Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon.

Facebook has flash memory on the brain. The social network, which has helped rethink server design for its operations and is designing a new type of infrastructure from the ground up for storing infrequently accessed photos, is thinking about “more use cases for flash,” said Jay Parikh, vice president of engineering and infrastructure…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Dell announced Thursday a combination server, data storage and networking device, Active System 800. Dell hopes the glossy black rack, fast and flashy, will fare well against similar products from Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and I.B.M. While the market sorts out which company wins, take a minute to admire what this trend says about tech.

For one thing, as cloud computing really starts to catch on, it is getting hard to tell the difference between innovation and consolidation. Dell’s “Active Infrastructure Family” of computers is a result of acquisitions the company has made in the past few years in storage, networking and software. Many of those companies would have been purchased by Dell’s competitors if Dell hadn’t got there first. Moving into the new era of cloud computing also involves rolling up the old era of separate computer businesses…

Grazed from PC Advisor. Author: Stephanie Overby.

Half of the service providers surveyed by ISG said that a quarter of the engagements in their pipeline included cloud computing services and all of them expected cloud services to grow faster than traditional IT outsourcing particularly in the Americas.

However, Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service ( IaaS) are taking very different trajectories, says ISG’s emerging technology analyst Stanton Jones. "SaaS is more narrow, and we’re seeing units outside of central IT lead the drive to evaluate and purchase," Jones says. "IaaS is broader and is IT-led. We do not see as much growth here because IT functions are preferring to play it safe and stick with more modernized and standardized infrastructures."…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

Twenty-five years ago, Sam Haffar and his brother Jason started out building white-box PCs for customers in Houston who were looking for a better value. The two brothers built the business one system after another, investing every year in top-flight engineering talent to provide customers with more innovative IT products and solutions. All of it was backed up by a super-high level of local touch and a corporate credo of "Customers For Life and Employees For Life."

From day one, Computex has always been out in front of big technology changes and was a virtualization expert long before it was fashionable. It’s those kinds of deep investments that have made the company, a member of the CRN Tech Elite 250, one of the most widely respected solution providers in the country. Top vendor executives and solution provider peers have sought out Sam and Jason time and time again for advice on how to cross the next big technology chasm…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Though there are many trends percolating through the local IT space, enterprise mobility, cloud computing and big data are presenting CIOs with the biggest challenges. So says Michael Vincent, director for innovation and strategy at Deloitte Consulting, who is also a keynote speaker at the upcoming CSSA President’s Awards. Vincent believes each of these trends will receive critical importance on the CIO’s radar in the coming 12 to 18 months.

Mobile strategy

Regarding enterprise mobility, Vincent says large enterprises have moved rapidly in adopting the revolutionary potential of mobile apps to both enable and transform business processes. He explains that as CIOs gain experience in the design and engineering of good mobile apps, there tends to be an explosive growth in the number of apps in and around the enterprise…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Yesterday’s release of Ubuntu 12.10 was met with the usual fanfare as the Canonical and Ubuntu folks, who pretty much grab any chance to party they can get (Jono gets a haircut! Wooo!) celebrated the semi-annual release of one of the more popular Linux distributions.

Much as been said about the desktop side of the distribution. Steven Vaughan-Nichols says the whole thing works fine, albeit pokey; *El Reg* hates the integration of Amazon searching (though somehow they manage to avoid the gratuitous use of the term "boffins"). That’s all well and good, but frankly the bit that caught my eye in the press material coming out was on the server side, where cloud computing is the big news and Unity is background noise…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has ratified the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), a set of protocols defining how companies can safely move data between private and public clouds. The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Cloud Storage Initiative Group submitted the standard for approval by the ISO last spring. CDMI is the first industry-developed open standard specifically for data storage as a service.

"There is strong demand for cloud computing standards and to see one of our most active consortia partners contribute this specification in such a timely fashion is very gratifying," Karen Higginbottom, chairwoman of the ISO committee, said in a statement. "The standard will improve cloud interoperability."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babbcock.

OpenStack is the main initiative contesting VMware’s growing dominance in running the enterprise cloud. OpenStack has both the momentum as an expanding open source project, and the right governance with the new OpenStack Foundation. It should be able to pose as a long-range alternative.

OpenStack provides the building blocks of cloud computing: compute, network, and storage management, with virtual machine provisioning built in. It has a monitoring/reporting system through its Horizon dashboard, plus image management in Glance. But it must compete with Amazon-compatible open source code from Eucalyptus Systems, and a more polished, OpenStack-like package in Apache’s CloudStack, contributed by Citrix Systems…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

The partnership will address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery Server, desktop virtualisation, networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing technology firm Citrix has extended its partnership with storage, data management applications provider NetApp to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud deployments.

Under the expanded collaboration, the companies will provide an integrated cloud orchestration and storage application that claimed to address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery…