Grazed from The Register. Author: Jim Clark.

Platform-as-a-service Heroku spent two years misleading customers because it was so focused on building a new product that it didn’t bother to update old documentation – this is unacceptable. The Salesforce-owned company admitted on Wednesday that customers using its ‘Bamboo" application automation technology could have spent two years paying for a service that used different tech to that found in Heroku’s docs, and that this tech entailed poor app performance that was nearly impossible for both Heroku and Heroku analytics partner New Relic to detect.

An equivalent situation would be a logistics company announcing it had not informed customers that it had shifted from using a central dispatcher to direct its trucks, to a system where each driver had a list of all packages and had to work out the delivery order with other drivers with no central command. Moreover, that this change meant packages were not getting delivered on time and that it had no way of informing customers of the tardiness of their packages…

Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud-based technology services company Green Cloud Technologies has closed on $5.6 million in new equity financing. The Greenville, S.C. company said that Millry Corporation, an existing investor and Green Cloud’s largest backer, led the series C round. The round also included other existing investors and an unnamed new strategic investor. In a February securities filing, the company reported raising $1.3 million in a round targeting up to $6 million. Since its 2011 founding, Green Cloud says it has raised $9.6 million.

Green Cloud offers “Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS. The company’s data centers house data and applications for businesses in a virtual environment that can be accessed over the Internet via any Internet-enabled device. Green Cloud said that new financing will be used for market expansion, sales and marketing and data center investments. The company this spring added North Carolina’s Research Triangle to the list markets it serves. Green Cloud also recently expanded into South Florida, Atlanta, and the Gulf Coast.

The industry shift to cloud computing has meant more than just a shift in services for users. IT professionals are asking themselves why they should deal with services that could be outsourced to larger cloud providers, and then reposition themselves to take care of the mission-critical technologies that their businesses really want.

This is the main drive behind IT managers pushing their firms to adopt cloud-based solutions. They’re looking to free up their in-house resources for more strategic applications and specialized infrastructure.

HotLink Corporation, the market leader in transformation solutions for heterogeneous virtualization management, today announced the latest release of HotLink Hybrid Express™, the industry’s simplest solution for deploying, administering and managing hybrid clouds. The new release provides Amazon EC2 plug-in support for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) so IT can deploy, administer and manage hybrid on- and off-premise resources using existing virtualization management infrastructure. Additionally, HotLink Hybrid Express is now available in a free edition for both Microsoft SCVMM and VMware vCenter environments.

HotLink Hybrid Express, which also supports VMware vCenter, is the only solution to natively extend on-premise virtualization management infrastructure to public cloud resources like Amazon EC2. HotLink’s patent-pending transformation technology abstracts public cloud platforms and workloads so on-premise management consoles treat them just like on-premise hosts and virtual machines — fully integrated and managed as a unified pool of resources without the need for a separate management console. Since HotLink natively integrates cloud-based resources, Microsoft SCVMM or VMware vCenter-compatible orchestration tools, service catalogs and self-service portals work seamlessly out of the box. Customers can implement hybrid clouds in just a few hours as opposed to weeks or months.

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Onisick.

The Apache Software Foundation announced in late March that CloudStack is now a top-level project. This is a promotion from CloudStack’s incubator status, where it had lived after being released as open source by Citrix. This promotion provides additional encouragement to companies and developers looking to contribute to the project, because it validates the CloudStack community and demonstrates ongoing support under the Apache Software Foundation.

CloudStack provides a complete IaaS software suite for private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It’s based on a product called Cloud.com, which Citrix acquired in 2011. CloudStack comes from a proprietary code base that was used in production before being acquired…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

WHAT:
The Cloud Computing Conference at the 2013 NAB Show is a two-day event that will demonstrate the new ways cloud-based solutions are providing increased reliability, security and collaboration for broadcasting, enterprise, military and government applications. Experts will provide a senior management review of case studies on cloud-based solutions and how they can positively impact each stage of the content distribution chain.

WHO:
Dave Fellinger, Chief Scientist, DDN

Dave will present at the session titled Cloud-Based Multimedia Storage on infrastructure approaches and the benefits to the production workflow of media/entertainment companies. In his role as chief scientist of DDN, Dave guides the company’s product and market strategy to resolve key customer challenges at acute levels of storage scalability. Dave has more than three decades of engineering experience, including film systems, ASIC design and development, GaAs semiconductor manufacture, RAID and storage systems, and video processing devices, and has architected high-performance storage systems for the world’s fastest supercomputers…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Several converging trends, such as IT consumerization, increased number of users, more devices and a lot more data, have pushed the storage environment to a new level. Now, these new technologies aren’t only driving the cloud — they’re pushing forward all of the technologies that support cloud computing. At the epicenter of the cloud sits the data center. This is the central point where all information is gathered, and then distributed to other data centers or to the end-user.

Because of these new initiatives and new ways to deliver data, the data center has been forced to evolve to support more agile and scalable platforms. Part of the conversation revolves around unified computing systems, while the other part revolves around something even more specific: storage…

Grazed from BroadWayWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

ProfitBricks, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company that completely reengineered the delivery of cloud computing, now offers the industry’s largest virtual server instance sizes, enabling customers to run true High Performance Computing environments in the cloud for the first time. By offering variable instance sizes, which now tip the scales at 62 cores and 240GB of RAM, ProfitBricks continues to define Cloud Computing 2.0. ProfitBricks customers can now run massive computational processes at a lower cost while taking advantage of better speed and performance. It also enables users of databases and big data software to scale their virtual servers vertically rather than horizontally.

ProfitBricks can offer such large instance sizes due to the fact that its core infrastructure is built on InfiniBand technology, giving ProfitBricks infinite possibilities in how it provides virtual resources. "ProfitBricks offers up the largest instances sizes in terms of both CPU and RAM," said Kenny Li, vice president at Cloud Spectator, a cloud analyst firm. "While competitors like Amazon put up impressive looking numbers by focusing on concepts like ECUs, when it comes down to it they’re truly offering up 16 physical cores even in their Hadoop-focused instances. That’s certainly impressive, but it’s not nearly to the same degree as ProfitBricks."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing poses a challenge, not necessarily to well-staffed, polished and accomplished IT shops, but to those "who didn’t necessarily fully deploy the previous generation of on-premises network and systems management," noted Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies, an IT consulting firm.

Kaplan moderated the opening day workshop, "New Tools and Techniques for Managing Hybrid Cloud," at Cloud Connect, a UBM Tech event in Santa Clara, Calif. The show started Tuesday and runs through Friday. For struggling IT staffs, hybrid cloud computing promises to deploy an additional layer of computing atop the complexity it is already trying to master, Kaplan told about 40 attendees of his half-day workshop…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Jobscience Inc., the leader in Social Relationship Management for HR, today announced that it has enabled Spin Systems to centralize its talent acquisition processes, while simultaneously moving their recruiting system to the Cloud. Spin Systems recruiters can now easily find and access information about a candidate at any point within the engagement process, from any computer at any location.

"Before deploying Jobscience Recruiting, we were using a client-based windows application that required users to go to a computer where the software was installed in order to use the application," said Ms. Carissa Braithwaite, Human Resources Manager, Spin Systems Inc. "We needed a cloud-based application and were using Salesforce.com for CRM, so we were delighted to find that Jobscience leveraged the robust Force.com Cloud platform."…