Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Bruce Cleveland.

Most of us are familiar with the adage by George Santayana, who, in his biography said, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” You may recognize it as, “Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.” Either way, I agree.

This truism is applicable to the high-tech industry, specifically when it is applied against transformational technologies. For example, the change from mainframe computing to client-server computing. Or, for those of you old enough to remember, the move from Codasyl databases to relational databases. Companies that remain steadfastly adhered to old architectures (e.g. ADR or Cullinet – who were unassailable technology giants in the early 80’s) are eventually upended and replaced by companies with new technology architectures (e.g. Oracle)…

Grazed from Enterprise Networking Planet.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

There is a lot of interest an activity around the open source OpenStack cloud project from all types of IT vendors, including networking vendors. One of those vendors is Brocade, who is now partnering with Piston Cloud Computing to build a joint solution set.

The partnership will see the Brocade VCS Fabric melded to a Piston Cloud designed OpenStack platform. Piston Cloud is a commercial vendor building its own OpenStack distribution. With OpenStack and its included Quantum network virtualization components the line will be begin to blur between Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the cloud…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Software defined datacentres, cloud management and automation, virtualisation licensing, mobile virtualisation, heterogeneity and the need for IT executives to develop new skills in the cloud era were some of the themes of the VMworld Europe 2012 conference.

“Cloud is a disruptive technology,” said VMware’s new chief executive Pat Gelsinger, in his opening keynote, setting the tone of the Right Here, Right Now conference, heavily focused on cloud computing’s role in datacentres and its automation…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: John Foley.

The General Service Administration, in justifying its decision two years ago to adopt Google’s cloud services for email and collaboration, projected it would save $15 million over five years. Now, an internal audit has found that evidence of those anticipated savings is lacking.

GSA’s inspector general recently released the results of its audit of the agency’s transition from Lotus Notes to Google Apps for 17,000 employees. Unisys is the lead contractor on that part of the project. In a related move, GSA awarded a five-year contract to Salesforce.com to use its Force.com service to support the Notes migration. GSA’s undertaking is significant because it’s one of Uncle Sam’s first big steps into the cloud. The agency became the first "to move its entire staff to a single cloud-based email system," according to the inspector general…

Grazed from The Huffinton Post. Author: Naibo Yu.

In a Chinese classroom, a teacher needs to face more than 20 students and sometimes up to 60. These students, and their parents, will always want to get the most attention from the teacher.
This is an educational challenge faced by schools the world over, which in China, we’re turning to technology to tackle.

In 2008, with a start up loan from Youth Business China (a member of the global charity network), Youth Business International, I founded HowLang Group – part of a new wave of educational tools, social learning, where technology is used to help break down the barriers of the school walls and improve learning. At this time, our product was just in the design phase, struggling for investment, so the loan was crucial to helping us progress…

Grazed from the Huffington Post. Author: Steve Hamby.

You can’t engage in a conversation about IT today without hearing having cloud computing dropped in the first two sentences. But behind that term is an overwhelming number of types, issues, solutions, and architectures to consider and digest. The world could benefit from a translation of sorts to explain to the cloud non-experts all this IT mumbo-jumbo. Here’s my attempt.

Multiple Cloud Types

It’s common to envision "the Cloud" as one huge computer network hoarding gobs of information. However, there are many clouds and even different types of clouds, each suitable for different types of problems. Specific features and benefits of cloud types should affect decisions in developing and deploying cloud solutions. And sometimes one cloud type isn’t enough, and multiple cloud types need to be combined to solve a problem. For example, a utility cloud often provides the core computing resources needed for data and storage clouds. Here is a closer look at four of the most common types of clouds that I encounter in enterprises…

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics. Author: Penny Jones.

Building on its current cloud computing operations, Asustek Computer – or Asus – which produces computers and provides personal cloud services, plans to build three more data centers around the world.

It has earmarked the US, Europe and Northern China for its new cloud computing centers, according to a report by the Focus Taiwan News Channel, which covered a speech given by Andy Huang, the Asus Asia Subsidiary’s director at a cloud computing forum in Taiwan…