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…

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.”…