Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google earlier this month made a significant cloud announcement, opening up its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering to customers and removing the beta tag from the service. One catch is that customers who sign up for the service need to buy a "gold-level" support package — which costs $400 per month. But while it may cost a pretty penny to get access to the same hardware that Google uses to power the world’s most popular search engine, it’s at least no longer an invite-only beta service.

Some say that Google is one of the companies that could give Amazon Web Services — seen by many as the market-leading IaaS provider — its biggest competition. There are a variety of opinions on that topic, though. Others believe Azure — the cloud platform Microsoft recently made generally available — could be a fierce competitor to AWS as well. Network World recently sat down with the Brian Goldfarb, the marketing executive in charge of Google’s cloud platform, to get the skinny on the company’s latest plans…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Patrick Burke.

Hewlett-Packard doesn’t shy away from taking a few cheap shots every now and again, and its latest line of servers, called Moonshot, proves it. HP has introduced a new line of servers that could be considered a major game changer in terms of power consumption and the cloud.

HP’s new servers consume 89 percent less power and cost 77 percent less to purchase than comparable HP servers. The new line of servers, called Moonshoot, could help CIOs uncover greater savings from cloud computing, according to an article on PCMag.com…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Meredith Courtemanche.

Savvis, a data center colocation and cloud computing company, launched its enterprise cloud services on VMware virtualization tools and a middleware solution that Savvis developed in-house. In 2012, Savvis switched to vCloud Director, VMware’s cloud middleware.

Jonathan King, VP of cloud solutions at Town & Country, Mo.-based Savvis, a CenturyLink company, describes what vCloud Director added to their cloud capabilities, how enterprises use cloud — including AWS — and what the next step is after enterprises adopt cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

HP’s cloud computing efforts have been the subject of much curiosity — not always in a good way — over the past year, but Hewlett-Packard’s top cloud guy Saar Gillai said the company is putting confusion and concern about its long-term future behind it. “Last year was an interesting one, but in the last six months since, it’s all been positive news,” Gillai said in an interview on Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit.

During that timeframe HP brought its public cloud online and the compute, block store and object store subsystems are all broadly available. This week, it announced new “cloud bursting” capabilities for HP CloudSystem and that it had integrated its 3Par fibre-channel storage with OpenStack…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

Someone at my seminar in Los Angeles last month asked about challenges that the cloud poses for software licensing. That’s such a broad and complex topic that it could warrant an entire seminar of its own. But this column can at least provide an overview of the issues.

The cloud delivery models that present the most software-licensing challenges are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Software as a service (SaaS) is less likely to cause problems because, as the name suggests, the software is part of the cloud provider’s services. With IaaS and PaaS, though, the customer has shared control over what is run in the cloud environment, including third-party software. In the case of IaaS, the customer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but may have control over operating systems and deployed applications. With PaaS, while the customer typically doesn’t have control over the operating system, it may have control over the deployed applications…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephanie Mann.

Mobile apps have already taken hold of the enterprise, and experts say their grip is only getting stronger. Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. reported that by 2017, 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store. By 2014, Apple will be as accepted by enterprise IT as Microsoft is today, the group added. Couple this with the rapid rise of Software as a Service (SaaS), and you see a striking new trend: more enterprises developing their own mobile apps for SaaS.

"What we’re seeing is that [enterprise software] vendors are finally catching up to really enable enterprises to develop their own mobile apps for SaaS," said Robert DeSisto, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "When you look at the CRM [customer relationship management] stuff, there’s no question that’s where it’s going — fast. Even Salesforce.com is now aggressively trying to meet the needs of the enterprise to build mobile apps."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jessica Scarpati.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers love to crow about how many development languages they support or how feature-rich their platforms are, yet customers have other priorities in mind when deciding which PaaS provider to use. Businesses select their current PaaS providers primarily for their various ecosystems of partners, developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that build commercial applications on top of their platforms, according to a new TechTarget survey.

"Customers are saying now, ‘I’m not just looking at Salesforce as an app provider, but I’m also looking at them as a platform provider, and I want to use their whole ecosystem.," said Adam Selligman, vice president of developer and partner relations at Salesforce.com, whose PaaS portfolio includes Force.com and Heroku…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

There has been a shift in technology where cloud computing and the emphasis around WAN technologies has skyrocketed. There are more users, more devices and a lot more data for organization to utilize and try to manage. Now, many companies are moving towards some type of cloud computing model to help them achieve their business goals. Why is this important? According to HP’s whitepaper on the CloudSystem, cloud computing is a key component of an organization’s ability to gain unencumbered access to information technology—to access “Infrastructure Anywhere, Applications Anywhere, Information Anywhere, or better said: Services Anywhere.”

In order to deliver on the “Services Anywhere” promise, organizations will have to think differently about IT and how cloud computing plays a direct role. The key will be understanding the unique requirements of each service, such as availability, cost, performance, and regulatory needs, then address them in the most efficient and cost-effective way…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Combining computing power is not really a new idea, but it is one that has gained traction in recent years as enterprises have sought out the most efficient and cost-saving way to manage data. Chances are, your IT team has considered or implemented cloud solutions from competitors such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. There is a new player in town, however, called Nebula One. A computer rather than a service, it allows you to link up many servers and control all of them as if they were a single machine. You can essentially have your own cloud computer, as powerful as the virtual infrastructure provided by many top services on the market.

In addition, the system uses OpenStack, a popular software tool for centralized control of data centers. The software is configured on Nebula One such that companies can configure and manage their own private clouds. If your business has not found comfort in paying another company to manage your infrastructure, then this solution is just the thing. Plus, just one person is needed to control the network, using a mouse and a software console…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

The U.S. National Security Agency has been “transformed” since implementing OpenStack, and now the agency plans to open its experiences to all 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the next few months we’ll work with the larger intelligence community to roll out systems across the community,” said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist with NSA, during a keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. “Hopefully we’ll be giving access to our OpenStack system to the rest of the [intelligence community] so they can leverage the same efficiencies.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if other agencies have committed to building their own OpenStack clouds or if they plan to use the NSA’s. But government organizations are notoriously difficult to crack so the NSA’s successful implementation could open the door to broad usage of the cloud technology in the U.S. federal government. It’s also good news for OpenStack users. Since the NSA has very strong security requirements, it developed a number of systems for securing APIs and guest OSes and putting SSL “everywhere,” Burton said. “I hope in the future to take what we learned from securing OpenStack and release that back to the community,” he said…