Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM has established a global network of eight data centers to supply infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and is now offering SmartCloud Enterprise+ for running production workloads, including SAP applications. Unlike Amazon.com or Rackspace IaaS, IBM customers will find System Z mainframes and System P servers running AIX in the IBM cloud. That makes SmartCloud more compatible with the workloads of IBM customers. Most services are based strictly on standard Intel or AMD x86 servers, and it remains difficult to migrate Z series or P series workloads to x86 servers.

IBM’s IaaS data centers are located in Boulder, Colo.; Raleigh, N. C., Montpellier, France; Ehningen, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Tokyo; and Toronto. It will add a ninth at mid- year in Barcelona, Spain. The company has previously offered IaaS in the U.S. and Europe. Offering greater geographic coverage often helps companies find a site in which to store their data. France, Germany and Canada all have regulations on what data may leave the country and what may not…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

There has been no shortage of assumptions made and confusion about cloud computing, along with boatloads of conventional wisdom. But the rise of cloud brings with it some so far unanswerable questions. Here are just seven of the great unsolved mysteries that are accompanying the great cloud computing migration of the 2010s:

1) Who really pays for cloud? This is a tangle in and of itself. In surveys I have seen and conducted, it’s all over the place. IT departments pay for a lot of it, and a lot of it is put on corporate credit cards. As a result, the costs get hidden or buried within corporate budgets. Another issue — when the holder of the corporate credit card tied to a cloud account leaves the company, guess what? The subscription is jeopardized…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud service provider Interoute has announced the launch of CloudStore, an enterprise app store which doubles up as a compute and storage facility, hosting OS and databases, as well as business apps. Interoute, known for its virtual data centre and owning Europe’s largest cloud platform, is further focusing its efforts on the enterprise – understandable, given that’s where most of its client base lies – but featuring a much more rounded product than just hosting apps.

Counting Microsoft, RedHat and Ubuntu among its cast list, the Interoute CloudStore integrates several assets, with its integrated network, compute storage platform underneath a layer of appliances, from which secure platforms can be built. The store also comes with an online knowledge centre, designed to help enterprises choose a bespoke model to suit their business needs…

Grazed from CNN Fortune. Author: Shelley DuBois.

Remember the Titan? No, not the comeback football team. The supercomputer that generated headlines last November for ranking as the world’s fastest. Titan can crunch so many calculations, it has the equivalent processing power of 500,000 laptops.

All that computing might is for naught without software capable of managing it. Software is a major—if often unsung—factor in the future of high-power computing. It will matter increasingly to businesses of all kinds as more and more products and services move into the cloud. "The line between high performance computing and cloud is blurring," says Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing, a company that builds software to increase efficiency in supercomputers and cloud-based servers. Today, Adaptive revealed it developed the software that boosted Titan’s efficiency from 70% to about 95%. The software used to make Titan tick is similar, Clyde says, to software that optimizes the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware will soon eliminate 900 jobs among the 13,800 employees with which it ended 2012. But the layoffs will not amount to a reduction in force; it will also add a total of 1,000 more employees this year, as it brings its workforce in closer alignment with its key business objectives.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, COO Carl Eschenbach and CFO Jonathan Chadwick didn’t specify where the layoffs would occur, other than to single out VMware’s SlideRocket division, an application unit whose software allows Web-based presentations to be updated in real time. Dazzling in its potential, it nevertheless left some VMware watchers scratching their heads as to how it would be used as part of a virtualization specialist’s repertoire. VMware has made six acquisitions over the past three years — iTHC, Wanova, Pattern Insights, Cetas, DynamicOps and Nicira — and added 6,700 employees…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Amazon Web Services has launched a beta of a new Web service that can execute in the cloud the heavy data-crunching job of transcoding video. The Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts high-fidelity video files into smaller-size formats more suitable for viewing on the Web and mobile phones. The process of transcribing video can be an ornery task, AWS explained in an introductory Web page to the service. Transcoding software can be cumbersome to deploy and configure, and it is difficult to scale.

Users also have to provision servers to transcode the video. Transcoding can be computationally intensive. The process usually involves copying the video into an uncompressed raw format and then copying it again into the new format…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bob Evans.

A strong case can be made that Oracle has the widest, deepest, and most-modern set of cloud-computing solutions in the world. More than 10,000 paying customers are using the Oracle Cloud, and that extends out to 25,000,000 million individual users. Can any other IT vendor that claims to be a serious cloud-computing player—IBM, SAP, Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, etc.—match Oracle’s offering across not only cloud applications but also cloud infrastructure and cloud platforms?

Here’s a quick quiz:

• Public cloud, private clouds, and hybrid clouds: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud deployment models?
• Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service: how many companies other than Oracle offer that full range of cloud services?…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The eighth annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report from security provider Arbor Networks has revealed how cloud services and data centres are “increasingly victimised” by cyber attackers. The report, which looked at a 12 month period ending September 2012, asked nearly 200 security-based questions to 130 respondents in the enterprise and network operator fields.

The key points of the research were:

• 94% of data centre operators reported security attacks
• 76% had suffered distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks towards their customers, whilst just under half (43%) had partial or total infrastructure outages due to DDoS. Yet only 14% of respondents had seen attacks targeting any form of cloud service
• The result of this was that “complex multi-vector attacks” – combinations of attack vectors intending to hack away at a company’s defences – were on the rise, with big security breaches becoming less common. To exemplify this, advanced persistent threats (APTs) were cited by 55% of those surveyed as their top security concern…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

NetCitadel is launching itself onto the market with a security orchestration virtual appliance the company promises will eliminate the manual configuration of changes in cloud, virtual and physical infrastructures, thereby freeing up IT administrators’ time and reducing the chance of human-created errors.

The OneControl Security Orchestration Platform is a virtual appliance that does the hundreds or thousands of systems changes that happen over a year, but it does it without the need for interference from an IT administrator. According to Mike Horn, co-founder and CEO of NetCitadel, one of the company’s early customers does in excess of 10,000 changes to its different infrastructures every year. With cloud continuing to take off (and some claim this will be the year cloud comes into its own), it’s not unbelievable to believe the number of annual systems changes for that company could approach 50,000. "For us, it’s all about bringing rich intelligence and information into the environment. That was really the nexus and the reason we started the company," Horn told Talkin’ Cloud…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cyber Innovation Labs (CIL), a leading provider of innovative Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, announces NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider of innovative IT, biometrics, network, and communications products and solutions, has selected CIL as a core data center platform to help deliver NEC’s Cloud Computing Solutions for the North America market.

NEC will leverage CIL’s facilities located at "The Underground," Iron Mountain’s highly secure, 145-acre facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania, to help fuel its business expansion in North America. NEC offers a broad portfolio of cloud solutions (IaaS, UCaaS, SaaS) and managed services addressing the financial services, healthcare, government, education, and legal markets. Architected with a groundbreaking audit, security and compliance foundation at its core, enterprises are able to deploy their mission-critical systems and applications with confidence in a fully private, physically dedicated environment…