Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Caitlan White.

As talk of cloud computing makes its way from the CIO’s office to enterprise IT departments, companies want to ensure they have the right talent for the job — and employees need to ensure their skills remain relevant. Much debate has come up around cloud computing certification among IT professionals. And much fear has been stirring that cloud signals the end of the IT admin. Can a stamp of approval or a certificate for a cloud technology help job retention as IT departments evolve?

Rackspace Hosting Inc., announced Wednesday its open cloud training initiative, which aims to certify IT administrators on OpenStack software. Open source cloud computing has made waves in cloud-savvy enterprises, but with OpenStack still not in a large number of production environments, can this certification make a difference among IT job candidates?…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: John Rath.

IBM unveiled several new technologies to help customers take advantage of cloud computing, and manage and analyze vast amounts of data. The new offerings include the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date, a new high-end disk storage system and key software updates for IBM’s newest mainframe computer.

Power Systems

As a result of a $1.4 billion research and development investment IBM announced its enterprise Power System, with Power 770 and Power 780 Servers featuring the new POWER7+ microprocessor. The POWER7+ offers an expanded 2.5x L3 cache memory, greater security with faster file encryption for the IBM AIX operating system, and memory compression that results in no increased energy usage over previous generation POWER7 chips. The Power 795 addresses demanding applications, such as business analytics, fast by utilizing up to 16 terabytes of memory with new 64GB Dual In Line Memory Modules (DIMM)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Continuous integration (CI) tools are becoming a bigger deal in the software development world. That’s why Google is helping App Engine developers use Cloudbees’ Jenkins-in-the-cloud tool. Google is promoting the use of the Jenkins continuous integration server with its Google AppEngine (GAE) platform.

Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips. Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)…

Grazed from UCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

As vendors compete for enterprise IT workloads, once-dwindling cloud computing prices are now beginning to streamline. Windows Azure cloud services of Microsoft is the latest vendor to update its pricing program, now allowing users to make a monthly commitment to receive large discounts regardless of what services they use.

It was reported in June of this year that Microsoft is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but not however, to its very own Azure cloud. It is evident that Microsoft is continuing to seek out entry-level customers and developers, and streamlining its cloud pricing is one way of attracting these new users. Most cloud services are priced on services used, such as storage, RAM and CPU, but Microsoft Azure provides a price dependent on monthly commitment and the amount of money the user agrees to spend…

Grazed from ComputerWeek. Author: K.S.Abhiraj.

Speaking of current cloud security landscape, while security and privacy concerns gets ameliorated the way cloud gets procured yet, major concerns are amplified by re-permeterization and control over organizational assets and the potential for mismanagement of those assets. Transitioning towards public cloud involves a crisp transfer of responsibility and accountability to cloud provider over information, as well as core systems whereas the core pain area seen in today’s date in private cloud environment is the way Cloud gets procured in sync without proper security equation with an unknown security denominator.

Despite the inherent loss of control, the cloud service subscriber still requires to take the responsibility for their methodology on how to align the business operations vertically with the cloud providers architecture and near-to-perfect stratagem on how to procure and integrate with the provider, thus to avoid any security fluctuations which can exhibit an opportunity for external players to penetrate…

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Curt Woodward.

Opscode, a Seattle startup that offers cloud-computing software and services for businesses, is putting some of its recent venture cash to use with expansions in Europe and Asia.

The new European office—which starts with just one London-based employee—will focus on sales and fostering the open-source community participating in Chef, the software system that Opscode created for managing IT resources. In Japan, Opscode is partnering with another company that will distribute its software and support the open-source community…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

IBM is targeting a market where the technology giant is considered as a newcomer. A major change in a society that generally deals with the largest corporations and governments around the world, IBM will increase its efforts to sell the so-called cloud computing services to medium-sized companies. The company has lined up partners to resell its services and is helping software companies to adapt their products to the IBM machines.

The decision puts IBM in more direct competition with Amazon and Salesforce. Both have been successful in dealing with SMEs and are expanding their offerings to larger companies. The software giant hopes that its knowledge of the industry and the wide range of technology will help the company to gain a large share of the market and that a series of more limited size of business may be added to new sizable revenue…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Andrea Eldridge.

Using cloud services such as Microsoft Live “SkyDrive,” Amazon’s “Cloud Drive,” Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox or SugarSync to store and/or backup your data has some clear advantages. Most notably: unlimited storage capability and the reliability of offsite redundant servers maintaining multiple mirror images of your data without having to invest in costly equipment. However, moving a large amount of data to the cloud will likely require a commitment to ongoing monthly fees. There are some additional benefits that may make the investment more cost effective.
Create a personal streaming media library

Anyone who’s amassed an extensive collection of music, movies and photos can attest to the limitations of storing it all on one computer. Transfer your files to a cloud account that supports streaming (such as Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” or SugarSync) and you can listen to or view content over the Internet without taking up space on your computer or mobile device…

Grazed from Information Management. Author: Jim Ericson.

Management consulting firm Navint Partners LLC has released a report and white paper documenting the success of cloud computing adoption when it comes to cost savings. The key finding: 90 percent of participants in a survey reported they had received 100 percent of forecasted savings when their companies adopted cloud technology.

The sampling of CIOs across North America included client and non-client executives, mostly from global organizations with more than 5,000 employees, offering a view into the ways large organizations view cloud adoption, according to Navint. Navint further engaged Robert Summers, the CIO of tax preparer Jackson Hewitt, to dig into the findings…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Can a single vendor dominate the public cloud services market in Europe as Amazon has managed to do in the US? It’s not very likely. The single biggest reason is obvious: Europe is not the US. Can one company dominate the public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market in Europe as Amazon has in the US?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Europe — for many reasons — is a much more fragmented (perhaps fractious) market than the US — or North America for that matter. Here’s why it would be hard for one infrastructure player — even Amazon — to dominate the European Cloud…