Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As InfoWorld’s Ted Samson reported last week, Rackspace has released Rackspace Private Cloud Software, which is the same complete version of Essex OpenStack the company runs in its own hosted private clouds. This move was designed to get Rackspace more traction in the cloud computing market, targeting the greater-than-expected spending on private clouds by enterprises.

Rackspace’s latest release reminded me of what’s been happening steadily in cloud computing over the last few years. While we keep discussing public clouds, almost like it’s a religion, enterprise IT continues to gravitate toward private clouds in a big way. Not surprisingly, traditional on-premise vendors like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and IBM have responded in kind. But so too have the "traditional" cloud vendors, such as Rackspace and, with its Eucalyptus partnership, Amazon Web Services…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higgenbotham.

In the wake of a $1 billion acquisition of Nicira, BigSwitch said that it has seen 6,000 downloads of its SDN controller software. Big Switch is the likely the next big buy for software defined networking, but who will be the suitor?

Updated: Big Switch, which many in the networking sector have enshrined as Nicira’s rival in software defined networking, said Monday that its Floodlight open-source, SDN controller software has surpassed 6,000 downloads and supports an ecosystem worth $3 billion. This type of momentum release is generally a company’s way of saying, “Hey, look at me,” and isn’t a huge surprise given the slow pace of summer and the fact that Nicira is in the process of selling itself to VMware for $1.26 billion…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Crowdfunding site uses Amazon S3, Heroku and other cloud services to keep its costs low. San Francisco-based LoudSauce aims to give voice to small groups and organizations that don’t have SuperPACs to call their own, according to co-founder Colin Mutchler.

It may not seem like much given that fat cat SuperPACs have already spent more than $194 million on this year’s election, but LoudSauce is proud of the $160,000 it’s helped raise from nearly 2,500 people for much smaller organizations. Perhaps more importantly, the ads it helps finance have been seen by more than 32 million people, according to the company…

Grazed from ITNews. Author: John Hilvert.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has highlighted cloud computing as a potential avenue for investigation as part of a broader inquiry into copyright reform.

An issues paper released this week by the commission asked interested parties to answer questions on whether current copyright legislation impeded the development of cloud computing services, and whether any changes to law should be neutral to technology, or contain specific exemptions for cloud services.

None of these issues are explicit terms of reference for the inquiry…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephanie Mann and Jack Vaughan.

Achieving success with Platform as a Service is a challenge for many organizations. From language support to infrastructure flexibility, development managers have a lot to consider when it comes to choosing the right Platform as a Service for their cloud development needs. Recently, SearchSOA.com spoke with Geva Perry, former general manager of the cloud computing business unit at GigaSpaces Technologies, about how to achieve a state-of-the-art PaaS today.

The conversation with Perry took place as part of the TechTarget BAA Group’s Java University. This series covers Java development issues, as well as important technologies that have come to affect Java in recent years…

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced a new embedded OEM agreement with VMware to further scale customers’ IT infrastructures and accelerate their cloud deployments. With the expanded partnership, Hitachi Data Systems will bundle VMware cloud infrastructure software and sell individual software licenses to provide organizations with complete, converged infrastructure solutions, services and support. These offerings will help organizations to effectively and easily build and manage their physical and virtual data center initiatives. HDS will spotlight its virtualization and cloud technologies in VMware environments and feature demonstrations and breakout sessions at VMworld 2012, August 26-30, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“Customers want a fully virtualized IT infrastructure that helps them scale and be agile while lowering costs,” said Mike Walkey, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Hitachi Data Systems. “This agreement is significant because it allows Hitachi Data Systems to manage support of the HDS and VMware components, and provide customers with the reliability and expertise they’ve come to know from both HDS and VMware. This integrated foundation for customers’ growing VMware environments helps them realize their data center or cloud investments.”

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Thomas Boue.

Cloud Computing is the fastest-growing and most exciting major technology trend in the software and computing industries. It is also a market that holds tremendous opportunity, as Tom Loosemore, deputy director of the UK Government Digital Service, said in a speech earlier this year given at the Digital London Conference , where he heralded Cloud Computing as one of the main drivers of the UK economy over the next few years.

Indeed, by 2015, revenue from public IT Cloud services will reach nearly 55 billion euros, according to IDC . Roughly a quarter of that will likely be in Western Europe — and private Cloud solutions could add another 10 to 20 percent. Even more significant to the economy will be the knock-on benefits that come from accelerating digital commerce and making robust technology solutions available to more users with greater cost efficiencies than ever before…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Victor Juri.

In an earlier blog I discussed how more and more digital marketing organizations are depending on Big Data analyses of billions (trillions etc) of pieces of data to generate business intelligence and drive research-based decision making (see Big Data and the New Marketing Paradigm). Computing on the scale required to handle Big Data comes with a number of challenges. To handle all the challenges Big Data systems usually perform a variety of actions which are individually scalable:

• Collect
• Store
• Analyze
• Share

Big Data and Cloud ServicesAmazon recently conducted a Big Data event in Boston where its web services division (AWS) shared with the community how customers are leveraging its cloud platform to process large data and calculation sets…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

Customers are embracing recurring revenue cloud computing services at a breakneck pace.

That was the word from hundreds of partners and vendor executives attending the three-day XChange 2012 conference billed as “Channel Without Limits” at the Gaylord Texan this week in Dallas, Texas.

“Cloud services’ demand is exploding,” said Andrew Pryfogle, senior vice president and general manager of cloud services for Intelisys, a master agency distributor of cloud and telecom services working with solution providers. “Customers are sick of writing checks and continuing to invest in on-premise boxes and professional services under the old IT [information technology] model.”…