Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Peter Judge.

Six months ago, IBM launched PureSystems, new-wave mainframes which combine RISC and Intel servers and promise a new and simpler way to develop enterprise applications. But since that initial fanfare,we have heard almost nothing about the supposedly revolutionary servers.

That doesn’t mean nothing is happening, though, says IBM senior server consultant IBM Tikiri Wanduragala. He grabbed TechWeekEurope last month, to tell us that PureSystems is a response to commodity cloud computing. It might take time to mature, but it is on track. The meeting took place in the run-up to the announcement of new PureSystems tailored for Big Data analytics…

Grazed from CSO. Author: Bobby Violino.

Like many other companies, processor manufacturer Intel Corp. is having to evolve its information security focus to meet the changes underway in the technology landscape—particularly with the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications and the rise in cloud computing services.

"We realize the importance of detective controls and building out our security business intelligence capabilities to scale and meet future business objectives around computing," says Alan Ross, senior principal engineer at Intel. "We must have the ability to aggregate, correlate and even visualize many billions of events per day. This type of scale requires investment in many areas."…

Grazed from BCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

Security is one of the main factors preventing companies from switching to cloud computing, particularly cloud storage, as they are worried about how well protected their data will be. But according to Google’s enterprise director of security, the cloud is probably a lot more secure than the in-house systems most firms are currently using.

Speaking to ZDNet, Eran Feigenbaum acknowledged that the exact level of security provided would largely depend on the type of organisation in question and who the cloud service provider was. However, he insisted that in most cases greater security would be offered in the cloud…

Grazed from EINPressWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IT Governance Ltd, the leading expert in information security training, consultancy, books and tools, has reported that the Cloud Computing Foundation training course in November is available at a special discounted price of £450 + VAT. This exceptional offer of the EXIN-accredited course will help cost-effectively train your whole IT team in the basics of Cloud Computing. Places can be immediately booked online at www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/3719.

Cloud Computing presents every organisation with the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of its information technology, while potentially significantly reducing costs. Alan Calder, CEO of IT Governance, says, "Understanding the additional risks and supplier relationship issues associated with Cloud-based services are essential for all IT professionals." …

Grazed from Linux.com. Author: Libby Clark.

Two major trends in enterprise computing this year show increasing overlap: big data processing and open source cloud adoption. To Hortonworks, the software company behind open source Apache Hadoop, the connection makes sense. Enterprise customers want the ability to spin up a cluster on demand and quickly process massive amounts of data, said Jim Walker, director of product marketing at Hortonworks, in an interview at OSCON in July. The cloud provides this kind of access by its ability to scale and handle computing tasks elastically.

The open source cloud offers the additional benefit of low-cost deployment and extra plugability you won’t get with a proprietary cloud infrastructure. All three major open source IaaS platforms — OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus — have made much progress this year in testing Hadoop deployments on their stacks. And Eucalyptus is working on full integration with the platform…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Kevin Normandeau.

The modern IT environment is evolving to include better hardware, more virtualization technologies and now, cloud computing. One of the biggest barriers in moving towards a private cloud model are security and compliance concerns. Organizations are working to protect their cloud platforms as more data centers become distributed. There’s little argument that there are numerous benefits to a private cloud – but some challenges still exist. This white paper from Cisco takes a look at the private cloud computing model and how security plays a role. When looking at cloud characteristics, some of the topics covered include:

• On-demand self-service
• Resources pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Measured services
• Broad network access…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

Microsoft announced today that it will acquire cloud storage vendor StorSimple. The terms of the purchase were not disclosed. The move is designed to advance Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision and enable its customers to better leverage hybrid cloud computing, the two companies said.

StorSimple, which opened three and a half years ago and began shipping appliances this spring, is among a relatively new breed of companies to offer an appliance that stores data onsite while replicating or mirroring it to an offsite, public cloud storage provider. Among other companies selling cloud-connected appliances are Nasuni and TwinStrata…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Edwin Schouten.

One of the benefits of cloud computing is increased efficiency; services are rapidly deployed and ready for use in a matter of minutes versus the weeks or months it traditionally takes. But there is more to cloud computing than just getting your compute resources, storage capacity or application as a service within minutes. Based on personal experience with cloud consumers, here are the top five business benefits beyond efficiency.

Business agility

Getting the compute resources you need when you need them tends to shorten IT projects resulting in less FTE to deliver the project and a quicker and more predictive time-to-market. Being able to deliver results faster, cheaper and with more quality might just give your business a competitive edge and make her more nimble on her feet. I have seen a data analytics project being reduced from 4 months to just 3 weeks, reducing the projects time-to-market and overall cost significantly…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

NetApp has contributed Data ONTAP 8 Clustering drivers to OpenStack, giving service providers and enterprises better resources when building private and public clouds based on the platform, it said on Monday.

The addition of drivers for Data ONTAP 8 Clustering to OpenStack Folsom, the latest version of the open source cloud platform, allows organizations to automate management of NetApp storage pools, or clusters, and to scale the cloud infrastructure. That will in turn allow enterprises to increase storage efficiency and reduce disk and power needs, the company said…