Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

With a difficult job market continuing in 2013, Certifications are a must for IT employment and here are the Certifications to have this coming year:

1. MCSA: Windows 2012 Server This certification provides the information on how to install, maintain, and manage the Windows 2012 Server Operating System. Windows Server powers many of the worlds’ largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Windows Server 2012 redefines the server category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps transform IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

2. MCSE: Private Cloud

Companies are looking for IT professionals who can help them build private cloud solutions to optimize IT service delivery…

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is due to release its Q3 earnings on October 24. Last quarter it reported consolidated revenue of $5.31 billion, a 10% increase y-o-y driven by the growth in Big Data and cloud computing with high-end and mid-end storage network revenues growing by 7%. This is also the tenth consecutive quarter of double digit y-o-y revenue growth for EMC.

The company generated operating cash flows of $1.24 billion and free cash flows of $958 million, a y-o-y increase of 16% and 36%, respectively. It has maintained its outlook for FY 2012 at $22 billion in revenues. [1] We highlight some of its key business drivers and what to expect from the company in 2012…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Why do tech-savvy companies like Heroku, Pinterest, AirBNB, Instagram, Reddit, Flipboard, and FourSquare keep so much of their computing horsepower running on Amazon’s aging US-East infrastructure given its problematic track record? US-East experienced big problems again Monday, impacting those sites and more. The latest snafu comes after other outages in June and earlier.

Why they’re sticking with US-East — especially since Amazon itself preaches distribution of loads across availability zones and geographic regions — is the multimillion dollar question that no one at these companies is addressing publicly. But there are pretty safe bets as to their reasons. For one thing, Ashburn, VA-based US-East came online in 2006 and is Amazon’s oldest and biggest data center (or set of data centers).That’s why lot of big, legacy accounts run there. Moving applications and workloads is complicated and expensive given data transfer fees. Face it, inertia hits us all — take a look at your own closets and you’ll probably agree. Moving is just not easy. Or fun…

Grazed from Executive Biz. Author: Ross Wilkers.

CGI Federal will transition the Federal Trade Commission‘s public websites to a cloud computing infrastructure under a five-year, $3.5 million contract. The company said it won the contract through the General Services Administration‘s Infrastructure as a Service blanket purchase agreement, through which the company delivers certified cloud services to the government.

“The demand for cloud continues to grow as agencies seek to implement affordable solutions that have increased security, provide more availability, and have better performance,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president…

Grazed from Information Week. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing customers tend to view it as a vehicle for absorbing their websites’ or other public-facing applications’ heavy traffic periods. But Amazon appears to be increasingly successful at getting more of them to use it for long-term, steady-state purposes.

The data is skimpy, and Amazon Web Services wouldn’t divulge how much of its business is now based on Reserved Instance versus on-demand servers. On-demand servers are ordered up without prior notice; they start and stop whenever the customer wants. Reserved Instances, available since 2009, are lined up through one- or three-year agreements in exchange for an upfront payment. Reserved Instances don’t have to run continuously for that length of time, although one of the options for purchasing them, heavy utilization, assumes that they run most of the time…

Grazed from Cisco News Room. Author: Anne Field.

Small businesses, of course, can save a ton of money and gain a lot of efficiencies by going to the cloud. But getting there isn’t necessarily that simple. Fact is, one size does not fit all. " A startup marketing company, for example, may take a very different path from an established medical practice," says Igal Rabinovich, CEO of IT Help Central, a White Plains, NY consulting firm. Here are some key considerations to take into account before making the move.

Create a migration plan.

Best is not to make the change willy-nilly, particularly if you think you’ll be moving many applications to the cloud. That means having a roadmap for how you’ll proceed, introducing applications one at a time and testing each one before deciding to go ahead with it and then moving onto the next. You also need to include a training period for employees to learn how to use each application…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Jason Verge.

If you need any more proof of the impact of cloud and spectacular growth of Internet traffic, Cisco’s Global Cloud Index should do the trick. The study predicts that global data center traffic will grow 4-fold and reach a total of 6.6 zettabytes annually by 2016. The company predicts global cloud traffic, the fastest growing component of data center traffic, to grow at a 44 percent combined annual growth rate (CAGR), from 683 exabytes annual traffic in 2011 to 4.3 zettabytes by 2016.

Two-thirds of all data center traffic and server workloads will be cloud-based by 2016, Cisco predicts, and the average workload per cloud server will be 4 times greater than that of traditional servers. Consumer cloud traffic is expected to grow faster than business cloud traffic, at 46 percent CAGR vs 37 percent for business. The Global Cloud Index report seeks to expand upon existing network traffic studies to assess the likely impact of Internet growth on data center and cloud infrastructure…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Musungu.

The cloud computing business model has had a phenomenal adoption in the last decade. It scales business, private, and public operations in a way that lowers costs, takes advantage of new technology, and boosts efficiency with minimal infrastructural engagements. And because it’s been the center of many debates surrounding business operations, cloud computing sector has been a beehive of activities. In the past few months, it has suddenly become a hot start-up area, attracting more and more interest. There are a number of possible reasons for this.

1. Closing knowledge gap about the cloud

According to a survey carried out and published by the Business Insider in late 2011, close to 50 percent of all Americans were not aware of what the cloud was. When the infograph came in, it worried stakeholders in the industry and they seem to have acted upon it. Recently, there has been marked evidence of a reducing knowledge gap in the previously quiet cloud sphere. People are becoming aware of the cloud and what it can do for start-ups and innovative businesses…

Grazed from BankInfoSecurity. Author: Eric Chabrow.

Employing cloud computing services could help organizations defend against the type of distributed denial of service attacks that have temporarily crippled the online service of major American banks, says NIST’s Matthew Scholl.

By using cloud computing services, Scholl says in an interview with Information Security Media Group, enterprises no longer are completely dependent on their own physical infrastructure because they can add processing capabilities from the cloud to keep up with DDoS attacks…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Rackspace’s new OpenStack-powered Cloud Block Storage comes in spinning disk and faster SSD tiers and lets customers mix and match block size with compute instances as needed, says company CTO John Engates. Rackspace continued to roll out pieces of its OpenStack cloud Tuesday with the debut of Cloud Block Storage.

Unlike its current non-OpenStack storage, this offering lets customers mix and match sizes of block storage volumes as needed with their compute instances. “We used to offer block storage associated with our cloud servers but it came in pre-defined bundles — large servers got a lot of storage, small servers got a small amount. This decouples that decision,” Rackspace CTO John Engates said in an interview…