Grazed InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

In what could be one of the biggest cloud computing contracts to date by number of users, the Department of Veterans Affairs will move 600,000 users to Microsoft cloud email and collaboration services. The five-year, $36 million contract will first see 15,000 VA employees move to Microsoft’s government community cloud collaboration offering, Office 365 for Government, with the rest of the agency’s 600,000 users to follow over the remainder of the contract period. The agency will use Office 365 for email, calendaring, instant messaging, web and video conferences, Office collaboration tools and SharePoint.

Instead of working directly with Microsoft, VA has signed on with HP Enterprise Services, which will act as the systems integrator and provide disaster recovery services. However, VA has a long history as a big Microsoft shop. In July, for example, the agency signed a five-year enterprise agreement giving the agency access to a broad array of Microsoft products and services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Rohan Pearce.

Commonwealth Bank CIO Michael Harte today told participants at a Sydney event organised by Amazon.com’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that data sovereignty and security have been used as unjustified excuses to stop businesses moving to the cloud.

"The favourite [excuses] I used to hear when I talked to the big household names in infrastructure equipment was, ‘It doesn’t look very secure Michael. You can’t do that. And there’s data sovereignty; you’d want to look very, very carefully at that. And this on-demand pricing — no we just can’t do that we’ve got rules saying specifically we can’t."…

Grazed from Sustainblog.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

The astronomical growth in computer data along with the migration to cloud computing technologies has contributed to the proliferation of large data centers. These facilities consist of big buildings housing thousands of computer servers. Extensive power and cooling systems are required to run the facilities. The largest facilities process data for the likes of Google, Facebook and eBay.

Historically, much of this data processing has been accomplished locally in corporate IT facilities. In recent years, many companies have outsourced IT infrastructure and software applications to cloud based service providers that run large data centers. The benefits to these companies include lower costs, increased flexibility and enhanced processing power…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

The web has brought out hardware machinery spot-on to cloud-based applications. Some of these servers are so scalable in magnitude, mindboggling in performance and high-end in gigabytes capacity, that they even sound a little alien. Suddenly they are here and those who only thought of them as data processors without a name can now identify with them, courtesy of cloud computing platforms. Intel, through its Tyan partners, is an example of companies that have enabled this to happen through its cutting-edge processing units. These can be discussed under the following headings.

GPU equipment

The Graphics Processing Unit is one of the biggest server products. It allows users to combine the three-dimensional and high-end qualities of videos and graphical interfaces with the core processing power of the Central Processing Unit (CPU). The result is a great chain of reactions. The server becomes at once fast for remote clients to remit and retrieve encrypted data across the cloud infrastructure. It also comes up with a modular system that helps to optimize capacity by users and thus reduce costs. Furthermore, its scalability is beyond question quite high, meaning virtual businesses that start small can expand within the server environment without any need to move to new hardware. Finally, the particular Tyan-Intel combination comes with a double-edge capacity that stores data, doubly, for a rainy day…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: George Moon.

Google’s innovative Cloud SQL database has received several upgrades, most notably to storage, speed, and location choice. The upgrades include enhancements for speedier read and writes, more storage, and the choice of running instances in either the U.S. or Europe, InfoWorld reports. Google enhances products often and with purpose, so these latest upgrades, it could be argued, are an attempt to gain more ground in the cloud computing market.

Cloud ComputingIn a blog post, Joe Faith, product manager for the Google Cloud SQL, wrote that storage would increase by 10 times to 100GB, the size of instances has been increased to 16GB RAM, faster writes via optional asynchronous replication, EU datacenter option for Premier customers and integration with Google Apps Script…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Cloud services are where the action is for enterprise IT companies right now, and Citrix, which bought the open source, cloud-computing platform Cloud.com for upwards of $200 million in 2011 (getting a killer domain name in the process), wants to be at the vanguard of that trend. It’s now preparing to launch a new service at the domain, which will simply be called “Cloud” (minus the dot-com). It has put up a placeholder at Cloud.com with a sign-up for “early access and pleasantly infrequent updates” for what it is describing as a “new Cloud on the horizon.”

It’s not clear at this point whether this will be a completely new product (one guess from TNW is a new home for Project Avalon), to compete against the likes of VMWare, Amazon, Oracle and Salesforce. On the other hand, it could simply be a relaunch of the services that existed at Cloud.com before the old page was taken down…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Whether we’re discussing your personal health, business or cloud computing, efficiency is the name of today’s game. Let me walk you through a few examples. In Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, he examined extensive research on how human beings are actually constructed for long distance running. He compares our physique with that of a cheetah, versus a rabbit, and discusses the need for endurance over speed when running is part of your survival – hunting or escaping, for example.

Our legs and our lungs are efficiently designed to support those objectives. Similarly, so is the African Wild Dog, the most efficient hunter in nature. They live in packs of 6-20 and instinctively understand that when their numbers dip below six, their ability to hunt effectively – and therefore survive – decreases. They maintain harmonious packs with very little in-fighting and competition, and hunt in a methodical, organized fashioned. When chasing prey, they run a relay-style race, alternating which dogs take the lead and which pack members drop back to rest while on a long chase…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Jacqueline Vanacek.

So much has been written about “the risks” of cloud computing, but that risk leads to bigger rewards, especially for small business. And as the engine of job creation, small business will accelerate the economic recovery. SMBs can launch new operations in the cloud with little up-front capital. This levels the playing field against market leaders and allows for rapid growth.

Seventy-four percent of small-medium businesses expect to use cloud services next year. They are also mobilizing their workforce (see Infographic). This can increase remote worker productivity by seventy-two percent…

Grazed from Tyan. Author: PR Announcement.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp, will live demo its FT48-B7055 with LSI NytroTMMegaRAID® application acceleration card and NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator pre-installed. This platform delivers outstanding computing performance for data transmission and data migration. TYAN will display a full array of products in cooperation with industry leading companies designed for HPC and power-efficient computing environments at SC’12.

This includes the latest microserver platform, the FM65-B5519, with 18 front-serviced computing nodes, the 4-Socket systems GT26A-B8812 and FT68-B7910, the FT48-B7055 and FT77A-B7059 high-density GPU platforms supporting 4/8 GPU cards, and the KGN70A and KTN70A storage platforms with 18/24 HDDs in a 2U chassis. These platforms will all be showcased at TYAN’s booth (#2419) along with Intel 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapters, an LSI NytroTM MegaRAID® application acceleration card and a NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s probably not a huge investment, especially by Oracle’ s usual standards, but the database giant has bought a minority stake in Engine Yard, the PHP, Ruby and Node.js Platform as a Service. The stake gives Oracle a better story — sort of — in PaaS.

Oracle, which for the past year or so has proclaimed itself a cloud company, now has at least part of a Platform as a Service story. It’s made an investment – the amount was undisclosed — in Engine Yard, a PaaS provider that supports Ruby, Node.js and PHP. The company has long been a rumored acquisition target especially since Salesforce.com bought Heroku in 2010, starting a sort of run on PaaS companies…