Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

OpenStack turns two this week. That means the open-source project — which fancies itself the Linux of the cloud — is entering a critical stage of its development process.

Rackspace(a rax) — which helped give birth to OpenStack in July 2010 — rolled out some stats to show OpenStack momentum and to push its OpenStack-as-Linux comparision. For example,  in the 84th week of the project, there were 166 entities contributing to the effort whereas it took Linux 828 weeks to hit 180 active contributors, according to Rackspace’s tally…
 

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.

Here are some of the interesting use cases we’ve written about over the past year or so, and a few others I’ve just come across recently. If you have a cool one — or a suggestion for a new use of big data within the healthcare space — share it in the comments:..

Grazed from CloudBestPractices.net.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Canada has a notorious ‘Innovation Gap’, that is seeing the country slip further and further behind the rest of the world embracing the new technology-enabled Knowledge Economy.

They are scoring a ‘D for Innovation‘, which is no surprise given they are also scoring a D for openness to new IT models like Cloud Computing, as Telus reports in this press release.

The principle business benefit of Cloud Computing is that it provides a platform for encouraging and enabling more innovation – More prototyping, faster product development cycles, lower risk for trialling new ideas, and so on…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org.  Author: Saroj Kar.

According to information released by Dimension Data, 45 percent of network structures of some 300 companies audited by the service provider during the year 2011 will be totally obsolete in next five years.

As per the Dimension Data’s Network Barometer Report 2012, a key factor for this massive jump in the initial stage of obsolescence is that suppliers of equipment are moving more products to the end line, aimed at the arrival of new technologies.

The data represents an increase of 38 percent over the previous year. In addition, all equipment that is in the cycle of obsolescence, the percentage that is out of line increased exponentially from 4.2 percent to 70 percent in calendar year 2011. At the same time, the percentage of stage equipment which is of maximum risk to contract renewal (EoCR) and end engineering (EOE) dropped sharply from 86.2 percent to 20.8 percent…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author:  Gaurav Pal, Smartronix.

Sun Microsystems’ slogan, “Write once, run anywhere,” (WORA) was hot stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, a new technology wave is forming, “Deploy once, scale anywhere,” or DOSA. So why should we care about WORA now? By understanding the evolution of Java and the emergence of WORA, we may discover insights into how the various cloud computing paradigms will evolve in the coming years.

As an enterprise architect with multiple large Java and cloud deployments, I have been intimately involved in both technology waves. Based on this experience, I can see the parallels and I believe that the various cloud platforms will ultimately provide the equivalent of the Java virtual machine (JVM) and create infrastructure independence that will enable new architectures…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada.  Author:  Brandon Butler.

Enterprise spending on cloud computing growing at a faster rate than overall IT spending will pose a challenge to legacy hardware and software vendors, Gartner cloud forecaster Ed Anderson says.
 
Cloud computing is expected to grow 19 per cent in 2012, becoming a US$109 billion industry compared to a US$91 billion market last year. By 2016, it’s expected to be a US$207 billion industry, according to Anderson’s latest findings. That compares to the 3% growth expected in the overall global IT market. While it’s true that the US$109 billion cloud market represents just a 3 per cent chunk of the overall US$3.6 trillion spent on IT globally, Anderson says it’s still responsible, in part, for a slowdown in growth for traditional on-premise hardware and software sales.
 
Software delivery is shifting from a traditional license sale to install an application on-premise, to a per-user cloud-based software-as-a-services (SaaS) model. Meanwhile, hardware is shifting from on-premise capital expenditures to off-premise operational expenditures…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way users and enterprise use IT; most of us already know that. But what hasn’t been discussed too often is how advancing on-demand software and services supplied via the Web are changing the identities of data centers.

Investment in data centers and related infrastructures by large enterprises is becoming integrated into wider strategies that include additional service layers and customized functionality beyond traditional network services, U.K.-based telecom market researcher Ovum reported.

The independent analyst firm said that data centers are becoming "strategic service hubs" for new enterprise IT and communications services…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author: Editorial Staff.

At the I/O conference in June, Google (GOOG) announced Compute Engine – an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product that will provide companies with raw computing power by way of the internet.

Infrastructure as a Service has been one of the largest growth areas in technology. Companies are forgoing maintaining their own servers, and instead, paying firms like Amazon (AMZN) and Rackspace (RAX) to provide that server power.

By outsourcing their server technology, companies receive several benefits. For starters, companies can "scale" very quickly by renting server power. Because companies are renting the IaaS they can simply rent more servers to add capacity very quickly. If companies were not renting IaaS, they would have to physically buy and implement their own technology — a slow and cumbersome process. Also, when companies physically buy servers, they must buy enough servers to maintain service during peak hours, meaning that the server power is wasted for most of the day. By having a flexible amount of server power, companies are able to pay only for the amount of server power they need…