Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Location-based service (LBS) technology has been growing in line with the development of both the mobile devices we use to connect and the wider proliferation of cloud computing services which we seek to connect into.  Traditionally, location services fall into two types:

PUSH LBS: location services can be push-based e.g. alerts sent to users when they pass into pre-specified geographic areas such as restaurants or shops etc.

PULL (or QUERY) LBS: location services can be pulled e.g. alerts sent to users in response to queries they make related to where they are…

Grazed from TechGoondu.  Author:  Aaron Tan.

Packaged software vendors may be starting to offer cloud-computing services in recent years, but their transition to a services-based business will be difficult to achieve, says CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey.

“They are software vendors, not services vendors. Everything about those companies in terms of sales compensation and business models supports the software model,” he told Techgoondu in a telephone interview from Switzerland last month.  “The cloud era is a services era, not a software era,” he said.

While vendors such as Red Hat and VMware have been touting cloud software that allows businesses to create their private platform as a service (PaaS), Labourey said such offerings only serve to satisfy the needs of IT managers who are in denial about the benefits of the public cloud…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org.  Author: Florence de Borja.

With the current popularity cloud computing is experiencing, it is not surprising to expect that it will have a great impact on the global economy. In fact, according to the International Data Corporation, it is expected for cloud computing to generate at least 14 million jobs worldwide. In a recent Forbes article by Joe McKendrick, he pointed out 5 ways in which cloud computing will change how businesses are implemented. According to him, cloud computing will also indirectly affect jobs.

In McKendrick’s article “5 Ways Cloud Computing Is Disrupting Everyone’s Job”, he noted that because procurement of cloud computing resources can be done through a credit card, everyone can have access to it. And with that access, it is highly probable that IT will no longer be limited to a particular IT department only. Instead, the IT professionals will be part of each department using cloud computing. According to McKendrick, executives within the lines of business have greater IT budgets than their counterparts in the IT department. But, it doesn’t mean that IT executives will be eased out of companies. These IT executives will be advising the businesses as well as offer tactical and strategic guidance so that line-of-business executives can identify and select the suitable resources for their departments…

Grazed from Barton’s Blog.  Author: Barton George.

You may see all manner of vehicles as you search for a parking spot when you arrive at work in the morning. But you may not expect to encounter a cloud. At Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, the company has used space in one of its parking lots of house a Dell Modular Data Center (MDC), which will house Dell’s OpenStack-powered cloud computing platform and Apache Hadoop solutions for customers to test-drive. It’s an interesting example of how modular units can allow companies to use available space on corporate camouses to expand their IT operations.

Read more from the source @ http://bartongeorge.net/2012/09/11/mdc-in-our-parking-lot-serving-up-openstack-hadoop/
 

Grazed from HPCWire.  Author: Chad Harrington.

The essayist Paul Valery once quipped, "The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." Surely, there is truth in that. The future of workload management continues to evolve; it is definitely not what it used to be.

As we look toward the future of workload management, we see three major trends: application insight, big data awareness, and HPC clouds. The trends are inter-related and we’ll discuss each in turn.

Application Insight

First, workload managers need to have greater insight into the applications they run. The more deeply the workload manager can understand the workload, the more efficiently it can schedule, manage, and adapt the computing environment. Today’s workload managers understand basic workload requirements and can track an application’s progress. However, there is more that can be done. In the future, we’ll see more emphasis on understanding an application’s purpose and key metrics. If the workload manager understands the application’s current and future needs, it can make much more optimal decisions. Metrics such as I/O bandwidth, memory allocation, storage space, CPU and GPU cycles, etc., all help the workload manager understand an application in order to optimally manage it…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk.  Author: Graeme Burton.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com’s cloud services division, has claimed that more than 300 government agencies and 1,500 education institutions in the US are now using AWS for a wide variety of uses including "big data" analytics, high-performance computing applications, web and collaboration applications, archiving and storage, and disaster relief.

Teresa Carlson, vice-president of worldwide public sector, AWS, attributed the rate of adoption to such federal government initiatives as the US Federal Cloud First mandate. "With the new services and features added today in AWS GovCloud, public-sector customers now have greater capabilities to rapidly design, build and deploy high-performance applications with AWS’s scalable, secure, low-cost platform," she said…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author:  Cris Frangold.

During the OpenWorld 2012 conference, Oracle (ORCL) announced its Oracle Public Cloud service that will provide on-premise web hosting and management or strictly cloud computing using remote servers to businesses. To enter this growing market quickly, Oracle acquired a number of small startups over the past year with plans to integrate some of its existing products into the new service.

Acquisitions included Taleo and SelectMinds; both of which provided contact management services to businesses. Instead of building a cloud computing service from scratch like it had originally intended, Oracle decided to acquire several small companies and combine products into one offering…