Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Oracle’s still fighting to recover, recoup and profit from its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun Microsystems three years ago. In its first quarter, Oracle’s overall hardware business was off 24 percent year over year despite “triple-digit growth” in engineered systems like Exadata.

Oracle’s plan to wring software-like profit from its hardware business still hasn’t panned out nearly three years after it bought Sun Microsystems’ server-and-storage business for $7.4 billion. And that’s got to bug CEO Larry Ellison who is a bear on execution and profitability…

Grazed from ExtremeTech. Author:  Joel Hruska.

In our first story, we discussed backup philosophy, common misconceptions of what constituted a backup, and the criteria we’d use for developing a comprehensive backup policy. This article focuses on online/cloud backup services and compares three of the top solutions on the market today — Backblaze, Mozy and Carbonite.

The explosion in “cloud computing” as a moniker has made it difficult to distinguish the difference between various types of services. We suggest three basic categories: File lockers, online backup services, and online archives. Archiving services are beyond the scope of this series and are currently marketed towards businesses, not consumers. Amazon Glacier attracted a great deal of attention when it launched a few weeks back, but it’s not intended for just anyone to use. There’s no management console of any kind, and data transfers are handled via Java or .NET scripts. This article uses the phrase “online backup service” and “cloud backup service” interchangeably…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

Instagram can drive data to its computing systems on Amazon.com’s EC2 service 20 times as fast with solid-state drives, a co-founder of the photo-sharing service said on Thursday at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Rather than access data from networked hard disk drives, Instagram’s server instances on EC2 can use directly connected solid-state disks, said Mike Krieger, a co-founder of the company that Facebook agreed to acquire in April for about $1 billion. Instagram got trial access to solid-state drives on the EC2 cloud-computing platform before that option became generally available, one of the perks of being a large customer, Krieger said…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Christina Torode.

I know what I’m about to propose goes against the mass appeal of the cloud computing model — low cost, on-demand standard configurations that meet the needs of a broad customer base. Customization does not, for the most part, enter into the equation, but there is an argument for a customization of sorts in the cloud.
Christina TorodeChristina Torode

Data security, including regulatory compliance, is a big factor in keeping enterprise companies out of the public cloud. But some cloud service providers are starting to see the value in catering to industry-specific data security needs. This past May, for example, Microsoft introduced Office 365 for Government, which segregates government agency customer data in a multi-tenancy public cloud. Microsoft also has Office 365 ITAR, a caged data center environment that supports FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act)and ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) requirements. The Federal Aviation Administration marked its entrance into the public cloud with plans to give 80,000 employees access to Office 365 productivity tools…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Roseblum.

Cloud Computing offers a large number of benefits which make an enterprise switch over to the cloud. From startups to medium and large enterprises all are keen to adopt it mainly due to the cost saving in cloud computing. However it is very important to realize that like any other new technologies there are some risks of failure. Some of the likely reasons for the failure of cloud computing projects are mentioned below.

1. Lack of managing and monitoring applications

It is a common belief that developers can start coding immediately after switching to the cloud. They no longer need to worry about the development environment. This is true to some extent but they still need to manage and monitor their application to avert failure. Lack of monitoring and managing of the application may lead to high cost of operation and eventually project failure…

The private cloud market is expected to be more than double from its current market in 2011. For this private cloud market is expected to grow with a CAGR of 21.5% for the period of 2011 – 2015. Application Virtualization Tools is the leading segment in the private cloud with around 37% market share in 2011 followed by infrastructure virtualization and Business Purpose Virtualization Tools. The Middleware Virtualization tools is contributing small fraction to the private cloud market but it has very high potential to grow in the near future. In market sizing terms Application Virtualization Tools, Infrastructure Virtualization Tools and Business Processes (BP) Virtualization Tools is expected to nearly double its market by 2015. On the other hand Middleware Virtualization Tools is expected to grow nearly 10 times from its 2011 market.

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Editorial Staff.

Around the world, city leaders face the challenge of delivering economic growth while meeting sustainability targets and rising expectations about the quality of municipal services, often in the face of drastic budget reductions. This is forcing many city leaders to improve efficiency and drive further innovation in the creation and delivery of services. According to a recent report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, new platforms for communication, data sharing, and application development – particularly cloud computing and data analytics – will play a key role in this transformation.

Cumulative investment in smart government technology between 2011 and 2017 will be almost $4.8 billion, the report finds. Annual investment in smart government technologies in North America alone will surpass $1 billion in 2017, and annual investment in cloud services for smart cities will reach nearly $1.4 billion worldwide by 2017…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Liau Yun Qing.

Chinese Internet giant Alibaba will be investing US$200 million in its Aliyun OS mobile operating system (OS) team which will be spun off from the company’s cloud computing division.

A report Friday on Xinhua cited an internal memo by Jack Ma which said Aliyun OS will be spun off from Aliyun.com, the company’s cloud computing unit, into a separate entity which will directly report to the Alibaba Group. The memo added that Alibaba Group will be investing US$200 million in Aliyun OS to strengthen its talent, technology and infrastructure…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched boasting $10 million in funding and 5,600 members. The OpenStack community has announced the formal launch of the new OpenStack Foundation to continue to promote the development and adoption of the open-source OpenStack cloud software.

As the independent home for OpenStack, the foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Platform as a service is the fastest-growing area of cloud computing: Gartner forecasts the worldwide enterprise market for PaaS platforms will grow from $900 million in 2011 to $2.9 billion in 2016, representing a 26.6 percent rise each year.

The problem is that no two PaaS offerings are alike. Plus, as the market expands, anything and everything that looks like development is adopting the PaaS label, further confusing the field. As a result, I see weak excuses for PaaS clouds these days as wannabes toss their hats into the arena and chase the gold in them thar clouds. But ignore them. The truth is that a small set of established providers rule — and will continue to rule — PaaS…