Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Piston Cloud Computing Tuesday released version 2.0 of Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a pre-configured cloud operating system based on the OpenStack project and loaded into a Piston cloud key memory device. The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.

Not every enterprise network administrator is going to want to plug such a device into the heart of the his cloud network, lest someone one day exploit the practice and inject malware into the heart of his cloud. But Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston and a veteran of both the NASA Nebula project and Netscape 8 browser development, said Piston wanted to bring a foolproof, non-fragile version of OpenStack to market that installed without complications…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rachel King.

A big theme at SugarCon 2013 this week is enabling a mobile workforce, and it would make sense to enable that demographic with some helpful apps. Thus, SugarCRM has unveiled its HTML5-powered mobile app today, designed to offer access and updates in real-time about campaigns, deals, contacts, and CRM records.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation described a little bit about the infrastructure under the hood, explaining that the app offers an integrated experience with Sugar’s browser application while also trying to take advantage of native iOS functions…

Grazed from IT-TNA. Author: Steve Wexler.

Swiss-based Kaseya, a vendor of on-premise and cloud-based IT systems management (ITSM) software services, has announced a set of free and subscription Software-as-a-Service services. The company has also retooled its SaaS bundle, Kaseya Essentials, with new capabilities and is making it available as a free trial. Kaseya has 10,000 customers, evenly split between SaaS and on-premise, but there are another 5,000 unpaid SaaS users using free or trial solutions.

According to TechNavio, the network management services market is expected to reach $2.7 billion this year, driven primarily by organizations becoming cost conscious. ‘Network management services have been providing efficient infrastructure management at much lower costs when compared to in-house network management. With several vendors providing comprehensive solutions, end users now have the option of end to end service support for networks. Moreover these services are offered through SLAs thereby ensuring quality network management services.’…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

ActiveState(R), whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, today announced the release of Stackato(R) 2.10, the next evolution of the company’s groundbreaking private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology for the agile enterprise. Enterprise cloud leaders like HP, ExactTarget, and Mozilla use Stackato to get to market faster, be more productive, save money, and innovate.

Highlighting this Stackato release is a new Oracle DB add-on, allowing enterprise developers to easily create and deploy applications that depend on an Oracle back-end, without IT assistance. Additional updates include more efficient log-streaming (with Logyard), improved security, an even better web management console user interface, and upgrades to PostgreSQL, Perl, Node.js, MongoDB, uWSGI, and the Mono add-on for .NET applications…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

What started as a secret and then an enterprise novelty has quickly gone mainstream. Chances are, your enterprise has caught on to cloud computing and seen several advantages. Easier and faster access to data is one of these. Nobody has yet come up with a reason this is not beneficial to the modern enterprise. The Web services which are easily accessible are numerous. The big names such as Google and Amazon have come up with some fairly versatile solutions over the past couple of years, expanding data storage and the resources available to run complex software applications.

Rackspace is yet another competitor in the cloud computing market, bringing to life the concept of cloud-on-cloud computing. Everything from cloud services you can outsource your infrastructure to, to configurations enabling business to create their own clouds, have been conceived. This company, however, has come up with OpenStack, a software platform that has brought businesses one step closer to in-house cloud computing. The single, open-source platform can span hundreds of different servers, converging processing power for applications used on the network…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Glenn Rossman.

GoGrid, a cloud infrastructure company, and Racemi, the moving company for the cloud, on Tuesday announced the availability of Cloud Path for GoGrid, a joint offering for migrating customers’ existing server workloads to GoGrid’s cloud platform free of charge. The Cloud Path Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering is a customer self-service web portal for automated migration of existing Windows and Linux servers to GoGrid Cloud Server instances. There is no infrastructure to deploy or maintain on the customer site. Plus, the live capture of server workloads eliminates powering down servers and means no server downtime.

"This free migration solution provides an average cost savings of $800 per server migrated versus manual processes," said Lawrence Guillory, CEO, Racemi. "Even more important, it reduces customers’ migration project timelines from days, weeks, or even months to just hours."…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Dale Vile.

Most forms of cloud computing are starting to find a place in mainstream IT delivery. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), for example, is providing greater flexibility and better economy for those wanting to grab server or storage capacity from the cloud. It might not be totally replacing other forms of infrastructure hosting but the offerings in this space are mature enough for prime time and provide significant advantages in many scenarios.

The delivery of business applications over the wire (or air) on a subscription basis via the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is also now well established. Whether it is in email, office or information management, or more complex solutions such as CRM or ERP, we are again some distance from world domination but mainstream use is clearly growing. We are certainly beyond the early adoption stage among larger enterprises…

Grazed from CloudFoundry. Author: Jonas Partner.

From its beginning, Cloud Foundry has been committed to providing developers and enterprises choice of deployment options spanning public and private clouds. In this post, Jonas Partner, CEO of CloudCredo and OpenCredo, shares how their enterprise customers are using PaaS to deploy applications that span public and private clouds to increase availability, add extra capacity and prevent lock-in.

As one of the co-founders of OpenCredo I have been actively working with Cloud Foundry since its early days. We were one of the first companies to launch a production application on Cloud Foundry with the help of our friends at Carrenza. More recently we have established CloudCredo to help both enterprise customers wishing to host Cloud Foundry on their own infrastructure and cloud service providers wishing to offer Platform as a Service. We helped Ospero to bring a Cloud Foundry-based PaaS running on vCloud Director to market to better serve their customers…

Most virtual environments live off "golden images." These are virtual machines (VMs) that were built as templates. When a new VM is needed, the designer or administrator selects the golden image that will be used as a starting point, and then creates the new VM. Typically, these golden images are handcrafted, and incorporate all the libraries, tools, and software needed to support the apps and other software that will run on them. The golden image is refined by trial and error until it works as intended, then used until it comes time to change it. But let’s face it not everyone needs the same thing on their VM. There are always variations. An old-school golden image basically assumes that one size fits all, but is that really true?

Wouldn’t it be better if you could construct each VM based on what was going to run on it? Ok, maybe you’re objecting that this isn’t really a golden image, but hear me out. The problem with most golden images is that they are too complex and bound to change. What if you have a slim golden image and then add just what you need to it? You’d be creating a kind of golden image factory, where the repeatable baseline is easy to generate (the slim golden image) and additional software can be added quickly to that VM.