Grazed from Read Write Web. Author: Matt Asay.

As much as we don’t like markets being dominated by a single vendor, it’s almost as bad to try to choose between a chaotic mix of vendors. That’s the current state of the cloud market, and it’s giving some prospective buyers fits. For public cloud, Amazon is the early leader, but within the enterprise…? It’s not so clear.

The major cloud vendors admit as much. In a recent Quora thread, executives from Eucalyptus, VMware and more debate who leads the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud market. Answer? It depends…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The data center environment continues to evolve. Current market and business demands have changed to revolve around cloud computing, more devices, and a focus on the end-user computing experience. Large or small – infrastructure is what has been keeping organizations operational. Within the data center, numerous technologies all work together to help bring powerful technologies to other sites, branches and the end-user. A major part of this environment has always been the storage component.

Over the past few years, the storage controller has advanced far beyond a device which only handles storage needs. With more cloud and IT consumerization – managing data, space and future storage requirements has become a greater challenge. So, as other technologies evolved; storage did as well…

Grazed from BroadcastEngineering. Author: Michael Grotticceli.

The key to seamless cloud computing is the fast and reliable transfer of files in and out of the remote environment in which they are stored. The faster the transfer, the more productive and profitable a broadcaster can be. At the recent BioIT World 2013 conference in Boston, Aspera, a provider of file transfer software, said that, working with Intel Corp., it was able to send files at 10Gb/s speeds (called “fasp transfers”) using its software running on an Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 workstation in a virtualized (cloud) computing environment.

The companies said initial benchmark tests compared the performance of Aspera transfers on a high-performance Intel system versus a similar system that did not support Intel’s Data Direct I/O Technology. Additional tests focused on data transfer over a 10GigE connection between high-end Intel systems with built-in support for Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), as well as over a WAN connection with varying degrees of latency (50ms to 500ms) and packet loss (0.1 percent to 5 percent)…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudscaling, the elastic cloud company, today unveiled the third major release of its Open Cloud System (OCS), adding a new virtual private cloud (VPC) network capability, enhancements to block storage, support for OpenStack Grizzly and certified hardware from Juniper, Dell and Cisco.

The new version will be announced at the OpenStack Summit in Portland this week and is the third generation of the company’s OpenStack-powered OCS elastic cloud infrastructure system. Version 2.5 further advances the product’s lead with features valued by enterprise customers, SaaS providers and cloud service providers…

Grazed from UCStrategies. Author: Editorial Staff.

The announcement of the availability of its first product has been made by two-year-old San Jose, California-based company, Averail. The product, Averail Access, is designed to provide secure mobile access to business content via SharePoint, Office 365 or Dropbox, and is essentially a SaaS-based mobile content security solution. It aims to offer services to large enterprises, providing a vast amount of help for content controls and policy settings, and does not copy information extensive of IT-managed systems. Therefore, it succeeds in cancelling the requirement of redundant storage, which would otherwise be needed to aid mobile employees.

The CEO of the company, Marc Olesen, said: “We connect directly to the source repositories, whether those repositories are behind the firewall, or in the cloud. We can federate access to multiple repositories regardless of where those repositories are stored. This occurs directly with the corporate assets and we do not store any of the content ourselves, and our controls can be set by user, by device and by document.”…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Sylvia Lehnan.

Much has been said about the benefits of the SaaS model for its customers, including freedom from installation and maintenance hassles and – for many companies – being able to account for the purchase as an operating rather than a capital expense. But what does a software company that wants to start offering cloud products have to consider?

Vendors who want to develop cloud-based applications need to make decisions around technical infrastructure and adjust to a financial model that’s based on recurring income rather than one-time sales and on-going maintenance contracts. However, they also need to consider how the model affects all other areas of the business…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb has joined the OpenStack® Foundation as a corporate sponsor with a commitment to developing open cloud standards and technologies.

The OpenStack Foundation supports a global community of more than 8,800 members representing 850 unique organizations across 114 countries and is responsible for continuing to promote the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack cloud software…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

By 2015, 10 percent of overall IT security enterprise product capabilities will be delivered in the cloud, according to Gartner, Inc. The services are also driving changes in the market landscape, particularly around a number of key security technology areas, such as secure email and secure Web gateways, remote vulnerability assessment, and Identity and Access Management (IAM). Gartner expects the cloud-based security services market to reach $4.2 billion by 2016.

"Demand remains high from buyers looking to cloud-based security services to address a lack of staff or skills, reduce costs, or comply with security regulations quickly," said Eric Ahlm, Research Director at Gartner. "This shift in buying behaviour from the more traditional on-premises equipment toward cloud-based delivery models offers good opportunities for technology and service providers with cloud delivery capabilities, but those without such capabilities need to act quickly to adapt to this competitive threat."…

Grazed from CBR. Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite deals increasing 3% in the quarter The transaction value of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the online and mobile industry decreased 50% in the first quarter of 2013 to $7.9bn, according to the latest report from Berkery Noyes. According to the report, the deal volume however increased 3% during the quarter compared to the corresponding quarter a year earlier.

Berkery Noyes said that the SaaS/ASP segment experienced the largest quarterly rise in volume, improving 16%. The transaction volume in the e-commerce segment increased 6% in Q1 2013 with Google’s acquisition of Channel Intelligence for $125m being the segment’s highest value deal. M&A involving transactions with a large mobile component grew 33% over the past three months…

Grazed from DZone. Author: Omri Erel.

Many people are becoming curious, with the increasing popularity of cloud topology, as to what cloud computing deployment models exist, and which ones are popular. While cloud is a big buzzword right now, a lot of people are kind of mystified in regards to what it really is. That’s ok, that’s what I’m here for.

So, today, I’m going to clarify once more, for those new here, what cloud computing is, then go over some cloud computing deployment models which are popular, and maybe talk a little bit about how they work. First off, cloud just means that it exists off location, and is being stored, processed and/or served by an outside machine or machines…