Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Robert L. Mitchell.

Would you entrust your mainframe to the cloud? Perhaps not for production, but IBM is hoping to gain customers for its cloud-based disaster recovery services by offering support for virtual mainframes. Currently, IBM offers cloud-based backup and disaster recovery services for the AIX, Windows and Linux platforms.

"We’re moving away from just backup to a replication environment in the cloud for all critical servers" — including the mainframe, said Rich Cocchiara, distinguished engineer and chief technology officer for Business Continuity Recovery Services, during a recent one-on-one meeting at Computerworld’s offices. "What cloud is doing is bringing the price down," perhaps to the point where more organizations may be willing to give up building or owning their own backup data centers. Instead of paying the capital expense of creating a backup data center, IT pays for access to virtual machines, as well as for the data backups and storage of the information…

Grazed from Military and Aerospace Electonics. Author: Editorial Staff.

U.S. Army researchers are attempting to apply tactical cloud computing to battlefield command and control (C2) by enabling warfighters to access crucial C2 and intelligence services with a wide variety of military computers of variable link capacities located anywhere on the battlefield.

The Army Communications Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. issued a broad agency announcement (BAA W15P7T12RA216) entitled Command and Control Applications For the Decisive Edge, which includes a topic called Command & Control Tactical Cloud Computing Environment.

The tactical cloud computing project, sponsored by the CERDEC Command, Power & Integration (CP&I) Directorate, seeks to enable warfighters on the forward edge of the battlefield to use cloud computing to access important situational awareness information using data radios, wearable computers, rugged laptop computers, and other rugged mobile computing devices…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

"Shadow IT" — where users acquire and manage IT resources outside the control of corporate IT — is the bane of many IT organizations. We’ve seen numerous instances of this over the years, including the use of PCs, the Web, the iPhone, and now cloud computing resources without a formal policy and support from corporate IT.

It’s easy to see why users resort to shadow IT: Employees charged with running profit centers see a need for a specific type of technology. Rather than fight through IT’s red tape and endless meetings, they go out and get what they need. Indeed, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study finds as much as 30 percent of IT spending coming from business units outside the official IT budget…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

2X Software, a global leader in desktop virtualization and application delivery, today announced full compatibility with IGEL Linux thin clients. The company’s 2X ApplicationServer XG is now available on IGEL Linux thin clients with the "Advanced" firmware package, including the IGEL Universal Desktop Converter (UDC) software.

2X Software offer a wide variety of cloud computing solutions via 2X ApplicationServer XG, the leading application and desktop delivery solution that allows administrators to publish applications and virtual desktops from an all-in-one platform. IGEL thin client solutions complement 2X features, with the aim of IGEL’s Universal Desktop Strategy being high customer performance with secure, yet flexible, access to the private and public IT cloud…

Grazed from eChannelLine. Author: Mark Cox.

Avnet Technology Solutions has announced a new training framework available through its recently launched Avnet Cloud Solutions group, which will be available in the U.S. and Canada. The new framework is focused on the off-premise cloud computing market. It includes fundamental, advanced and mastery training related to developing a cloud practice, specializing in high-growth off-premise cloud workloads and gaining in-depth expertise in off-premise cloud offerings.

This announcement is a followup to Avnet’s announcement in May of Avnet Cloud Solutions, a new organization specifically focused on off-premise cloud solutions for VAR, MSP and ISV partners in the U.S. and Canada, the same as the new announcement. At that time, Avnet announced a number of cloud providers would be named to provide those offerings, and announced one, Savvis, a global enterprise-class cloud and managed services provider. Now it has announced another, ITpreneurs, which works in collaboration with CompTIA and the Cloud Credential Council to offer a vendor-neutral cloud certification program…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What’s the big promise constantly being made about cloud computing? Cost savings, cost savings, cost savings.

But the economics of cloud computing can be a big question mark, especially when it comes to long-term cloud subscription engagements versus larger, one-time investments in packages. An analogy that has been drawn is the long-term costs of renting a car for everyday use, versus making an up-front purchase.

It appears that many enterprises understand that while cost savings is directly possible through cloud, there are other, more profound benefits on the horizon…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Keith Bates.

Whilst the concept of 100% Cloud Computing is an alienating thought to even the most IT savvy MD, the reality is that the number of companies opting for a fully outsourced approach is on the rise. Despite the age old server room providing a comfort to those reluctant to move with technological developments, practically speaking it is a ticking time bomb, draining both funds and IT resources.

I am not alone when I say that 100% Cloud is a viable option for businesses nationwide – providing they are willing to embrace the new technology. We have no servers of any significance in any of our offices, relying solely on the Cloud and yet still manage to run more effectively and securely than before. Of course, organisations are right to analyse the risk of the cloud, but once fully informed, the question needs to be asked – “Why the reluctance towards 100% Cloud adoption?”…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Steve Woods.

The online storage wars just heated up today, as cloud storage service Box.com has begun offering up a great deal more free space than usual – as long as you’re a newbie to their service.

In the battle to get you and I to store our personal and office related documents, images and more in the cloud, services such as Dropbox, Google Docs/Drive and Box have been parrying and thrusting for years now. It’s been pretty bloody…

Grazed from TechCentral.ie. Author: Editorial Staff.

Two of the bigger names in cloud computing, VMware and Rackspace, have released low-cost or free trial versions of their cloud offerings.

The news follows an announcement by Red Hat earlier that it too would offer a free version of its cloud computing platform. Red Hat’s and Rackspace’s offerings help users build private clouds based on the OpenStack software code, while VMware is offering a free trial version of its vCloud software, which allows access to public cloud resources.

The moves signal an effort by cloud service providers to entice businesses that may have virtualised environments to expand to a public or private cloud, one analyst says…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Consumers store their personal content everywhere online — Evernote, Gmail, Dropbox, Flickr, Facebook, just to name a few places — but getting stuff from one place to another can be a pain. Need to set a profile picture for a new service, but all your good photos are sitting in Facebook albums? That probably means downloading the photo locally, maybe editing it, and then finally uploading it to the new service. Filepicker.io, a Y Combinator company headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., thinks it can turn this process on its head with just two lines of code.

The way it works is actually pretty simple: App developers integrate with Filepicker by inserting a few lines into their source code, and Filepicker gives them API access to a broad range of cloud services where consumer content is stored. Users can then upload and download content — photos, documents, whatever — straight to and from the app. Essentially, it cuts out the middleman…