Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

We know that Facebook is building a storage facility next to its Prineville data center, but in a conversation ahead of our Structure Europe event this month in Amsterdam I spoke with Facebook’s Jay Parikh to learn more about Facebook’s data center for digital packrats. Facebook is a designing a new data center designed specifically to store all those photos of your baby from three years ago or your senior road trip from seven years ago for the long haul. It has to be cheap, it has to be power efficient. And it’s a fundamentally different data center design and compute architecture than the big web companies use today.

Ahead of his talk with me later this month at our Structure:Europe conference in Amsterdam, I spoke with Jay Parikh, VP of infrastructure engineering at Facebook, about the computing challenges facing the giant social network. The one most on his mind at the moment is how to store users’ photos, videos and other digital bits so they can access them anytime they want. Like the piles of albums I have from my high school days, our digital photos have to live somewhere, so Facebook is trying to create a data center equivalent to that dusty old box in the attic that you only open when you move…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: John Rath.

Citrix launches XenServer 6.1. Citrix (CTXS) announced the latest version of XenServer, its complete server virtualization platform based on the open-source Xen hypervisor. New features in version 6.1 include direct integration with Apache CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform, a new Storage XenMotion technology to allow moving running virtual machines without the need or shared storage, and a XenServer Conversion Manager to automate batch conversions of VMware virtual machines to XenServer virtual machines.

“Citrix has gained a significant foothold in the cloud computing space with XenServer and more recently Citrix CloudPlatform (powered by Apache CloudStack),” said Peder Ulander, Vice President of product marketing, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix. ”XenServer is already the most widely deployed virtualization platform in large public clouds today. The tight integration between XenServer and CloudPlatform demonstrated in XenServer 6.1 will provide a new level of manageability and security that will provide a strategic advantage for our cloud customers.”…

Grazed from Campus Technology. Author: Margo Pierce.

Cloud computing hype is beginning to perpetuate some misconceptions that need debunking, according to information technology research and advisory company Gartner. Its new report, "Five Things That Private Cloud Is Not," clarified a number of issues for prospective adoptees.

"In the rush to respond to these pressures, IT organizations need to be careful to avoid the hype, and, instead, should focus on a private cloud computing effort that makes the most business sense" said Tom Bittman, vice president and analyst for Gartner. Among them is the caution that companies selling space in their server racks are the only viable solution. The top five includes:

Private Cloud Is Not Virtualization
Virtualization and virtualization management are not, by themselves, private cloud computing, according to the report. And while private cloud computing leverages some form of virtualization to create a cloud computing service, it is "a form of cloud computing that is used by only one organization, or that ensures that an organization is completely isolated from others."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Robert Westervelt.

For the United States Mint, its effort to gain insight into the systems and processes that secure its SaaS ecommerce system proved to be a worthwhile investment of time and resources. According to its chief information security officer, however, it faced a tough battle dealing with the resistance from its cloud provider.

Speaking to attendees at the 2012 SecTor security conference, U.S. Mint CISO Chris Carpenter said he insisted on understanding how his organization’s SaaS application was being secured, from system architecture to firewalls and how the provider conducts security internally and externally. However, he was shocked when his inquiry to the provider was met with the response, "No one has ever asked us that before."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing is poised to reshape and disrupt the way organizations use information technology, right? Ultimately, yes — but a new industry survey says it may be a few years before the disruptive effect of cloud is fully felt across the business landscape.

These are part of the conclusions of a new survey of 252 cloud users, providers, consultants and integrators jointly conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA, an IT certification group. The survey finds the cloud market has not yet reached a level of maturity that will support major industry disruptions. “Instead, the survey participants believe that platform and infrastructure service offerings are still in the infancy stage of maturity, while software service offerings are just emerging from infancy and are in the early stages of market growth. The respondents estimate that it will take approximately three years for cloud platform and infrastructure services to be firmly placed within the growth stage, and at least two years for software services to reach that stage.”…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Derek Du Preez.

Whether companies should be looking to commodity-based computing for public cloud offerings or highly engineered systems has caused a split in the IT industry. This is according to Derek Wilson, managing director for Global Platforms, BT Innovate & Design, who spoke to Computerworld UK at Oracle OpenWorld this week in San Francisco.

Wilson’s comments come shortly after CEO Larry Ellison’s announcement that Oracle will be branching into infrastructure-as-a-service, which will be offered on its highly engineered systems. This approach differs to companies like Amazon Web Services, which run on commodity hardware…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CallidusCloud®, a leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today the integration of CallidusCloud’s CPQ (Configure Price Quote) with Oracle® Sales and Marketing Cloud Service to help enable businesses to add cloud-based proposal generation to their Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service deployment. CallidusCloud’s CPQ automates product selection, pricing and proposal generation within Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service giving salespeople quick and easy access to the critical internal resources needed to configure, price, quote, and propose their products and services. CPQ accelerates sales cycles across companies, including those with simple product catalogs and distribution models all the way to complex, multi-channel sales networks.

"CallidusCloud’s CPQ maximizes deal revenue, protects margins and generates a professional proposal in seconds," said Rory Cameron, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Alliances, CallidusCloud. "We are excited to be collaborating with Oracle on Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service and showcasing it at Oracle OpenWorld."…

Grazed from Bit-Tech.net. Author: Gareth Halfacree.

Intel Capital, the chip giant’s venture capital arm, has announced its latest round of funding, investing in ten companies across the world and in doing so providing a glimpse at the technologies and markets the company sees as important to its future growth.

First, cloud computing. Having gone from being a buzzword used to make internet-connected servers that you never own where third-party companies have full access to all your private data to an accepted term for the likes of Gaikai’s remote-rendering gaming service, Intel is clearly predicting some serious growth in this region. Accordingly, it has sunk a wodge of change into cloud-based file storage and collaboration service Box – previously known as Box.net – and Bollywood video streaming service Hungama. For the enterprise market, the company has also provided funding to Tier 3, a US company specialising in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS.)…