Grazed from eChannelLine. Author: Mark Cox.

HP has announced virtualization solutions aimed at enhancing the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in cloud environments. One of them, the HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) is an enhanced and rebranded version of an old LeftHand product. The others — HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect and HP Multitenant Device Context, are important firmware upgrades to HP’s FlexFabric core 12500 data center switch.

"This is a significant announcement reflecting our evolution of our converged infrastructure," said Kate Davis, product marketing manager, HP storage. The HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance is an upgrade of the old LeftHand Virtual SAN appliance, which has been on the market since 2007…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has been Assigned a patent (8,244,559) developed by four co-inventors for a "cloud computing resource broker." The co-inventors are Eric J. Horvitz, Kirkland, Wash., Harold L. Cochrane, Redmond, Wash., Rene A. Vega, Kirkland, Wash., and Angel S. Calvo, Seattle.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Embodiments for interacting with cloud computing providers are disclosed. In accordance with at least one embodiment, a resource broker receives a request for a computing task that is to be performed from a customer. The resource broker selects one of the cloud computing providers to perform at least a part of the computing task. In turn, the resource broker may obtain a gain from performance of the at least one part of the computing task by the cloud computing provider."

The patent application was filed on June 26, 2009 (12/492,813). The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,244,559&OS=8,244,559&RS=8,244,559

Grazed from AMEInfo.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

As increasing numbers of organisations across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region prepare to embrace working without traditional infrastructural limitations, Gitex Technology Week 2012 is set to make its biggest impact in cloud computing to date.

Under the theme "Business Innovation through Cloud Computing – From Hype to a Must-Have Service Model", Cloud Confex is well-established as the largest and most influential conference and exhibition of its kind in the Middle East. It is on course to grow by 25% this year…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Colo5, LLC, a leading independent data center operator headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, announced it is now providing cloud computing services.

Cloud computing eliminates hardware investments and provides businesses with a solution to pay for only services used. By eliminating hardware investments, the Colo5 Cloud lowers your IT costs and offers scalable CPU, RAM and storage resources. Enterprise to small businesses can benefit from adopting the cloud because it provides increased business agility to an organization as a whole and individual end users…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Holger Kisker.

Over the past few years, BI business intelligence (BI) was the overlooked stepchild of cloud solutions and market adoption. Sure, some BI software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors have been pretty successful in this space, but it was success in a niche compared with the four main SaaS applications: customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration, human capital management (HCM), and eProcurement. While those four applications each reached cloud adoption of 25% and more in North America and Western Europe, BI was leading the field of second-tier SaaS solutions used by 17% of all companies in our Forrester Software Survey, Q4 2011.

Considering that the main challenges of cloud computing are data security and integration efforts (yes, the story of simply swiping your credit card to get a full operational cloud solution in place is a fairy tale), 17% cloud adoption is actually not bad at all; BI is all about data integration, data analysis, and security. With BI there is of course the flexibility to choose which data a company considers to run in a cloud dyployment and what data sources to integrate — a choice that is very limited when implementing, e.g., a CRM or eProcurement cloud solution…

Grazed from MSPNews. Author: Erin Harrison.

Although organizations are implementing cloud computing for storage and other needs, only about one-third of them regularly test data recovery plans.

According to a survey conducted by Kroll Ontrack, 62 percent of organizations are leveraging the cloud and/or virtualization, but only 33 percent test data recovery plans regularly to ensure proper protocols are in place to protect this data.

Although 49 percent of organizations reported experiencing some type of data loss in the last year, they were not necessarily from the cloud. In addition, 55 percent said data was lost from a traditional storage device in contrast to 26 percent who reported a data loss from a virtual environment, 3 percent who reported a loss from the cloud and 16 percent who experienced data loss from both a virtual environment as well as the cloud…

Grazed from Smart Data Collective. Author: Paul Barsch.

Among CIOs and CFOs debate swirls regarding how to best budget for and acquire IT resources. The key questions are; should companies own, lease or essentially “rent” IT services via cloud computing? It’s actually a tougher choice than you may think.

An Economist article explains the "Big Data" conundrum facing global enterprises. Data volumes are increasing faster than many companies have the capacity to store much less mine them for insights. In this exploding “data revolution” many companies are also finding their internal processes—much less budgets—for acquiring technology are not keeping up with business user needs.

That’s why cloud computing is so attractive. With the public cloud model, compute, memory and storage can be acquired on a “pay per use” basis. In the public cloud there is typically no hardware/software to buy upfront, thus companies can use operating expense budgets (OPEX) to fund their needs, giving them plenty of budgeting flexibility. The alternative is to purchase needed hardware and software outright—thus capitalizing assets (CAPEX)…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Rachael King.

Companies are turning increasingly to IT outsourcing as a means of supplementing and, in some cases, replacing internal hires. That’s especially true of application hosting. About 35% of companies say they’ll outsource more in this area during the next year to 18 months, according to a new report from global consulting firm Bluewolf. Cloud computing is partially driving this growth, as more companies use applications from the likes of Salesforce, Google and Workday.

Companies spend nearly half of their outsourcing budgets on application services including development, hosting and maintenance. Bluewolf predicts that as more companies rely on cloud providers, the outsourcing of applications will grow, whether it’s to providers who offer niche services or larger companies like Google or Microsoft…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Most public cloud announcements focus on reduced rates for machine instances, new persistent storage options or the introduction of new services, while news about cloud development tools seems to get the short shrift. Still, Amazon and Microsoft offer many new tools that make it easier for developers to build, test and deploy instances in the cloud.

Developers looking for language-specific cloud tools to help streamline some of the more tedious cloud-instance and storage tasks have several options. Let’s take a look at what cloud development tools Microsoft and Amazon have to offer…

Grazed from Linux.com. Author: Jennifer Cloer.

Two weeks from today The Linux Foundation will debut CloudOpen. This is a really exciting time in cloud computing, a time when developers and open source projects are clearly leading the way in technology innovation. The building blocks are in place thanks to decades of open source software development, and everybody is looking for their edge.

CloudOpen will provide a vendor- and project-neutral venue for collaboration and advancing key technologies. CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems, OpenStack, Gluster, oVirt, Chef, Puppet, Xen, KVM, OpenShift, Ceph and more will al be there, as will the vendors and users who want to understand how best to work with these projects…