Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Anyone excited to watch NASA’s Mars rover, called Curiosity, land on the surface of the red planet on Sunday night can all but rest assured that too much demand won’t kill the stream. NASA teamed with an application-testing specialist called SOASTA to ensure the world can keep watching even if demand spikes or servers fail, proving a single implementation of its application stack can handle 25 Gigabits per second of web traffic.

SOASTA tests the traffic load applications can handle by generating cloud-computing-based resources that mimic the traffic generated by potentially millions of simultaneous real-world users. The company also recently tested London2012.com, the official Olympics web site that organizers predict will have to handle more than a billion visits over the course of this year’s event…

Grazed from Federal Times.  Author: Michael Hettinger.

The race to bring cloud computing to the federal government has officially begun. In June, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) reached its initial operating capabilities to certify businesses that meet federal cloud services standards — moving government closer to utilizing the cloud to reduce costs and more effectively serve citizens.

But we need commitment to make this cloud computing vision a reality. Specifically, federal decision-makers need to:

Create a comprehensive federal information technology road map

Today, agencies must interpret myriad Office of Management and Budget strategy documents involving cloud computing, shared services and data center consolidation — supplemented by the recent digital government strategy. The result is confusion around prioritization of agency IT initiatives, as evidenced by public comment from the cloud computing industry…

Grazed from AFP.  Author: Robert MacPherson.

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.

Wozniak, 61, was the star turn at the penultimate performance in Washington of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," monologist Mike Daisey’s controversial two-hour expose of Apple’s labor conditions in China.

In a post-performance dialogue with Daisey and audience members, Wozniak held forth on topics as varied as public education (he once did a stint as a school teacher) and reality TV (having appeared on "Dancing with the Stars").

But the engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today’s personal computer, the Apple II, was most outspoken on the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into remote servers, known as cloud computing…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Esther Shein.

Ethernet storage provider Coraid has rolled out a ZFS-based set of NAS server heads that are targeted at meeting needs of cloud, video, big data and other high-performance applications. The scale-out architecture of the new ZX-Series can process large data sets by providing throughput and scale to support data growth, the company said.

Capturing, storing and analyzing increasingly larger sets of data stresses the scalability of legacy NAS systems, the company said. The ZX-Series can process large data sets, such as consumer behavior analysis or HD and 3-D video format editing, because it provides the throughput and scale necessary to support data growth, Coraid said…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Julie Bort.

If you haven’t given much thought to IT software company VMware it really is time to start.

More than any other company founded in the late 1990’s, VMware has changed everything about enterprise data centers. Nearly every enterprise on the planet uses it (it has 350,000 customers). And it’s not done yet.

Although VMware is a public company, most of its shares are owned by storage giant EMC. However, VMware is arguably the most important asset EMC has. So much so that its CEO, Paul Maritz will become EMC’s chief strategist on September 1 while EMC’s COO Pat Gelsinger will become the CEO of VMware. The move is seen as a step up for both of them with Maritz becoming heir to the EMC CEO throne…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic.  Author: Tina Costanza.

If recent figures are anything to go by, cloud computing has a very bright future indeed, a new infographic illustrates.

Uberflip has released an infographic that is published on Visual.ly that states by 2016 more than one-third of the world’s digital content will be stored in the cloud, and the global market for cloud computing will grow to more than US$241bn by 2020.

IDC has even estimated that spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14m jobs worldwide by 2015, with more than half of these to be in small and medium-sized firms…

Grazed from The Motley Fool.  Author: Tony Daltorio.

There is perhaps no hotter area in the technology space than cloud computing and network virtualization. Two recent deals put the spotlight on that fact: the $1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira by VMware (NYSE: VMW) and the purchase of Xsigo by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) for an undisclosed sum. Xsigo’s software simplifies cloud infrastructure and data center operations. Oracle now can offer clients a full set of virtualization capabilities for cloud-based computing.  

Both Nicira and Xsigo have some of the world’s biggest companies among their customers and the deals highlight how fast the market for virtualization software is consolidating. It also shows the growing conflict coming between virtualization software firms and the network equipment companies…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

Enterprises are beginning to change their buying behaviors based on the deployment speed, economics and customization that cloud-based technologies provide.  Gartner cautions however that enterprises are far from abandoning their on-premise models and applications entirely for the cloud.

Based on an analysis of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012, the best results are being attained by enterprises that focus on a very specific strategy and look to cloud-based technologies to accelerate their performance.  Leading with a strategic framework of goals and objectives increases the probability of cloud-based platform success. Those enterprises that look to cloud platforms only for cost reduction miss out on their full potential…