Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

In a bid to capture more cloud customers, Google has reduced prices on its existing virtual servers by 5% and added 36 selections to the four previously available in its Compute Engine server catalog.

Google seeks to put more muscle behind its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings since Compute Engine was first announced as "a limited preview offering" during the Google I/O 2012 show in June. It’s still in limited preview, i.e., a beta test through customers, with no date in sight for when it will become a generally available product, said Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions in the Google Enterprise unit…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

It’s hard to write history when you’re still in the thick of recording it. However, in cloud computing we’ve amassed just enough background to name some of the early pioneers who’ve helped establish the relatively new computing paradigm.

The list is neither exhaustive nor all inclusive. And, undoubtedly, there will be other lists, highlighting other quiet innovators whose names we’re just beginning to hear, and whose accomplishments will be well-known in the coming years. But for IT managers in the midst of considering or adopting cloud computing, this list offers a commentary on where we have so recently come from, and where we may be going in the near future…

Grazed from EnterpriseIrregulars. Author: Tom Raftery.

We have been talking on GreenMonk about the lack of transparency from Cloud vendors for some time now, but our persistence is starting to pay off, it appears! Some recent conversations we’ve had with people in this space are starting to prove very positive.

We’ve had talks with GreenQloud. GreenQloud are based in Iceland, so their electricity is 100% renewable (30% geothermal and 70% hydro). They already measure and report to their customers the carbon footprint of their cloud consumption – so what discussions did we have with them? Well, GreenQloud use the open source CloudStack platform to manage their cloud infrastructure. Given that CloudStack is open source, and we’ve previously suggested that Open Source Cloud Platforms should be hacked for Energy and Emissions reporting, we suggested to GreenQloud that they contribute their code back into the CloudStack project. They were very open to the idea. Watch this space…

Grazed from Mibiz. Author: Mike Brennan.

Cloud computing offers a lot of promise for business, particularly small-to-medium ones, to not only save money on IT spending, but also to rapidly scale up for important Internet advertising campaigns and the like. But a recent survey also shows there remains a lot of confusion among business executives on what cloud computing brings to the table.

The survey, “The Future of Cloud Computing,” showed only 40 percent of respondents are experimenting with cloud computing today, while another 26 percent said they are waiting for the market to mature before taking the plunge…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Graham Morrison.

It was back in 2010 when Rackspace, the company famous for hosting lots of websites, got together with NASA, the agency famous for pretending to send astronauts to the moon. The whole project kicked off after a single blog post by a NASA contractor. The post read: "Launched NOVA – Apache-Licensed Cloud Computing, in Python. It’s live, it’s buggy, it’s beta. Check it out."

Together, NASA and Rackspace went on to create a kind of online fantasy world, where storage, resources and performance would be no object, and small startups could build their ivory towers in the clouds, knowing that when their day came, they’d be able to scale everything up, quickly and efficiently, before quickly selling their stock to Facebook…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, says it’s high time for a new vision in the evolution of cloud computing. That is, to bring in the experience and sensibilities of service oriented architecture, essentially building a cloud architecture on what he calls "Distributed SOA."

What does Nolle mean by Distributed SOA? It builds on a concept first detailed by Eric Newcomer back in the heydey of SOA, warning that too many centralized approaches to SOA were being pushed by vendors, who had vested interests in keeping things centralized and mostly proprietary. This goes against the very grain and philosophy of SOA, which is to enable the building and deployment of services entirely independent of vendors and underlying technologies…

Grazed from Trade Arabia. Author: Editorial Staff.

Antivirus protection alone is not enough in the age of cloud computing, where web and email exchanges provide the most potent routes for attack, said one of the leading online privacy and security CEOs. Historically, antivirus software has been the go-to security measure for CIOs, but many are now overlooking the potential threats that emerge during unprotected internet usage.

“These days, as companies and consumers increasingly conduct their business in the cloud, securing virtual identities, browsing activity, and personal data arguably has become more important than securing physical devices,” said David Gorodyansky, the CEO of AnchorFree…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Christina Farr.

Who would have thought that cloud computing would be the modern day equivalent of Robin Hood? In a report published by the University of San Diego, Unlocking the Benefits of Cloud Computing for Emerging Economics, researchers found countless benefits in increased global access to cheap data storage and processors. The authors intimated that in the future, cloud computing technologies will be an economic stabilizer.

Cloud-based technologies have experienced explosive growth in recent years, and evidence suggests they they will continue to grow. By 2014 Gartner predicted that 60 percent of the world’s server workloads will take place on virtualized cloud servers. It’s great news for vendors and businesses, but what does this mean for people in countries like India, Mexico and South Africa?…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: VI.

As cloud computing continues to grow and cloud hosting is adopted by more and more individuals and businesses alike, it has been calculated that the use of cloud hosting can dramatically decrease the amount of carbon emissions produced by each and every business that makes use of the cloud.

Google has calculated that an SME can lower its energy usage by 65%-85% simply by switching to the cloud.  This is thanks to the fact that servers, located elsewhere, will be used for data storage rather than running pollutant in-house servers.  So, here at VI, we got thinking. If every SME around the world made use of cloud computing, could we really go some way to saving our planet from the ever worsening problem of global warming caused by rising carbon emissions?…

Grazed from YNetNews.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

European researchers are working to develop new microprocessors that use up to 90% less energy than the chips currently in use, Energy and Environmental Management Magazine reported.  According to the report, an EU-funded project dubbed "EuroCloud," has adapted the low-power microprocessors used in mobile phones to work on a larger scale.