Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Ted Samson.

Microsoft on Tuesday made a flurry of Windows Azure-related announcements, including the general availability of Windows Azure IaaS (infrastructure as a service), with new VMI (virtual machine image) templates for SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and SharePoint; larger VM sizes; and new pricing to challenge Amazon Web Services (AWS). What’s more, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Azure Virtual Networks.

Microsoft unveiled previews of Azure IaaS and Virtual Networks last June as part of a significant overhaul to the formerly PaaS-centric platform featuring a healthy dose of IaaS capabilities and broader support for various OSes and development platforms. Today’s news marks an important milestone for Microsoft Azure as it emerges as a credible competitor to AWS, OpenStack, and other cloud platforms jockeying for position. (Check out InfoWorld’s review of Azure for more details about the Microsoft-crafted cloud.)…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

Integration continues to frustrate organizations trying to use SaaS applications. TechTarget reports that application integration showed up as a top cloud problem in two surveys it recently conducted. You may recall earlier this year a KPGM survey that found 31 percent said integrating cloud services with their on-premise applications and systems was more complex than expected.

TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse survey found similar results: 34 percent said SaaS programs can’t interoperate with other programs from the cloud or in house. “And once again, customization was tied with integration: Even with customization, 34 percent of Cloud Pulse respondents said SaaS apps can be inadequate for the client’s business needs,” reports SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Site Editor Jan Stafford…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rachel King.

Hewlett-Packard is boasting its dedication to OpenStack through the debut of a handful of new Converged Cloud products being debuted today. Announced amid the OpenStack Summit in Portland this week, HP is integrating more of the open source cloud computing software with its own portfolio of private and public cloud solutions. Starting with brand new options, HP has added new private cloud bursting services intended to simplify the startup of hybrid clouds.

Dubbed CloudSystem Bursting Activation Services, HP will provide support to help clients configure the software needed to burst from HP CloudSystem (the tech giant’s private cloud flagship product) to another while also streamlining access to additional capacity across multiple HP CloudSystems. Service providers will also be able to use these services to deliver on-demand capacity to customers…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix and The Linux Foundation today announced that open source community development for the Xen(R) virtualization platform will become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Leveraging its proven model of collaborative development for the new Xen Project(TM) initiative, The Linux Foundation will provide infrastructure, guidance and a collaborative network. The neutral, member-led community will help accelerate cross-industry innovation around the Xen Project hypervisor, bringing guidance and contributions from a more diverse group of technology leaders.

Over the past decade, collaborative innovations in cloud computing, security and advanced processor support have made Xen the most scalable and secure hypervisor in the industry. It is these innovations that have led to the adoption of Xen and Citrix XenServer(R) as the platforms for powering approximately two-thirds of the public cloud revenue in the world. The initial set of supporters demonstrates the broad reach the technology has had in the marketplace. With more than 10 years of development and in use by more than 10 million users, the open source technology attracts contributions from organizations such as Amazon, AMD, Cambridge University, Citrix, Fujitsu, Intel, National Security Agency (NSA), Oracle and SUSE…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

A whitepaper from Melbourne’s Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) has cast doubt on traditional thinking regarding the energy consumption of cloud computing. “Previous analysis and industry focus has missed the point,” blistered the Power of Wireless Cloud report to open its executive summary. “Access networks, not data centres, are the biggest threat to the sustainability of cloud services.”

As straight to the point as this is, what are the underlying reasons behind this summation? According to the researchers, the wireless infrastructure is a more fundamental part of the cloudy ecosystem, with data centres just a part of a larger space. “Wireless cloud is a surging sector with implications that cannot be ignored,” the report notes…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Nick Heath.

Microsoft challenged AWS today by making its infrastructure–as-a-service (IaaS) offering generally available and committing to match AWS for the price of storage and compute in the cloud. The Redmond-based software giant said its IaaS offering will allow businesses to migrate virtual machines running on Hyper-V from their internal datacentre to Windows Azure public cloud.

Microsoft has offered the service since last year, but today’s general availability means the introduction of monthly SLAs guaranteeing 99.95 percent availability for the service and 24/7 support, as well as the ability to run VMs on Azure servers with 28GB and 56GB of memory, compared to the previous limit of 14GB…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

The Linux Foundation has taken control of the open source Xen virtualization platform and enlisted a dozen industry giants in a quest to be the leading software for building cloud networks. The 10-year-old Xen hypervisor was formerly a community project sponsored by Citrix, much as the Fedora operating system is a community project sponsored by Red Hat. Citrix was looking to place Xen into a vendor-neutral organization, however, and the Linux Foundation move was announced today. The list of companies that will "contribute to and guide the Xen Project" is impressive, including Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, and Verizon.

Amazon is perhaps the most significant name on that list in regard to Xen. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is likely the most widely used public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, and it is built on Xen virtualization. Rackspace’s public cloud also uses Xen. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin noted in his blog that Xen "is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world’s largest companies."…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Ryan Cox.

Cloud Foundry wants to help your developers to spend more time on code, and less time on middleware. Dekel Tankel – Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Foundry & Pivotal, stopped by to talk with John Furrier – Founder, SiliconANGLE and Jeff Frick – team member of theCUBE. The one takeaway if you didn’t get to catch his interview, agility.

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. It was initiated by VMware, and the goal of Cloud Foundry is to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry wants you to have more productive developers, plain and simple. Over and over Tankel drove home the message of “more time coding, less time dealing with middlewear.”…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Scott Merrill.

The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the same cost as cheapo shared hosting, you can get your own small virtual machine at any number of providers, allowing you to tweak the entire instance to just the way you want it. Such a VM is perfect for running TT-RSS, or a photoblog, or just learning the differences between Apache and nginx web servers. If infrastructure isn’t your thing, you can quickly deploy your code to various PaaS providers, often for free, and have as reliable of a site as what you’d get from shared hosting.

The great thing about PaaS hosts is that they’re mostly agnostic to the stuff running inside them. Some PaaS hosts may cater to specific languages, but generally any app or framework written in a supported language will work on your PaaS of choice. The bad thing about PaaS is that a lot of the underpinnings of “hosting” get abstracted away completely, and the various open source applications and frameworks haven’t quite caught up with this design paradigm quite yet…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

OpenStack is an open source framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. RDO, the name for Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution (which stands for Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack), may not have a name as catchy as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, but its function will be similar.

The Fedora community adds new features upstream before they become incorporated in the Linux-based operating system and eventually make their way into Red Hat’s commercially available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RDO will be a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on RHEL, Fedora and their derivatives and offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience…