Grazed from Canadian Reviewer. Author:  Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla.

Softchoice , an IT services and products provider, launched its Softchoice Cloud service yesterday in downtown Toronto. The event featured representatives from various cloud computing, storage and software as a service solutions providers such as Google, Microsoft, Box and many others and touched upon the challenges and opportunities related to cloud computing solutions.

The event focused on how the cloud is changing the way Canadians and the world are doing business. The challenges and opportunities presented by cloud computing are manifold and how businesses can use Softchoice as a curator and manager for various cloud solutions that can scale from small businesses to enterprise…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Chad Berndston.

Now that Cisco Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) has significant traction with its Cloud Partner Program, it’s looking to elevate partners who have made the deepest investments in its cloud vision to a new Master specialization, one that will bring added benefits and a level of preferred status among top Cisco partners focused on the cloud.

As of this week, Cisco partners can begin applying to become Master Cloud Builders, a specialization that builds upon the Cloud Builder designation but requires significantly more involvement on the part of partners — for significantly more benefits. Cisco unveiled the Cloud Channel Program at its 2011 Partner Summit in New Orleans as a way to organize Cisco partners around their potential cloud computing opportunity with the vendor. According to Cisco figures culled from various research reports, the market opportunity for building cloud infrastructure is on a roughly 24 percent CAGR over the next four years and could hit about $112 billion by 2015. Cloud services, meanwhile, are on a roughly 35 percent CAGR, expected to reach $113.6 billion by then…

Grazed from CSO. Author: John Kinsella.

As we’re adopting cloud computing, we’re more aware of the security concerns it raises than we were of issues created by other large-scale technologies we adopted in the past. This is a wonderful thing! But security nirvana has yet not been achieved. While there’s still plenty of room for cloud providers to improve, many aspects of cloud security must be the responsibility of the consumer.

In particular, I see five security-related issues with cloud computing that are critical to the success and security of a cloud-based project—and that are not always getting the full consideration they deserve…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Optimists hope that the EU’s expected cloud computing recommendations will resolve concerns around diverse data protection laws that slow cloud adoption. Realists hope for the best, but prepare for less. The reality is Europe remains a collection of countries, not a unified whole.
Brandenburg gatephoto: Flickr / compujeramey

When the European Commission unveils its new cloud computing plan of action this week, the hope is it will reduce fear, uncertainty and doubt around Europe’s confusing welter of data protection laws that are impeding the broad adoption of cloud — especially public cloud — technologies. The European Cloud Computing Strategy is expected to push an array of standards for cloud computing and to help alleviate some of the legal hurdles to adoption…

Grazed from Help Net Security. Author: Editorial Staff.

ScaleXtreme released free open source software for companies to build internal cloud dashboards and self-service portals for developers and other end-users. The technology enables creating a new public cloud instance as simple as using a vending machine.

Many organizations are finding that allowing developers and end-users to provision public cloud servers can dramatically drive down costs and improve satisfaction. Organizations want to balance these new capabilities with an interface that hides the complexity of cloud computing from users and provides appropriate cost controls and visibility into spending. They want to ensure cloud servers are monitored, compliant with security policies and have been appropriately patched…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Driven by a "perfect storm" of technology trends that includes server virtualization, cloud computing, big data and the convergence of storage and data networks, over half (54 percent) of all IT departments are being asked to scale their networks to support speeds of 100Gbps by 2016. That is the finding of a new in-depth survey just completed by Emulex Corporation (NYSE: ELX).

The survey of 1,529 IT leaders across North America and Europe focused on the issues, trends and challenges facing data center personnel and IT organizations, particularly as they relate to data center networks. The central theme emerging from the study is that IT departments, including CIOs and IT executives, are genuinely concerned about how to keep pace with the demand for increased throughput on data center networks:…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon Web Services is adding a flexible IOPS storage option to its Relational Database Service. People setting up new MySQL, Oracle or SQL Server instances can take advantage of the new option now. Later, they can move legacy instances over.

Not all database workloads are created equal. Some high-priority jobs require faster storage input/output operations per second than others. Now Amazon is acknowledging that fact with new provisioned IOPs for its Relational Database Servoce database services…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Tony Jimenez.

Cloud is one of the biggest trends in IT today… that is no surprise to many. Gartner projects that the worldwide Cloud Solutions Market will be more than $148.8 billion by 2014. Surprisingly, however, only two things really seem certain.

First, despite the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) formal definition for government, it appears there is no common use of the term “cloud” in the market. In fact, it seems that cloud” is one of the most abused terms in the IT arena today. It is now used to reference almost everything IT! The Global Language Monitor named it as one of the two most confusing tech buzzwords so far this decade, along with “big data.”

Second, although everyone is “talking” about cloud computing, organizations are actually just now moving beyond the low hanging fruit of cloud: software as a service (SaaS). So, the real challenge is…“To Cloud or Not to Cloud!”…

Grazed from IDG. Author: Bob Fernander.

The high-performance computing (HPC) scientific/academic sector is accustomed to using commodity server and storage clusters to deliver massive processing power, but comparable large-scale cluster deployments are now found in the high-end enterprise as well. Large Internet businesses, cloud computing suppliers, media and entertainment organizations, and high-frequency trading environments, for example, now run clusters that are on par and in some cases considerably larger than the top 100 clusters used in HPC.

What differentiates the two environments is the type of networks allied to the application programming models and the problem sets used. In the scientific/academic sector, it is typical to use proprietary solutions to achieve the best performance in terms of latency and bandwidth, while sacrificing aspects of standardization that simplify support, manageability and closer integration with IT infrastructure. Within the enterprise the use of standards is paramount, and that means heavy reliance upon Ethernet. But plain old Ethernet won’t cut it. What we need is a new approach, a new "maverick fabric."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

In the latest phase of a well-organized succession plan at IBM, Virginia Rometty will become chairman of the IT giant on October 1. Sam Palmisano will stay on as advisor until December 1, the company said. It’s not unexpected but it’s still worth noting — IBM CEO Virginia “Ginny” Rometty will succeed Sam Palmisano as chairman of the computing and services giant on October 1. Palmisano will stay on as a senior advisor until his retirement date of December 1, 2012, IBM announced late Tuesday afternoon.

Last October, IBM tapped Rometty, who is 55 years old, as its first female CEO and ninth CEO overall. She officially took the reins as president and CEO and became a director on January 1, 2012. Rometty, who started at the company as a systems engineer in 1981 and worked her way up the ranks…