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…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Teena Hammond.

The word “cloud” is being used with ever-growing frequency, but exactly who is using it and are the results satisfactory? To find out the current IT mindset on cloud/Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), TechRepublic did an informal, online survey in early March, asking IT leaders if they’d moved to the cloud, and if so, what business drivers led that decision. The survey delved into whether public, private or hybrid cloud solutions were chosen, and the benefits of choosing one versus the other. Download the full IaaS Research: Leaders Share Cloud Strategies for the 21st Century Data Center report. Topics covered in the survey include:

• Vendors used for current cloud services
• Vendors being considered for future cloud services
• Reasons for going to the cloud
• Does the cloud meet expectations
• Why some companies aren’t adopting the cloud
• Current cloud status
• Public, private or hybrid?

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Jeremy Kirk.

Amazon.com has added a file-syncing feature to its online storage product, Cloud Drive, putting the service on par with competitors such as Dropbox and Google’s Drive. The syncing feature will allow users to view an up-to-date file across several devices. Cloud Drive is a desktop application for Windows and Mac, and Amazon.com also has a version designed for Android, just for photos. Amazon.com also offers a Web-based upload panel if users don’t want to download the desktop application.

Online storage applications are a very competitive market segment. The services allow users to spread the same version of a file across several computers and prevent the loss of a file in case a computer is lost or stolen or breaks. But it is also an area where technical glitches and performance issues are a concern…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

SingleHop, a global leader in highly automated cloud computing and infrastructure-as-a-service, announced today the availability of its VMware Enterprise Private Cloud, which offers a private cloud environment powered by the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus platform. The product is a secure single-tenant pool of computing resources, custom-built for every client, and connected with a highly scalable SAN storage solution. The end result is a private computing platform with the flexibility and scalability of the cloud with industrial-strength security capabilities.

The Enterprise Private Cloud utilizes SingleHop’s tried and tested automated infrastructure platform in accordance with VMware’s enterprise-class cloud computing technology. Some of the features of this blend include:..