Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

There is now a direct connection between facilities teams and those engineers tasked with designing a cloud solution. Too often, the first response from IT professionals regarding the cloud is that of unease. The primary reason for this type of reaction is oftentimes the result of a lack of understanding revolving around cloud computing.

Remember, when we’re working with any sort of cloud infrastructure, we are effectively only transferring data over the Wide Area Network. There are, of course, accelerators, monitoring tools, virtualization metrics and other components to a cloud solution. But in its simplest form – it is the transfer of data over the WAN…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Investors continue throwing money at infrastructure companies, especially if they have a product that helps accomodate and mitigate the complexities of virtualization and scaled out computing infrastructures. Nutanix aims to solve problems in both areas, and investors are rewarding it with $33 million.

Nutanix, a startup building an appliance to virtualize storage networks, has closed a $33 million Series C round of funding, which brings its total cash raised to $71.6 million. The latest round, which brought in new investors Battery Ventures and Goldman Sachs, also included existing backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital and Khosla Ventures…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Watson.

From the look of things, most individuals and businesses will have found solace in cloud computing, either due to personal pressure or public demand. In spite of the concerted efforts to outline the challenges and shortcomings of cloud computing, everyone knows that cloud computing is the ‘big bad wolf’ that’s going to swallow us all at one point. As a result, before you get in with both feet, it is advisable to appreciate the characteristics which indicate whether your vendor can deliver.

Changes in technology are bound to affect the ability of numerous vendors in the future, but the relativity of changes is of utmost important: if your vendor is not reliable as yet, they may never be!…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Roughly 700 enterprise customers and cloud services providers (CSPs) have embraced HP’s CloudSystem to build private, managed and public cloud environments. HP CEO Meg Whitman shared that stat and other cloud computing highlights during a Q3 2012 earnings call with Wall Street today.

Whitman said HP’s earnings were “decent” but Wall Street was unimpressed amid falling PC sales and mixed performance at Autonomy, the big software company HP acquired last year. HP shares are down nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading this evening…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Login VSI B.V., the vendor of Login VSI, the de-facto industry standard benchmarking tool for Server Based Computing (SBC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI), announced today a strategic partnership with Spirent Communications. The partnership offers enterprises and network system developers the ability to conduct realistic user emulation to determine optimal performance of private or public cloud based VDI deployments.

The companies will jointly identify and develop VDI related testing opportunities in public and private cloud computing environments. Login VSI B.V. will be responsible for delivery, installation and support of the testing tool Login Virtual Session Indexer (Login VSI)…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

With the release of a third free OpenStack distribution this week, the heady early days of Linux when New Distros Roamed the Earth seem recreated. But has the past really come back again?

The latest release is from commercial vendor Piston Cloud Computing, which just announced the release of Airframe, the mini-me edition of Piston Cloud’s flagship product, Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

According to the company’s announcement, "Airframe is a bare-metal cloud management platform that installs in less than 10 minutes and delivers 100 percent of the core OpenStack services, including compute, storage, networking and cloud management."…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Adaptive Computing, the largest provider of private cloud management and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workload management software, today announced a strategic partnership and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT) to create a cloud operating system by integrating Moab Cloud Suite and an open source private cloud platform. By integrating best-of-breed components, Adaptive will enable broader applicability of private clouds within the Intelligence Community as well as in the commercial market.

Moab’s policy-based decision engine enhances open source cloud, making it more efficient and capable as a cloud operating system. Moab brings policy-based optimization to cloud management, managing resource allocation, migrations, maintenance reservations, etc. Combining these capabilities with open source enables organizations to save time and money…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Looks like the crusade for agility and programability os moving from computing and networking into the realm of storage, as startup Convergent.io gets $10 million in Series A funding. This follows yesterday’s $33M round for Nutanix, which makes similar software defined storage claims.

Convergent.io has raised a $10 million Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz. The startup, which was founded in October last year, has a team of storage and virtualization experts, and plans to build a product that will help customers better use their existing storage resources in virtualized environments…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

The technology industry is about to come together next week for VMworld in San Francisco. In the span of a few short years, this show has become a real showcase of the latest and greatest IT technology and industry vision. At VMware, every company wants its IT department to look like Amazon, Google or Zynga, running applications on fully-automated and orchestrated cloud computing platforms, and easily managing thousands of servers and petabytes of data across multiple data centers.

Maybe we’ll get there someday – maybe. For now however, many companies can’t get beyond basic use of these technologies. Why? There are lots of reasons but information security issues remain at the top of the list…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Ann Smarty.

The cloud is a very complex, and yet oddly simple configuration where there is a low likelihood of failure and a lot of speed and scalability built right in. But of course, just like anything else in the world, it does have some problems.

Among those problems is that it is not perfect, regardless of how much great talent, money, and time have been spent making it as close to perfect as is humanly possible. Additionally, cloud computing is also going to forever face the challenge of human nature. While there may one day be a better solution to the problems that cloud computing solves, it will most likely carry a great deal of staying power…