Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

High performance cloud computing company Cycle Computing is no stranger to spinning up massive clusters of servers in Amazon’s public cloud, but this week the company says it recently ran one of its largest jobs ever, one that used 10,598 multi-core instances.

Cycle Computing provisioned Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers for a pharmaceutical client to simulate a drug test. It took two hours to configure and ran for nine hours, for a total cost of $4,362. If the infrastructure had been built by the company, Cycle estimates it would have taken a 12,000-square-foot data center and cost $44 million. Cycle says it’s the biggest job the company has performed in terms of the number of virtual machine instances that have been used for a single run…

Grazed from Secure Business Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

Guidelines on cloud computing have been released by the PCI security standards council. With an aim to offer a resource for businesses in choosing solutions and third-party cloud providers, the guidelines were developed by PCI special interest groups to answer common questions. The main objectives are to provide an explanation of common deployment and service models for cloud environments, including how implementations may vary within the different types, compliance challenges in a cloud environment and determining and documenting responsibilities to the different cloud models and guidance.

The document also includes a number of appendices to address specific PCI DSS requirements and implementation scenarios, including: additional considerations to help determine PCI DSS responsibilities across different cloud service models; sample system inventory for cloud computing environments; sample matrix for documenting how PCI DSS responsibilities are assigned between cloud provider and client; and a starting set of questions that can help in determining how PCI DSS requirements can be met in a particular cloud environment…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

I observed an interesting debate on Twitter a couple weeks ago between an advocate of "enterprise" computing and an Amazon Web Services champion. After it went back and forth I bit, I offered my contribution: Somebody is using a ton of AWS, and it’s growing like crazy. Listening to this debate reminds me of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus discussion about how two people can discuss something and still fail to understand the other person’s basic perspective. In the case of this Twitter debate, the discussion failed to address a key question: What are the requirements of the applications running in those environments?

The crucial fact is that those who defend enterprise computing fail to grasp the fact that legacy IT infrastructure and operations don’t address the requirements of new application types that I label the "three M’s"-mobile, media and marketing. These apps are flocking to public cloud computing because they’re not well served by traditional infrastructure and are much more aligned with what cloud computing brings to the table…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

ElasticHosts has launched a new style of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to challenge Amazon, Rackspace and other major cloud service providers with its own brand of cloud services.
ElasticHosts announced Feb. 5 that it has nine data centers around the world, and it’s possible all nine would fit into one of Google’s or Microsoft’s.

But size is not the point. ElasticHosts CEO Richard Davies says it’s competing with Amazon on price while giving customers a simpler user interface to configure exactly the servers they want, instead of having to select from the coffee shop list of small, medium or large. There is a growing number of small cloud service providers, many of them operating strictly on a regional basis, such as PeakColo in Denver and Phoenix; Bluelock in Indianapolis and Salt Lake City; or CoreVault in Oklahoma City and Cheyenne, Okla…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Samsung is looking to step up its mobile cloud game. Not gaming apps in this case, but technologies related to global distribution and mobile applications data management. The company that has been giving Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) a run for its money in the smartphone world (not to mention duking it out in court) has made a strategic investment through Samsung Venture Investment Corp. in database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider Cloudant.

Details are a little fuzzy as to how much of an investment Samsung Ventures has made in Cloudant, which has made news recently here on Talkin’ Cloud related to its launch of a NoSQL DBaaS offering on Rackspace and the more recent news of SoftLayer announcing it was using Cloudant NoSQL to power its SoftLayer Message Queue Service…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Pete Knight.

When I began looking at thin client applications, I was pretty darned sure that the weight loss industry had come up with yet another way to separate overweight people from their money.

Introducing Thin Technology

Thin clients have been around for as long as there have been computers tied together in networks. The concept is pretty simple; individual users do not need full access to a computer to do their work, so rather than placing a fully functional computer on each desk, a thin client machine provides just the functionality needed to accomplish the necessary tasks. Thin client systems are useful in some business and institutional settings. They have the advantage of keeping the major computing functions, processing and storage, in a safe, central location. There is also potential savings in software licensing, the software is licensed to the central computer but can be accessed from any of the thin client remote terminals…

Grazed from Lexology. Author: Rosemary Wallis and Thomas Huthwaite.

Several news reports in the past week have referred to Kim Dotcom’s new website, Mega, as a “file sharing” website, saying that Dotcom’s company has received “file sharing infringement notices” and mentioning the Mega website alongside reports on the recent decision of the Copyright Tribunal on the infringing file sharing legislation. These reports appear to be confusing two different aspects of the copyright legislation: there are some important distinctions to be made.

File hosting vs. file sharing

In the colloquial sense, Mega is a ‘sharing’ website. However, it is not a “file sharing” website as defined by New Zealand’s infringing file sharing legislation. Under the legislation, file sharing occurs only when material is uploaded via, or downloaded from, the internet using software or a network that enables the simultaneous sharing of material between multiple users. Examples of such software include BitTorrent and uTorrent…

Grazed from DigiTimes. Author: Joseph Tsai.

Driven by booming demand for new data center services for mobile platforms and cloud computing, shipments of micro servers are expected to more than triple in 2013, according to an IHS iSuppli Compute Platforms Topical report. Shipments of micro servers are forecast to reach 291,000 units in 2013, up 230% from 88,000 units in 2012. Shipments of micro servers commenced in 2011 with just 19,000 units. However, shipments by the end of 2016 will rise to some 1.2 million units.

The penetration of micro servers compared to total server shipments amounted to a negligible 0.2% in 2011. But by 2016, the machines will claim a penetration rate of more than 10% – a fifty-fold jump. Micro servers are general-purpose computers, housing single or multiple low-power microprocessors and usually consuming less than 45W in a single motherboard. The machines employ shared infrastructure such as power, cooling and cabling with other similar devices, allowing for an extremely dense configuration when micro servers are cascaded together…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Scott Allan Miller.

Private clouds, hosted or on-premise, are rapidly becoming commonplace. More and more businesses are learning of cloud computing and seeing that running their own cloud is both feasible and potentially valuable. But due to a general lack of cloud knowledge, it is becoming more and more common that clouds are recommended when they do not suit the needs of the business at all. Often this happens when people confuse private clouds with traditional virtualization management systems.

The Differences Between Virtualization and Cloud Computing

A cloud is a special type of virtualization platform and fills a unique niche. Cloud computing takes traditional virtualization and layers it with automated scaling and provisioning that allows for rapid, horizontal scaling of applications. This is not a normal business need…

Grazed from Chip Design Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.

Chip design engineers face a myriad of challenges in their work, be it brainstorming ways to implement a certain feature set, figuring out how to meet performance requirements (and still stay within budget), or running enough simulations and compilations to verify functionality and test coverage before manufacture. These are the processes that bring our smartphones, smart TVs, industrial robots and most other electronics to life. Over the years, much thought and hard work has also been put into improving design methodologies, software tools and computing hardware for chip design, in order to shorten product time-to-market and lower development costs. Today, the cloud can help with this, by dramatically accelerating chip design workflows.

Cloud computing has steadily made inroads into the enterprise; therefore it comes as little or no surprise that a compute-intensive endeavor such as semiconductor chip design will find practical applications for the cloud. The prospect of scaling computation resources on-demand and running simulations and compilations in parallel is attractive–both for IT departments and for design teams…