Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Cloud computing and scalability are often mentioned in the same sentence, but often not when talking about databases. Especially not MySQL databases. A Boston-based startup called ParElastic hopes to change that, and has raised a $5.7 million Series A led by General Catalyst Partners (former VMware CTO Steve Herrod’s new home) to help fund its cause.

ParElastic sits in between the application and the underlying database and lets developers scale without having to resort to complicated sharding or maybe even moving the database back in-house where they can run it on a bigger server. Architecturally, Founder and CEO Ken Rugg told me, ParElastic’s Database Virtualization Engine is similar to a parallel database system, although it functions more like middleware that manages multiple database instances as one and is designed for operational rather than analytic workloads…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Pere Hospital.

Arguably, security is still one most significant concerns of Cloud customers. As more and more businesses continue to transition their mainstream Cloud-based I.T operations on Mobile-ready applications, it has opened the lid for security vulnerabilities in organizations.

Although, the adoption of Cloud and Mobile computing is getting bigger, with the majority of organizations and enterprises adopting this trend, it is, still, of immense importance for the general public to understand the consequences of any cyber-attack, as well as plan ahead to out-maneuver any such incidents…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Amazon has broadened the ways in which .NET users can fiddle with its platform-as-a-service cloud AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The expansion of the technology was announced on Tuesday and sees Elastic Beanstalk for .NET now support Amazon’s enterprise-focused Virtual Private Cloud technology. It follows an announcement by Amazon last week that saw it cut the cost of running Windows on its cloud by up to 26 per cent.

Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon’s free platform-as-a-service – a technology that taps into common IaaS tech like scalable storage and compute, while also automatically doing load balancing and resource provisioning…

Grazed from DeveloperTech. Author: James Bourne.

Enterprise cloud computing giants Salesforce.com has launched Salesforce Platform Mobile Services, a tool to help accelerate mobile app development for customers and partners on the Salesforce cloud platform. The platform, which runs Salesforce CRM and, according to the company, is home to over three million custom apps and a million developers, is of course the cornerstone of one of tech’s giants.

The majority of cloudy polls put Marc Benioff’s company near the top, most notably being crowned the number one software as a service (SaaS) player last month – bearing in mind Salesforce was one of the founding fathers in the SaaS space and one of its closest rivals, Oracle, was reluctant to initially use the term ‘cloud computing’…

Grazed from ERPCloudNews. Author: Patricia Jones.

Adoption rate of SaaS CRM is on a rise, especially, among small and medium businesses. According to a market survey the high adoption rate is specially driven by the cost advantages offered by cloud software solutions. Approximately 60% of the SMEs studied in the survey cited cost as the major factor for choosing web based CRM solutions in their organizations. A Gartner Hype report has mentioned that SaaS adoption is going to be 50% of all CRM adoptions by 2020 and one can safely assume that a large part of these adoptions will solely be based on budgetary advantages.

Since most of the small businesses operate on shoestring fund it is quite an attractive option for them to adopt hosted service solutions. The enterprise legacy software versions are expensive, take longer time to deploy and require a fully functioning IT infrastructure/team to keep them running…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

Mario Cruz understands an enterprise CIO’s reluctance to embrace Platform as a Service (PaaS). He used to be one of them. During his more than 20 years in IT, including eight years as CIO of Chicago-based Rewards Network Inc., he’s been around a few traditional data centers and the keeper of many legacy systems.

Now as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of startup Choose Digital, Cruz has harnessed his business to the cloud. He and partner Stephen Humphreys founded the company in early 2011 as a "white label" alternative to iTunes. In essence, Choose Digital is a digital supply chain for music, movies, TV shows, books and games. Their customers, which include United Airlines and Marriott, use Choose Digital’s system to render digital rewards for their respective customer loyalty programs while keeping their own branding and controlling their own user data…

Grazed from UC Strategies. Author: Editorial Staff.

An apology has been released by VMware in light of recent delays in getting users set up on the company’s Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, which is basically a “test drive” for its public cloud infrastructure operating in an anonymous partner’s data center. VMware’s vCloud Team said: “We’d like to apologize to our users for exceeding the target provisioning time for new accounts. For those who are ready to give it a try, we are making room for you.”

Last month, VMware began its free trial of the Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, and sources noted that the following error message appeared after signing up: “We were unable to log you in: Your vCloud service has not completed provisioning. If you recently signed up for service please wait at least 15 minutes for this to complete.” Although a target time was not given for provisioning the service, some would-be users of VMware’s services were still unable to log in after several days. The company noted that the huge influx of sign-ups were responsible for the delay, and the vCloud team said: “To meet that demand we are adding more capacity to get you up and running.”…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond Inc. (Nasdaq:CBEY), the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses, today announced it is making it easier for existing customers to view, customize, manage and control their cloud computing services through a single portal – Cbeyond Online™, resulting in significant resource and time savings. The new on-demand, self-service functionality also allows Cbeyond’s customers to use the cloud to meet their dynamic business needs and serve their own customers more efficiently.

The Cbeyond Online portal now supports Cbeyond’s cloud service platform, including TotalCloud™ Data Center launched in October, 2012, and TotalCloud™ Phone System, launched in December 2012. Using this portal, all Cbeyond customers now have the ability to view computing, storage, and network utilization and performance reports, add real-time compute, storage and network capacity, as well as make changes to their cloud resources such as provision or resize their virtual machines…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Michael Goodenough.

We all have a lot of “stuff” in our homes, garages and even cars. We run out of places to put our items so oftentimes that means either downsizing what we have or finding new places store it. Computer data is no different. If we run out of space on a personal computer, tablet or server, we often delete old files or transfer data to a storage network.

Primary and Secondary Traditional Storage

Traditional storage is generally broken up into Primary and Secondary storage. Primary storage includes storage area networks (SAN), direct-attached disks (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS). Primary storage is generally accessed on a random basis, and it acts as support for active applications. Secondary storage is your backup storage, designed to protect your data. Three major types of secondary storage include optical disk, tape media and virtual tape libraries (VTL)…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

We can stop pointing fingers at datacentres for chewing up power because the biggest culprit of energy consumption in the cloud computing ecosystem is the equipment that facilitates wireless access to the cloud, according to the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET). CEET is a joint-venture between the University of Melbourne, communications vendor Alcatel-Lucent, and the Victorian State government.

The proliferation of cloud computing has meant more datacentres are being built to supply cloud services. Datacentres, particularly older models, are often cited as energy inefficient although through new design principles, they are gradually becoming more power efficient…