Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Microsoft is joining several startups in trying to entice developers to use its cloud as a specialized backend for their mobile applications. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services joins offerings from Parse, Kinvey and Apigee in trying to establish a new infrastructure for the growing mobile ecosystem.

Microsoft just announced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud offering that joins the ranks of Parse, Apigee and Kinvey in establishing a backend as a service designed for the mobile ecosystem. The goal of such a service is to provide a platform for mobile developers that will allow them to worry less about their infrastructure and only about their app…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

Clustered storage vendor Scale Computing today upgraded its scale-out storage cluster to include compute resources dedicated to applications and a hypervisor component that allows storage and memory to be easily managed and allocated.

Scale Computing calls its new HC3 appliance "infrastructure-in-a-box," saying it eliminates the need to buy virtualization software, external servers and shared storage. That can mean significant reductions in both costs and complexity…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With Nodester, the polyglot PaaS provider gets deeper and broader Node.js support and access to even more Node.js developers. Next up? J2EE, Go and Perl support, says Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson.

Appfog, the provider of a multi-language, multi-cloud platform as a service, is buying Nodester to beef up its Node.js capabilities.

Company CEO Lucas Carlson said the deal — terms of which were not disclosed — will give the company deeper and broader Node.js support and access to more Node.js developers…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Michael Brenner.

Cloud computing offers many potential benefits for your organization: flexibility, reduced costs, increased efficiency and productivity, just to name a few. Whether you’re a seasoned cloud-computing pro or are just embarking on your first implementation, it is worth your time to examine the technology that will help you on your journey to reaching the cloud.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) gives us some direction. In its What’s Needed for Cloud Computing? Focus on Networking and WAN Optimization white paper, ESG clarifies the definition of cloud computing, helps identify where you are in your implementation, and examines the role of the network in cloud technology…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Michael Otey.

Today many companies are looking into the different cloud computing offerings provided by different vendors. Most of those vendors provide off-site services where the business has little of no control over the servers or the data. Trusting security, data integrity and performance levels to the cloud vendor.

At this past VMworld 2012 I met with NEC’s Bill Michael, Director Cloud Services to discuss NEC’s new Cloud in a Vault service. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault takes a completely different tack on cloud computing by offering a private cloud that’s built entirely according to the customer’s requirements…

Grazed from DigitalHome. Author: Cliff Boodoosingh.

Primus Business Services (NYSE: PTGI) has launched its enhanced PrimusCloud Server to allow Canadian business clients more control over their hardware performance.

The PrimusCloud Server platform provides enhanced levels of end-client management capabilities and has two distinct levels of storage performance – standard cloud and premium cloud.

Primus created a single cloud product that spans the different grades of SAN (Storage Area Network) capabilities, making it easier for customers to control their infrastructure, including all of their networking and server components…

Grazed from ProgrammableWeb. Author: Michael Vizard.

One of the things that not many IT people fully appreciate is how much scale really matters when it comes to cloud computing. The more applications that run on a particular cloud computing platform, the more the cost of running those applications is distributed across an increasingly larger number of servers and storage systems. Eventually, a cloud service provider reaches enough critical mass that every new application winds up helping the cloud service provider to drive infrastructure costs down, while at the same time increase overall performance.

This is clearly the case with Amazon, which is now the leading provider of cloud computing services in the industry, so much so that it’s the shadow being cast by Amazon from Seattle, rather than Microsoft, that is being felt most this week at the VMworld 2012 conference…

Grazed from NewsFactor. Author: Michael Liedtke.

Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times.

Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback.

Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP’s market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Unsurprisingly, the news coming out of VMworld 2012 so far is heavily tied into the cloud computing realm. One of the first announcements off the springboard was the launch of a cloud storage starter kit developed by Nirvanix and TwinStrata.

Both cloud storage service businesses, Nirvanix and TwinStrata are combining 50 TB of Nirvanix cloud storage with TwinStrata’s CloudArray to provide a “pre-tested, fully integrated cloud storage starter kit” for $48 per year. The two companies are targeting enterprise customers in search of backup, archiving and global collaboration in one solution. Additionally, the companies have crafted a set of SLAs around the offering…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Rackspace is buying Mailgun for its email-enabling APIs, which should come in handy for developers wanting to build and host applications using Rackspace’s shiny new OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure. Terms were not disclosed.

Rackspace fresh on the heels of delivering its OpenStack private cloud, is buying Mailgun, a San Francisco startup that makes it easier for developers to build email services into their applications. Terms were not disclosed…