Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Dan Sullivan.

IT departments are embracing both cloud computing and mobile devices for their multiple benefits. At first, these two technologies may seem to be fairly independent; mobile technology focuses on driving efficiencies in data centers, while the cloud brings new levels of flexibility and usability to end users. Both technologies are valuable on their own, but enterprise potential is amplified when mobile and cloud are used together.

Some functionalities that tablets lack can be found in cloud computing resources. For starters, most mobile device applications are designed for non-desktop platforms, like Android and iOS, and they tend to have a narrower range of functionality than desktop applications. Though tablets offer more mobility than even ultra-light laptops, they lack the substantial storage and are not designed to compete head to head with workstations or laptops when it comes to compute-intensive operations. There are a number of ways to meld tablets and cloud computing to deliver desktop-like functionality, and offer alternatives to traditional desktop experiences…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Eyeing the growing market for big data analysis, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has introduced a storage package, called High Storage, that can offer fast access to large amounts of data.  High Storage, an Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) package, is designed to run data intensive analysis jobs, such as seismic analysis, log processing and data warehousing, according to the company. It is built on a parallel file system architecture that allows data to be moved on and off multiple disks at once, speeding throughput times.

"Instances of this family provide proportionally higher storage density per instance, and are ideally suited for applications that benefit from high sequential I/O performance across very large data sets," AWS states in the online marketing literature for this service. The company is pitching the service as a complement to its Elastic MapReduce service, which provides a platform for Hadoop big data analysis. AWS itself is using the High Storage instances to power its Redshift data warehouse service…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Red Hat will acquire virtualization environment manager ManageIQ for $104 million to beef up the capabilities of Red Hat Virtualization 3.1, its own virtualization management console.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization generates and manages virtual machines run by the KVM hypervisor found in the Linux kernel. ManageIQ was an early fosterer of management in the multi-hypervisor virtual environment. In this early, 2009 look at the company, ManageIQ CEO and co-founder Joe Fitzgerald talked about management problems in the more dynamic world of virtual machines…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud computing is one of the most exciting technologies to come along in a very long while. This is largely due to the race in the marketplace to provide the most innovative cloud features and functions. It’s a race to keep up with the hype; it’s also a race to stay or become relevant. However, could all that excitement be masking the true purpose of cloud computing?

Cloud computing should have the objective to provide a core foundation of infrastructure and business processes on demand, and we should use those resources to drive our business. If cloud computing works correctly, the storage and compute systems it provides, or the applications it serves up, should function like any other utility we use: It should just work, and eventually, we don’t even think much about it. In other words, it should become boring…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Raj Sabhlok.

Cloud computing continues to be one of the most hyped topics in IT. Even Gartner suggests that cloud computing has moved beyond the peak of inflated expectations, with many achieving meaningful success.

I suspect nearly every business or individual uses a cloud application or service today. As consumers, every time we access Gmail or Facebook, we are buying into the cloud paradigm. Businesses have adopted SaaS applications for accounting, expense reporting, email and a “host” of other business applications.

So, it would seem as if cloud computing is fairly mainstream, right? Well, yes and no. Based on my predictions below, I anticipate an even broader adoption of cloud computing in 2013 as companies seek to leverage its inherent benefits…

Contributed Article.  Author: Tim Sedlack, Senior Product Manager, Quest Software (now part of Dell)