Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon and Google trade price cuts. Again

The incumbent public cloud champ and its wanna-be rival took turns cutting prices again last week.  Amazon Web Services sliced the price on Windows on-demand EC2 instances by 26  percent – although as the price still depends on region. That move came within hours of Google cutting prices of most of its GCE instances by an average of 4 percent — that little tidbit was buried in larger news that Google is opening up access to Google Compute Engine to any customer willing to pay $400 a month for Google Gold Support.

But because the AWS price cuts were for Windows, that move may have been directed at Microsoft Windows Azure more than Google, but why quibble? NetworkWorld has more as does the Motley Fool.   ProfitBricks, another cloud contender, extended its scale up vs. scale out cloud pitch last week as well, making its biggest instance bigger. The new super-duper instance weighs in at 62 cores and 240GB of RAM up from 48 cores and 196GB of RAM…

Grazed from CorrelSense.  Author: PR Announcement.

Correlsense, an application management and IT monitoring software provider, today announced it is partnering with Red Hat to focus on collaboration around Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, OpenShift. This partnership allows OpenShift customers and community access to SharePath, a leading application performance management solution. By using the OpenShift platform and SharePath together, both developers and IT operations professionals will have the ability to manage applications from development, through testing, deployment and in production.

Since its launch, developers have leveraged OpenShift for deploying PaaS-based applications in a streamlined and efficient manner. Users can upload their Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Python or Node.js code and leave the configuration, management and scaling headaches behind. With the application monitoring capabilities of SharePath, IT operations and development can use one tool to manage the performance of their applications after deployment. SharePath traces 100% of user transactions across multiple tiers and stacks, auto-detects interdependencies, and correlates the performance data on a single dashboard in real time…

Grazed from CompositeCode.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year.  PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that out. With Cloud Foundry, there’s several key SPOFs (Single Points of Failure), and with all PaaS Systems the data tier is often the neglected pairing of the system. I’ve been wanting to write about this for a few months now and Deploycon has lit a fire for me to do just that.

Deploycon – “Platform Services and Developer Expectations”

I’m on a panel at Deploycon titled “Platform Services and Developer Expectations” and this leads right back around to that. This SPOF issue is concerning to me as PaaS Providers talk up the offerings more and more with little light actually shone on this issue. In some ways each is moving away form their respective SPOFs, but overall they’re all pretty prevalent throughout. For security, each has a non-distributed database, which technically needs backed up still – no clear replication or other mechanisms setup to ensure data integrity in a failure situation. Of course, the huge saving grace with a PaaS, is that if the overall system goes down or a SPOF blows up, all the existing deployed applications will generally continue to run. Unless of course the routing and networking are also SPOF. This is the largest glaring concern with PaaS Systems that I see today….

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Gartner has been looking toward the future, and what it sees is a future in the cloud.  Gartner believes that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) – will usurp more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.

IT companies will need to "bridge legacy offerings and new services" to pave a way to the cloud for service providers, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.  Cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other segments of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013, according to Gartner…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Bridget Botelho.

Any financial adviser will tell you it’s better to own than to lease, but that pragmatism is ignored when it comes to cloud computing.  More and more companies pay cloud providers monthly subscription fees for instant access to the latest and greatest infrastructure, platforms and applications that they can’t afford to buy outright. The market for leased IT platforms, applications and operations is so hot right now that companies can get just about anything as a service (XaaS) — and they seek out those services with the hope of lowering IT expenses.

Nearly three quarters — 73% — of IT pros using public cloud services listed cost savings as the primary reason, according to a 2012 TechTarget survey of 1,500 IT professionals…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Until recently, IT pros responsible for servers, network components, storage infrastructure and applications could be forgiven for not thinking much about the future of desktops that run Windows. What happened on the desktop stayed on the desktop. But like a distant war that is suddenly being fought on native soil, Microsoft’s struggles to revitalize and preserve its venerable desktop business are having an impact in the data center.

The assault on the Windows desktop is intense. Microsoft’s OS business is under fire from Apple and consumer devices. The profitable Office productivity applications are under attack by countless new Software as a Service (SaaS), mobile and Web apps. Even back-end services such as Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory are no longer safe from incursions by cloud-based products…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: James Furbush.

Aside from pricey legacy identity and access management vendors like Oracle, Novell and CA, a new breed of SaaS products has popped up in recent years to help organizations better integrate mobile endpoints and SaaS apps into their environments through single sign-on. This movement is turning "a once-boring enterprise niche into something sexy," said Gregg Kreizman, an identity access management analyst at Gartner, Inc., a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

As is often the case with enterprise technology, both types of identity management vendors — which exist to serve distinct market needs — have started offering similar feature sets as one another to provide customers a full range of governance, provisioning and de-provisioning, group policy, and single sign-on access…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

If you’re thinking about switching your business to the cloud, it’s good to know a few pieces of cloud-cabulary so you don’t get lost in the shuffle. Like all IT and most major companies, where there’s a product, there’s an acronym. And cloud has quite a few. This post gives a quick and dirty overview of the what, why, and who of software as a service.

What is Software as a Service?

Before I start, let me say one thing: there’s no such thing as an actual cloud your documents float in and when you need them you make it rain (that’d be pretty cool though, a bunch of corporate executives doing the rain dance to get last quarters financial report?) So what is it? Webopedia defines it as the model where applications are hosted by a vendor or service provider and made available to customers over a network. This network is typically the internet…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB) alluded to a database backup offering earlier in 2013, and now the company has delivered, offering a database backup solution as an add-on to its BusinessPremier plan for small businesses. For Carbonite’s resellers, the new offering expands the breadth of offerings they can deliver to their end user customers, enabling them to back up databases ranging from MySQL to SQL to Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and Oracle, as well as Hyper-V in the virtual environment, said David Hauser, senior director, Channel Development.

“We’re also able to back up local, open and locked files [such as] Outlook PST files, and it also has the capability of a Windows system state,” he said. “These are the databases that the majority of small businesses use and this is where the vast majority of demand has come from, so we think it’s a very good fit.”…