Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon appears bound and determined to speed up IO for its cloud customers.

New Provisioned IOPS (Input Output per Second) block storage volumes will let users set performance levels of up to 1,000 IOPS per volume and then use RAID to stripe two or more volumes together to realize 10,000 IOPS, said Arun Sundaram, product manager for AWS Storage. (See the AWS blog post and video announcing the news here.)

Users can set up the new Provisioned IOPS volume from the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) console. “It’s as easy as spinning up an EC2 instance, you create an EBS volume, specify the amount of storage, and attach your volume to the instance,” Sundarum said…

Grazed from Cleveland Business. Author: Brian Rosenfelt.

Microsoft recently announced that its soon-to-be-released Server 2012 platform will not include a Small Business Server edition. This will be the first time since 2000 that the popular “SBS” platform will no longer be available.

Microsoft Small Business Server is designed for smaller organizations (under 75 users), and bundles Microsoft’s Server, Sharepoint services, and Microsoft Exchange platform into a single package. This meant an inexpensive way for many smaller organizations to have their own in-house mail solution, without the need to have multiple servers and systems.

This decision will impact many of the clients we work with and the future, and in my view is sending a very clear message: Microsoft is committing itself 100% to the cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Venture capital firm Accel Partners is looking to ramp up its investments in the big data and cloud computing spaces with the addition of a new principal and a new entrpreneur in residence.

New principal Jake Flomenberg comes from Splunk, where he was director of product management, and was previously at Hadoop pioneer Cloudera. New EIR Nick Mehta was most recently CEO at LiveOffice and has also been a VP at storage provider Veritas (Symantec acquired both companies). Flomenberg will work primarily on Accel’s $100 million Big Data Fund, which it launched last November, while Mehta will likely focus a lot of attention on the intersection of SaaS applications and big data.

The firm’s Big Data Fund targets big data applications and higher-level analytics software rather Hadoop distributions, databases and other infrastructure-level technologies. According to Accel Partner Ping Li, the firm has several companies as part of that portfolio, including Code 42, RelateIQ and Vigilent. A few others are set to come out of stealth mode in the fall. Accel’s previous data-focused investments include Cloudera, Couchbase and Nimble Storage…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Preston Gralla.

Microsoft just released a preview version of its new cloud-based Outlook.com email service, and it’s a winner, much better than Windows 8’s underpowered Mail app. Here are five reasons it beats Windows 8 mail.

You can create mail rules

Anyone beset by email overload — which means everyone who uses email — needs tools to help manage their mail. Chief among them is the ability to create mail rules that will automate the handling of messages, for example, automatically sending mail from your boss to a Boss folder, from your family to a Family folder, and so on. Outlook.com does it. Windows 8 Mail doesn’t…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the service leader in cloud computing, announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful and elegant new Control Panel. These solutions, backed by Rackspace’s renowned Fanatical Support®, further expand Rackspace’s broad Cloud hosting portfolio, which is used today by over 180,000 customers worldwide.

“The new Rackspace Cloud Servers began delivering business value to us and our customers almost instantly”

The introduction of these open cloud products marks the first time any company has deployed a large-scale open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Customers can now select from private, public or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their solutions in a Rackspace data center or another data center of their choice…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

An increasing number of countries, particularly those in emerging economic regions, have been erecting trade barriers that have restricted access to lucrative foreign markets for U.S. IT firms, software leaders warned on Wednesday.

The market-access restrictions have taken many forms, including government mandates supporting domestic companies, regulatory hurdles, tariffs and the manipulation of technology standards.

"Protectionism is not new, but the scale and the scope … is unprecedented," said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), a leading trade group representing the software sector. "The challenge we face is steep. It is particularly challenging in what should otherwise be the fastest-growing markets."…

AppFog, the leading platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for cloud-based application deployment and management, today announced it is collaborating with Rackspace, the service leader in cloud computing, to allow its customers to deploy applications to the open Rackspace Cloud powered by OpenStack. AppFog’s solution will be available through the recently announced Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace.

AppFog will offer customers the ability to develop and deploy apps to the open Rackspace Cloud in an efficient and cost effective manner. Highlighting a pay-for RAM approach, developers are able to receive 2GB free of RAM simply by creating an account. Users will reap the benefits of interoperability, as AppFog provides customers with the capacity to redeploy applications to Rackspace that are currently running on a different Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider with zero-code migrations, while helping users avoid vendor lock-in. AppFog’s IaaS deployment options continue to expand with the addition of Rackspace to a list that already includes AWS, HP, and Microsoft Azure. As a multi-language PaaS, AppFog supports Java, .NET, Node, Python, Ruby, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres and more.

OnApp has announced that CloudTO, a subsidiary of Cirrus Tech Ltd., has selected the OnApp Cloud platform to power a new range of public cloud hosting services. With OnApp Cloud, CloudTO can deliver extremely resilient, scalable and easy-to-use cloud services to its enterprise customers, quickly and cost-effectively. The company has already launched two new services built on the OnApp Cloud platform: an elastic public cloud service with utility billing, and a configurable cloud VM service with monthly pricing.

CloudTO spent two years trialling cloud platforms from five other providers before choosing OnApp Cloud. CloudTO selected the OnApp platform for its scalability, resilience and ease of use, and because of OnApp’s proven experience delivering and supporting successful cloud platforms for hosting companies.