CSC today announced BizCloud for Government — the industry’s first and only on-premise private cloud that is billed as a service and ready for application workloads in 10 weeks. As federal agencies strive to improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, meet federal mandates and embrace cloud services, CSC’s BizCloud for Government provides the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the agility, convenience and elasticity of a public cloud.

“Our customers want greater efficiency and cost-effective alternatives to meet both mission and IT requirements, and BizCloud for Government can provide these benefits immediately,” said Leif Ulstrup, president of CSC’s Federal Consulting Practice. “Many government agencies are already taking advantage of our more than 50 years of government experience combined with our deep commercial cloud expertise to modernize their enterprise without losing focus on the mission.”

6fusion, the leading provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved general availability and the latest version of the product is now available for download. You can see a demo of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere at 1PM ET on Wednesday, August 1st – register here.

Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing unparalleled insight into resource consumption – all for free and all right from the VMware console. In addition, new functionality was added to the latest version of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere based on feedback from beta customers, including:

Advances in VPS hosting technology and the decreasing cost of solid-state hard drives are set to allow Australian businesses to increase the speed and reliability of their websites without blowing their budgets.

Allowing disk access up to 100 times faster, with failover redundancy and cloud-based infrastructure, VPSBlocks new offering of VPS (Virtual Private Server) Cloud Hosting with SSD (solid-state-drives) is surprisingly affordable.

“For comparable prices to regular Australian VPS hosting, we can provide a solution to Australian businesses that provides vastly increased speed and reliability” –Will Kruss, CEO of VPSBlocks – the Australian web host offering the new technology.

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Managed hosting provider Datapipe this week said it has deployed the industry’s first global Apache CloudStack platform. Datapipe’s Stratosphere Elastic Cloud Computing Platform is available in Silicon Valley, the New York Metro area, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Datapipe’s Stratosphere leverages Citrix CloudPlatform, an open source platform based on Apache CloudStack for building scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings. The platform is interoperable with Amazon Web Services, enabling customers to build and deploy cloud applications across both Datapipe Stratosphere and Amazon’s public cloud using EC2-compatible tools…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

Storing of data in the cloud is convenient, there is no need to buy any equipment and in most cases it helps companies address challenges related to the growth of protecting and managing of business application data. Now users can quickly recover lost data when stored in a system based on cloud computing. TwinStrata, the cloud storage provider, revealed the stats in a study at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York.

According to the report, three out of four respondents say they could recover data in the cloud within 24 hours, should they experience any problems with the data. By contrast, one in eight organizations that do not use the method of cloud computing for data storage, the recovery of data could be delayed over a week…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Yahoo’s going with another plainspoken blonde.

After the market closed Monday Yahoo’s board named Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s first employees and long-time protector of the stripped-down look of Google’s homepage, CEO replacing interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The Yahoo board is taking another flyer on Mayer, 37, considering she’s coming out of Google’s product side, responsible for the look and feel of such things as Google Mail, Google News and since 2010 Google Maps and other Google location and local services. She has no CEO or turnaround experience. She did sit on Google’s operating committee and is on the board of Wal-Mart…

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

A handful of vendors have created a trial version for ARM-based servers of the OpenStack cloud computing software now available for testing online. The open source offering fills in another small piece of software puzzle for the low power architecture working its way into the data center.

ARM server SoC designer Calxeda worked with open software specialist Canonical and Hewlett-Packard to create a version of the TryStack for ARM hosted by Core NAP. Dell, Equinix, NTT and Rackspace Hosting also supported the work which is based on the Essex release of OpenStack…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

RightScale has made its very first acquisition.

It’s bought the free Scottish cloud cost forecasting web site ShopForCloud and renamed it PlanForCloud, fleshing out its management portfolio to help those struggling with cloud costs, which are always, as anyone will attest, complex. Terms were not disclosed.

The widgetry will help companies budget their cloud costs by giving them tools to model various architectures and usage patterns, access up-to-date pricing from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, and produce detailed cost reports in just a few minutes…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Pat Romanski.

Rackspace Hosting on Wednesday announced that it has upgraded its Cloud Tools Marketplace to enhance the customer experience for accessing the ecosystem of cutting-edge applications, tools and solutions.

John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace, noted that "the Cloud Tools Marketplace provides an ideal customer experience by making it easier for them to identify the most appropriate technologies to use with their open cloud deployment."

Through the Cloud Tools Marketplace, developers and enterprise IT professionals building on the open Rackspace Cloud, as well as first generation Cloud Servers, can evaluate more than one hundred industry leading technologies to deliver advanced capabilities for their environments hosted at Rackspace…

DigitalOcean, a New York based Cloud Hosting provider has recently announced their new $5 dollar a month virtual private server plan. Dedicated to building the easiest cloud hosting platform available, DigitalOcean is offering the subscribers of the new cloud server plan with 20GB disk space, 256MB Memory, automated back-ups, and free unlimited bandwidth.

With the new $5 a month plan, DigitalOcean expects to speed up its already rapid growth. Its hosting solutions have received a stunning reception among developers and startups. Over 7,000 virtual private servers have been launched just within the past few months and they are launching more than 400 servers per day at the time of this press release.