Grazed from Sci-Tech-Today. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

AMD’s new design initiative addresses the growing demand to deliver better performance-per-watt for dense cloud computing solutions. Unless Intel shifts its strategy, it’s probable that AMD will be the only processor provider bridging the x86 and 64-bit ARM ecosystems in the data center and for cloud solutions.

Forbes is pondering whether AMD’s move into ARM chips is positioning the company for a sale. Other media outlets are considering whether or not the move is setting the stage for heavy competition with Intel Relevant Products/Services on the server side…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Michael Kanellos.

Internet startups need to amass a compelling business model, defensible technology and an experienced team of entrepreneurs to achieve escape velocity. But they also need to make sure the trains run on time.

Operational competitiveness is the new dividing line between the success stories and also-rans in cloud computing and Internet services, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation during a panel discussion at the Big Science conference that took place in San Jose this week. Companies offering cloud services have to have a good idea, in other words, but it is more important that they make sure their system doesn’t crash, annoy users or leak data like a sieve…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Chad Berndtson.

Cisco this week made substantial updates to its Unified Computing System (UCS) and cloud automation portfolios, including a centralized management tool for large-scale UCS deployments and the extension of certain connectivity tools to support rack-mount server versions of UCS in addition to blade server versions.

New to the UCS platform is UCS Central, what Brian Schwarz, director, UCS product management, described as a "big brother" to Cisco’s UCS Manager software. UCS Central creates a single management dashboard for large-scale UCS deployments and the many UCS Managers needed to control distributed server environments across large enterprises. Whereas an instance of UCS Manager covers up to 160 or up to 320 computing nodes, depending on a customer’s configuration, UCS Central can oversee as many as 10,000 physical servers. It’s based on the same data model and API structure as UCS Manager so IT managers used to the UCS Manager interface won’t find anything too new, according to Cisco…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Michael Brenner.

Is your business ready for cloud computing? We know there are cost-saving reasons to run your business in the cloud, but before signing with a vendor, there are some other things to consider. Processes, goals, and technology are just a few.

ViaWest’s white paper entitled How to Execute a Successful Cloud Strategy succinctly outlines 10 “cloud tenets” that are perfect for helping you develop a cloud strategy specific to your business. When evaluating a cloud vendor, the white paper recommends:

• Analyze your long-term business needs – Cloud computing vendors aren’t “one size fits all.” Consider your organization’s present and future needs and match them to a cloud vendor that has a choice of technology…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Brian Patrick Donaghy, CEO of Appcore, reached out to me to discuss the five things he expected to see in the cloud computing market in 2013. Since his company is in the business of providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) tools, it appeared to be an excellent opportunity to discuss what Appcore has learned from its customers’ experiences using cloud computing. In the end, the conversation turned into a rambling discussion of the history of computing, how technology is adopted around the world, and was great fun. Thanks Brian!

Five cloud computing trends for 2013

Here’s what Brian Donaghy had to say about what we’re going to see in 2013…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Attunity is bringing its CloudBeam managed SaaS platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS) out of the private beta phase and into public beta. It’s not quite ready for official launch, but now that the company has launched the public beta, it is bringing out two high-performance data movement services — upload to cloud and replication between cloud regions. “Attunity CloudBeam helps users realize the promise of cloud computing by alleviating the Big Data bottleneck and infrastructure maintenance challenges,” said Matt Benati, vice president of Global Marketing, in a prepared statement.

Attunity first announced CloudBeam back in July when it brought the private beta to customers for testing. CloudBeam was designed to be simple cloud service providing high-performance solutions for moving Big Data in, out and across AWS cloud data centers as quickly and easily as possible…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line.

Some computing and storage tasks require faster data input/output than others. That’s why in August, Amazon Web Services said customers could, for an additional fee, allocate up to 1,000 Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) per EBS storage volume. On Thursday, the company doubled the limit to 2,000 IOPS per EBS volume according to a post on the very busy AWS blog. Faster storage input/output is important in database and transaction processing applications…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As InfoWorld’s Ted Samson pointed out this week, Microsoft is intertwining Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Azure to help developers build multiplatform, cloud-friendly apps. And it announced a batch of new services and functionality for its cloud platform, including the extension of Windows Azure Mobile Services to support for Windows Phone 8. The move should provide easy cloud-based mobile application development for those loyal to Microsoft platforms. Microsoft even provides a store to sell these Azure-built applications. But something’s still missing from Microsoft’s cloud picture.

The core issue is that a company the size of Microsoft should be doing more leading and less following. All the technologies and services Microsoft annonuced this week for its cloud ecosystem were born, proven, and executed by other companies, such as Apple, Google, and Amazon.com. Microsoft is looking much less innovative than these competitors, and so it’s much less likely to capture and hold the emerging $50 billion cloud computing market…

Grazed from ChannelPartners. Author: Editorial Staff.

Public cloud services are creating a strange dichotomy, having both a positive and negative impact on IT services spending. That’s according to a new report from Gartner, the tech researcher, which says public cloud services are simultaneously cannibalizing and stimulating demand for external IT services. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) adoption – the most basic and fundamental form of cloud computing service – has expanded beyond development and test use cases.

"Public cloud adoption is accelerating and public cloud services do, and will, cannibalize IT services spending in the coming years, most notably in the data center," said Bryan Britz, research director at Gartner. "At the same time, public cloud adoption offers service providers the opportunity to accelerate externalization of spending for the non-public cloud workloads and IT operations and service management responsibilities in tandem with clients pursuing a public cloud initiative."…

Grazed from EastDay. Author: PR Announcement.

MICROSOFT Corp has chosen Shanghai as the first city in China for commercial and public cloud computing services, Microsoft and the Shanghai government said yesterday. "It’s a milestone agreement to show Microsoft’s commitment to China," said Ralph Haupter, chairman and CEO of Microsoft China. "Microsoft will continue to expand and accelerate investment in China, driving the next era of innovation and opportunity."

The cloud agreement enables customers in China to access Microsoft’s Office 365 and Windows Azure services operated by 21Vianet in China, the world’s biggest personal computer and Internet market…