Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.

For the last few months, I’ve been living the dream, building a vast empire of computers that spanned the globe. Machines everywhere crunched my data into teeny tiny bits, then crunched the numbers even more. Private networks carried my secret scraps of info between the machines so that others could work the data and reform it into pretty graphs. Sure, my desktop is a bit old and it could use more RAM, but with my browser I created a worldwide army of machines with about as much ease as the sorcerer’s apprentice in "Fantasia."…

Grazed from InformationWorld. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware told Wall Street analysts Wednesday that it is launching an approach to hybrid cloud computing that will enable its customers to use their VMware-based data center environments in conjunction with infrastructure-as-a-service providers in the public cloud.

In VMware’s view, its virtualization management console will be the command post for both sets of workloads and will allow movement out to the cloud and back again. Before such a situation can become a reality, however, VMware must move further down the road to virtualized networks that act as an integral part of a software-defined data center…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Jack McCarthy.

In the coming months, the cloud will change businesses in ways we can’t imagine. Companies are rushing to develop new technologies to speed cloud development. Across the board, vendors young and old are offering new solutions that are making cloud computing easier, faster, more effective and less expensive.

The cloud is not new. Software-as-a-Service models promoted by Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM packages captured the attention of businesses years ago. Hosting centers have handled infrastructure needs. Virtualization, eliminating the need to keep hardware on-premise, has acted as a disrupter of traditional IT notions. Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN).com formalized the cloud business model using its own infrastructure and opened the floodgates of the cloud era…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware has created a new business unit focused entirely on hybrid cloud services. The new VMware Hybrid Cloud Services business unit will be led by Bill Fathers, the former president of Savvis who resigned his position at the end of November. The virtualization company outlined to investors its corporate strategy, which will be three-pronged approach related to software-defined data centers, an expansion of hybrid cloud offerings and empowering the multi-device era. It’s big news for cloud computing, and as part of the news, VMware unveiled plans to launch the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service later this year.

The service, which does not yet have an exact launch date, will extend VMware’s software-defined data center strategy, which will involve extending virtualization benefits to all areas of the data center. The hybrid cloud service is being designed to enable customers to reap the benefits of the public cloud without changing existing applications. Customers will also be able to use a common management, orchestration, networking and security model, the company noted…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

With the intent of rounding out its software stack for building hybrid clouds, Oracle is acquiring Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. Based in Mountain View, California, Nimbula was co-founded by Chris Pinkham, who managed the development of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), along with a number of other EC2 team members now with Nimbula. The company also has expertise with the OpenStack cloud software stack.

Nimbula’s flagship software, Nimbula Director, is designed to deploy and manage workloads across both private and public clouds. The software can be used for managing such cloud jobs as distributed software development, IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) hosting, batch processing and Hadoop deployments…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Rick Stevenson.

A major enabler of cloud computing over the past five years has been the rise of ubiquitous, commodity broadband and the drop in price for consumer wired and wireless telecommunications. Today, we can cheaply connect people and devices anywhere to almost anything else – a trend that’s created an explosion of cloud-based products and services. Although bargain data plans have enabled mesh-like connectivity, this growing complexity has also killed an idea that we, as an industry, were obsessed with in the late 1990s; namely, five 9s reliability.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does require a rethink. The game isn’t about uptime any more. It’s about how quickly you can fix complex systems when the inevitable happens. And just to make it more interesting, those systems are no longer neatly contained in your data center…

As the ongoing battle for lowering storage costs continues, the leading provider of cloud backup software for service providers BackupAgent announces its integration with Microsoft’s Windows Azure. With this new major feature the company enables service providers of all shapes and sizes to stay competitive in the cloud backup market.

The integration is twofold; the BackupAgent Cloud Backup Platform – including the service management console – can be fully hosted in a high available (load balanced) setup on Windows Azure Virtual Machines. Apart from the savings on hardware investments, this configuration makes it incredibly easy to manage resources and ensures optimal service during backup peak hours. The other part of the integration is the storage of backup data that can be outsourced to the Windows Azure storage platform. One of the great benefits is that this fits perfectly in BackupAgent’s pay-as-you-grow philosophy; you always pay for what usage, no overhead. On the other hand it makes it very easy to store backups on multiple physical locations all over the world. This redundancy reduces latency and adds value to the backup proposition.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Piston Cloud Computing is aiming to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack and its own Piston Enterprise OpenStack product with the announcement of a new OpenStack training series. The training series will kick off with "Deploying OpenStack for Cloud Administrators" in San Francisco May 8-9.

The first of the training courses will provide administrators with an introduction to OpenStack before diving into hands-on training labs to teach attendees about the installation and configuration of an OpenStack private cloud, instance management and migration, block storage, object storage and specific features for the enterprise…