Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft upgraded its System Center suite Tuesday to make it a hybrid cloud manager and a more complete manager of the capabilities included in Windows Server 2012, launched last September.

As System Center 2012 and Windows Server 2012 mesh more tightly together, Microsoft has achieved what it refers to as its "Cloud Operating System," in the words of Michael Park, corporate VP for server and tools business marketing, in an interview. The term means mainly that System Center can now scale across many Windows Server 2012 servers, and link up operations that may be scattered across more than one data center. System Center 2012 was augmented Tuesday with Service Pack 1. It’s been extended so that a single instance of System Center’s Virtual Machine Manager module can handle up to 8,000 virtual machines on a cluster with 64 hosts. Add another Virtual Machine Manager instance and manage another 8,000 VMs…

Grazed from ComputerWorld UK. Author: Glyn Moody.

There are so many parts to the institutions running the European Union that it’s easy to lose sight of them all and their varied activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.

One such is the new report "Fighting cyber crime and protecting privacy in the cloud" [.pdf]. Here’s the basic background:

While cloud computing is not a new technology per se and has been developed and marketed primarily for profit-driven purposes, the growing reliance on its infrastructures and services poses a series of challenges for EU strategies and policies. This study addresses these challenges, examining the current EU framework in the field and highlighting the legal aspects in relation to the right to data protection, the issue of jurisdiction, responsibility and the regulation of data transfers to third countries…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

For OpenStack to succeed, the open source cloud platform will need a big ecosystem of trained experts and channel partners. Enter Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and MIT, which this week are training 20 students as part of a 12-hour introduction to OpenStack. Although that’s a small group, it’s the latest wakeup call for channel partners that are trying to get their arms around public and private cloud business opportunities.

During a recent Tech Data TDCloud conference near Tampa, Fla., very few VARs and MSPs were familiar with OpenStack and its channel implications. At that conference, Hewlett-Packard officials described how HP’s public cloud is built on the open source platform. And over time, it will become easier and easier to move workloads between corporate networks and the HP Cloud, the company asserted…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The importance of cloud computing in the overall tech sphere has again been emphasised in a Gartner report surveying over 2,000 CIOs on their technology priorities for 2013. Cloudy areas featured heavily in the top 10 priorities for CIOs, with cloud computing itself – alongside software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) ranked at number three.

Elsewhere, legacy modernisation – a big element of companies moving into cloud-hosted solutions – was ranked at five, with customer resource management (seven), virtualisation (eight) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps (10) also make the top 10. Yet the two priorities ahead of cloud computing in the pecking order, analytics and BI (business intelligence) and mobile technologies, make for interesting reading as of course the areas are all inextricably linked…

Grazed from The Washington Business Journal. Author: Heinan Landa.

Are you thinking about the cloud for your IT? How about just for your e-mails or files? Are you considering putting your entire network in the cloud? The demand for cloud computing is growing at an unprecedented rate. Gartner predicts the cloud market will be over the $148 Billion mark by 2014. Its economies of scale and ability to deliver large enterprise applications to medium and small businesses continue to generate new consumers across industries. However, cloud vendors often aren’t sharing the full story with prospects. Below are the top four myths of cloud computing.

Myth No. 1: “By putting all of my data and applications in the cloud, I no longer need to worry about IT.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Awards, an international cloud computing awards program that recognizes industry leaders and pioneers, has just named Dermot Doherty as "Developer of the Year" for his creation of a cloud-based operating system called iSpaces.

“Compiling the shortlist was difficult. But trying to pick individual winners in any category was almost impossible,” said Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson. “We are extremely pleased to endorse iSpaces as a cloud services provider which solves real-world problems for its clients, knocking down the barriers inherent in older business models and showing them to be outmoded – truly leveraging cloud technologies to be the best of the best.”…

Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Flexiant has been awarded €950,000 from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. Flexiant is able to support technological research and development with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator by working as part of the CELAR, PaaSaaS and MODAClouds consortiums, which includes enterprise and academic partners and research institutions.

Flexiant offers several solutions for each of the threeFP7 projects including providing the cloud platform for each project team to build and test open source tools and use case scenarios; providing each project with the necessary use case data for testing that is not manufactured; providing ‘real data’ sets from cloud provider activity; and supplying the mature and comprehensive API(s) necessary for each project…

Grazed from MondoVisione. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ovum has published three “Trends to watch reports” on Cloud computing and reveals that 2013 will see cloud computing continue to grow rapidly. 2013 Trends to Watch: Private and Public Clouds* report , drills downs into not only private and public cloud trends, but also infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) trends, meanwhile, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Services** report, looks at cloud computing from the point of view of IT service providers.

Finally, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing*** report, looks at the way cloud service providers and consumers adapt to cloud computing both on their own and as part of increasingly sophisticated cloud ecosystems.

Grazed from NewEurope. Author: Karafillis Giannoulis.

On 16 January, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) announced that EU blueprint for cloud computing falls short. EESC reports that the Commission should widen its strategy and invest in the development of cloud computing software and infrastructure. According to Eric Pigla, EESC rapporteur, EU “should help businesses and public administrations to become ‘cloud active’ by offering cloud-based services and make Europe ‘cloud productive’ by providing cloud infrastructure.”

EESC believes that if EU accomplishes these objectives, then a “European digital energy production” will be established. Pigal underlines that a failure to do so will result in Europe’s growing dependence on foreign cloud computing providers. Pigal’s report stresses that “digital energy, like other energy sources such as oil or gas, is an economic and strategic challenge….[and] Under current market conditions, expanding the use of the cloud in Europe will inevitably strengthen non-European operators.”…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Within the virtualization world, VMware (NYSE: VMW) can hardly claim to be more friendly to open source than competing platforms such as KVM and Xen. Nonetheless, the company has signed on as a leading member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), a trade organization dedicated to promoting open source solutions in government. Is this a sign of renewed commitment to open source by VMware, or a more mercenary move by the company to protect its slice of the open source market? Here are some thoughts.

VMware’s relationship with the open source community is a complex one. Most core commercial VMware products are not open source, but the company does maintain some open source tools. In addition, most of its virtualization solutions support Linux as well as proprietary operating systems. Still, now that open source virtualization platforms have matured to become as feature-rich and robust as many of VMware’s tools—and are also available for free—the company faces an increasingly difficult market within the open source space…