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…

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.”…