Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Inktank, which specializes in providing enterprise-level support for Ceph Distributed Storage System, announced at Dell World 2012 it has joined Dell‘s (NASDAQ: DELL) Emerging Solutions Ecosystem.

Through the partner ecosystem, Inktank plans to offer Ceph storage software, professional services and support as part of the Dell ecosystem, designed as a partnership program to deliver complementary and interoperable hardware, software and services components via Dell’s OpenStack-powered cloud. Ceph, on the other hand, was designed to be a highly scalable and flexible platform that enables object, block and file storage in a universal storage system, enabling enterprises in the cloud…

Grazed from FutureGov.  Author: Rob Livingstone.

The whole topic of cloud computing has been dominating the IT agenda. Conversations have been very intense in 2012 – we were barraged by new opinions, fuelled by new cloud product offerings and innovative, compelling solutions.  Given the inconsistency in the maturity of understanding across industry as to the intrinsic value of cloud technologies, I expected 2012 to be an interesting year indeed as organisations struggle with balancing the promise of significant benefits with the perceived (or actual) concerns such as risk and security.

In my view, the cloud hype cycle differs from almost all the previous hype cycles as it is turbo-charged by the consumerisation of IT technology, where anyone can access immediately, at minimal to zero cost, powerful IT systems previously only available within organisations…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

If you’ve been holding back about moving to the ‘Cloud, it is time to get onboard the Cloud Computing express.  Not only has every major research firm published market forecasts indicating that Cloud services are growing exponentially, but we see multiplying customer success stories that clearly illustrate the immediate and measurable business benefits of moving to the Cloud.

Here are some simple rules you should follow to help you move ahead in the coming year and successfully leverage today’s rapidly evolving Cloud alternatives:…

Grazed from: The Edinburgh Reporter.  Author: Phyllis Stephen.

Cloud computing is a term that we have all been hearing lots about over the last few years. You may already be making good use of its facilities. Or, you may be wondering what it means and whether it could be of interest for you. So, you could be surprised to learn that if you access or are active on YouTube, Gmail, Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you are already a cloud user.

To sum it up, Wikipedia defines cloud computing as the use of computing resources (hardware and software) delivered as a service over a network, usually the internet.  Cloud computing has a number of benefits, including its facility for on-line data backup. Its solutions that ‘know’ which files you have created or changed and back them up continuously and automatically can be especially helpful…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk.  Author: Peter Gothard.

The CEO of Linux-based software solutions company LinuxIT, Peter Dawes-Huish, slammed the public sector G-Cloud system this week, likening the current service level to a military mission "with an entry route and no exit route" that is "not just dangerous, but suicide".

"Data lock-in and data opaqueness is as prevalent in cloud offerings as in any other delivery model," Dawes-Huish told the Westminster cloud computing eForum.  "If you move your applications and data to a cloud service in the proprietary model then you’ll be held to ransom, and it doesn’t matter how flexible your opportunity for moving, you’re locked in."…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Chris Kanaracus.

An official document containing policies and pledges for customers of Oracle’s cloud services reveals that many aspects fall in line with industry standards, while others may prompt cause for worry among customers, according to analysts.

The document was last updated Dec. 1 and is marked "confidential," despite being openly available on Oracle’s website (PDF). It lays out the rules by which Oracle and its cloud customers must play, apart from any special terms that may exist in individual contract agreements. Oracle launched a wide array of cloud services this year, including its Fusion Applications as well as a PaaS (platform as a service), IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and social network…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow and Stacey Higginbotham.

The cloud has moved from concept to reality. Sure, startups have been buying computing and storage on demand for years, while enterprises talked up virtualization and hoped it was the same thing. But now big companies are finally getting this whole on-demand compute thing, and the next year we’ll see big IT companies buy up startups that will help transition enterprise workloads to the cloud, more companies that offer enterprise-class infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) get real applications and a more viable model of hybrid cloud that enables cloud bursting. Let’s see what’s ahead…