloud computing still represents less than three percent of the $3.7 trillion spent on IT per year. This begs the question, If cloud computing is so hot, why is it still just three percent of the overall IT industry?

It might be helpful to look back to when cloud IaaS was introduced to the market more than eight years ago by Amazon.com. The primary goal was to provide computing capacity at a lower cost than actual physical servers. Since then, many other cloud service providers have jumped on the bandwagon to offer low-cost, best-effort cloud services. Yet, while a market for these services clearly exists, most don’t meet the enterprise requirements for a more reliable and secure computing platform. The problem lies in the fundamental challenge that end users have in using a server-centric cloud approach to solve problems better addressed by networks…

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…