Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Gladys Rama.

Version 2.0 CloudPortal Business Manager, Citrix’s cloud services delivery platform, was released last week.  Citrix acquired CloudPortal Business Manager, along with the CloudPlatform cloud orchestration layer, two years ago when the company purchased CloudStack software provider Cloud.com. CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 is the first time the product has been updated since Citrix acquired it, according to Tom McCafferty, senior director of product marketing within Citrix’s Coud Platforms Group.

"CloudPortal Business Manager is kind of a self-service or management overlay that sits on top of our CloudPlatform orchestration system. That’s what it was originally designed to do," McCafferty explained in a briefing. "It was for cloud service providers, building an Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS] cloud, who needed a way to deliver that service to their end users. And they needed a way to connect that service on the back end of their business to meter and bill it."…

Grazed from I.T. News Online.  Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, an international, customer-centric, pure-cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, today announced at SNW Spring 2013 that it’s upgrading its public cloud storage offering to an all solid-state drive (SSD) solution, powered by SolidFire. Abandoning magnetic-based, hard-disk drive (HDD) storage altogether due to its inability to keep pace with the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud, CloudSigma’s new, all-SSD offering enables companies to realize the scalability, flexibility and cost-savings advantages of a public cloud while ensuring the reliability and performance of their storage.

"With SolidFire’s SSD technology, we have radically improved the performance of our entire cloud," said Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma CEO and co-founder. "After pioneering public cloud SSD technology two years ago, we have seen the value of SSD’s ability to successfully remove storage bottlenecks and inconsistent performance in the cloud for critical systems and applications, especially when backed by an SLA. And now with SolidFire, we expect to see even greater performance improvements and growth for our customers."…

Grazed from SaaSAddict. Author: Omri Erel.

SaaS integration is becoming increasingly prevalent in the business world. The 21st century has finally taken true hold on the world, and the digital environment is now in the forefront of daily life. As a result, digital services have become an integral part of the business atmosphere as well. Everything is handled by computers, from accounting, to ordering, maintenance and finances. Increasingly, communication and customer transactions are entirely digital.

For business, this started early, before SaaS integration was even an issue. Businesses used computers first, after the government. Finances became some of the first uses of modems, and are still the main users of this arcane medieval form of connectivity as well…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Archie Hendryx.

If you were to ask EMC or VMware whom they consider their major threat and competition you’d be easily forgiven for being mistaken to think it was NetApp, HP or offerings such as Hyper-V. With many terming us to now be in the third era of corporate computing, with mainframe and the client/server being the first two, the current cloud era has undoubtedly been spearheaded by the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook. It is here where EMC and VMware face their biggest challenge of remaining relevant and cutting edge in a market that demands automation, simplicity and speed of deployment.

Despite major marketing campaigns of "Big Data" and "Clouds" that have seen airports littered with exorbitant amounts of posters and adverts, as well as numerous acquisitions of various companies that have extended already huge product portfolios, both EMC and VMware have struggled to release themselves from the shackles of being deemed just a Storage and Hypervisor company. So in light of this it’s no surprise to see both companies spin off a new and independent venture that will address this very challenge, namely the Pivotal Initiative…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

PEER 1 Hosting has taken the wraps off its enterprise-focused Mission Critical Cloud offering, which features built-in disaster recovery capabilities. The product offers both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology in a PEER 1-managed and hosted environment. The offering is powered by cloud services provider Tier 3, and is virtualised using VMWare’s technology.

Richard Rivera, HPC specialist at PEER 1 told Cloud Pro: “We found that we needed to give either the entrepreneur or the business executive choice, but they have different needs. "You have an IT business professional that desires more service, desires a managed environment, desires security and desires high availability. Then you have the entrepreneur who desires to be self-managed.”…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Jamcracker, the leading Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) enablement company, today announced the results of the third annual report on cloud adoption and usage. The explosion of cloud services offerings over recent years has presented a tremendous market opportunity for solutions that simplify the complexity associated with delivering and consuming multiple cloud services from disparate providers.

The largest segment of cloud adoption continues to be software-as-a-service (SaaS), followed by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), as organizations of all sizes are shifting from an "operation" focus to an "aggregate" IT delivery and consumption model. Cloud adoption by small and medium enterprises is increasingly happening through CSB providers, such as telcos and traditional IT distribution channels. Large Enterprise and Government IT cloud adoption is gaining traction, driving an interest in on-premise as well as hosted Internal CSB deployment models. Additionally, Jamcracker observed collaboration and messaging applications accounted for nearly 50 percent of cloud sales, suggesting that organizations are consuming services that accommodate the "bring your own device" and mobile workforce trends…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Azure cloud veteran Radhesh Balakrishnan has joined Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to drive the open source company’s OpenStack and virtualization strategies. Balakrishnan’s career move comes at a critical time for Red Hat, which is striving to push beyond Linux to compete with Microsoft and VMware (NYSE:VMW) across private and public clouds.

Although Red Hat remains in growth mode, the company’s most recent financial results disappointed Wall Street. Some investors worry that Red Hat is too small to focus on so many priorities — Linux, virtualization, middleware, storage and now cloud computing…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

In 2010, the founders of Midokura set out to become the top provider of public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds in Japan, but they realized networking challenges stood in the way. So they decided to focus on networking, and in the meantime the software-defined networking (SDN) space got hot. Now Midokura is trying to rack up more large-scale customers, particularly existing IaaS clouds, to validate its software’s capabilities.

Toward that end, the company has secured $17.3 million in Series A funding, bringing the total the company has raised to $18.6 million. The Innovation Network Corporation of Japan led the round, which also included participation from NEC Capital Solutions and NTT Docomo Innovations Ventures…

Grazed from Symantec. Author: Editorial Staff.

Building a safe cloud: Start with hardware

Ensuring a trusted and stable framework is in place should be the priority, beginning with securing the hardware. Cloud providers will differ in their management practices and procedures, and in order to establish that these guarantee your data’s safety, it is recommended to undertake an independent security audit of the cloud host.

The Service Level Agreements for availability of Reputable hosts’ will be in excess of 99.9%, any less and protection could be severely compromised, while support needs to be guaranteed indefinitely. Ensure auto fail-over for hardware failures and consider adopting multiple instances of critical services…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Users of cloud services report that Software as a Service and Platform as a Service create more application integration problems than Infrastructure as a Service — or even private IT. That can’t continue if cloud services are to reach maximum potential. Hybrid clouds can help by creating a uniform platform for deployment of integrated applications, facilitating the use of deployment/integration tools, and guiding application development and application lifecycle management practices to optimize integration. However, if hybridization isn’t done right, the result could be worse than before.

Application integration is the process of linking application components to connect workflows and to optimize user access to productivity tools. Nearly every enterprise uses application integration with their internal IT assets, because most applications today are componentized in some way — at the minimum they are presented from an application server through a Web server and to a range of browsers or mobile applications…