Grazed from AllAfrica. Author: Editorial Staff.

Vox Telecom’s Cloud Server Dashboard public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud Powered status, a move that will allow the company’s customers to enjoy all the advantages of third party cloud services, while maintaining full control over their IT environments.

"Our cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualisation and cloud tools, vSphere and vCloud Director," says hosting manager Justin Elms. "Cloud Server Dashboard provides a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering application mobility that only VMware can provide…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Fresh on the heels of a $10.7 million venture capital round, startup PLUMgrid is staffing up, naming a long-time networking technologist Lele Nardin as VP of engineering. Nardin most recently was SVP of engineering at Ericsson Silicon Valley and before that spent 15 years at Cisco where, at various times, he led development of Cisco’s popular 7200 router and the Cisco PXF and Quantum Flow processors. Most recently he headed the company’s IOS software organization.

“We’ve completed nearly two years of development and are moving to the next phase — going to market and supporting customers, we’re fortunate to have Lele,” PLUMgrid CEO Awais Nemat, another Cisco veteran, said in an interview Wednesday. He still isn’t talking — much — about PLUMgrid’s product, which Nemat said is already running at select, undisclosed beta customer sites. Very generally, he said PLUMgrid’s software runs on standard hardware moving packets around and will attack what he sees is a $40 billion market opportunity…

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…