Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Amazon Web Services is reporting another service outage this morning for some customers of its EC2 cloud computing service. Amazon has reported connectivity issues in its US-East-1 availability zone, the same zone which was hit by an outage earlier this month.

The problems began at about 10:45 a.m. Eastern time, and were confirmed by Amazon a short time later. “We can confirm network connectivity issues for some EC2 instances in a single Availability Zone in the US-EAST-1 region,” Amazon reported in its Service Health Dashboard. ” Customers may be experiencing impaired read/write access to their EBS (Elastic Block Storage) volumes. New instance launches are also delayed. We are applying mitigations to address the connectivity issues … and connectivity is beginning to recover.” dotCloud also reported downtime due to the AWS problems…

Grazed from AppleInsider. Author: Sam Oliver.

Bertrand Serlet, formerly the head of OS X development at Apple, has reportedly been working with a cloud computing startup called "Upthere" since he left Apple last year.

Serlet is working with at least two other former Apple employees at the company in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., according to Business Insider. The company is described as a "cloud hosting provider" with "consulting services in the field of cloud computing."

Said to have joined Serlet at Upthere is Roger Bodamer, a former vice president of product operations and development at Apple, as well as Justin Maxwell, a former Apple user interface designer…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

A Jersey City, N.J.-startup called ThroughPuter has a message for the world’s cloud computing providers: Come talk to us, we can make your cloud fly for serious applications. The company, which recently presented at our Structure Launchpad competition, has built a hardware architecture and operating system designed from ground up to run parallel-processing applications in a multi-tenant environment. Now, all it needs is a distribution channel.

Mark Sandstrom, founder and CEO of ThroughPuter, explained the company’s vision to me as solving a fundamental problem in today’s IT’s world. While more applications are expected to both run faster and run in the cloud, the cloud computing infrastructure underlying those apps isn’t up to the challenge. As Moore’s Law slows down, multicore chips are replacing faster clock speeds, but, Sandstrom said, neither new chips nor the clouds running them were really designed to execute parallel processing workloads…

Grazed from Stuff.nz. Author: Chris Gardner.

"Partly cloudy" was how Windows 8’s weather application described conditions in Amsterdam at Microsoft’s TechEd Europe conference.

It couldn’t have been a better description of the keynote speech delivered around cloud computing by Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s management and security division. Cloud computing is the popular term for the means by which the likes of Microsoft hosts operating system (OS) software and data for its clients at large data centres the world over.

"We are living in the era of the cloud OS," Anderson said…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

InfoWorld described yesterday how Compute Engine is Google’s first unabashed IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) product [1], a cloud that allows users to spin up enormous numbers of virtual Linux machines that run on the same infrastructure powering Google.

But how will customers decide whether to use Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Cloud, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, or another IaaS provider? For an informed answer to that question, InfoWorld turned to Michael Crandell, CEO and founder of RightScale [2], the cloud-management services company that helps customers work with everything from Amazon EC2 to Microsoft Azure.

RightScale has been testing out Compute Engine for some time now as a run-up to integrating its services with theirs [3]. Crandell told InfoWorld how, in the course of working with Google over the past year, he got a feel for what Google is offering and how Compute Engine is going to differentiate itself from the competition…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Delivering innovation in cloud computing technology for the design and entertainment industries, RevUp Render today announced a new cloud rendering service supporting V-Ray 2.0 rendering software from the Chaos Group. With the RevUp Render cloud computing platform, 3D graphics professionals can utilize the power of massive render farms and high-end production workstations via the cloud—allowing studios and artists to easily scale processing power up or down as needed.

With V-Ray 2.0 rendering software running as part of the RevUp Render platform, artists and studios employing 3D software with distributed rendering capabilities, including Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, McNeel Rhino3D, Trimble SketchUp, and other packages that integrate V-Ray and its distributed rendering (DR) feature can now work completely in the cloud—from beginning to end—utilizing RevUp COSMOS desktop cloud workstations and RevUp Render rendering solutions. Included with the service is a new mobile feature that extends the flexibility of the cloud even further by giving customers access to the RevUp Render desktop and nodes from mobile devices, including Apple iPad, iPhone, Android or Chromebook…

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Marcie Terman.

Frustratingly – and perhaps inexcusably considering the huge volumes of ink dedicated to the serious considerations of pursuing a Cloud strategy – too many companies are making costly mistakes when migrating servers to the Cloud. Marcie Terman, Business Development Director at DataFort, selects the six most important areas of risk to consider.

Risks around service continuity

Commodity services – those ‘off the shelf’, cheap solutions – will often neglect to make any mention of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) concerning service continuity. But you must understand the risk to your business posed by service continuity, and what your provider is willing to guarantee within the agreement. After all, if you don’t know what the guarantees are, how will you ever convince your board of the merits of Cloud computing?…

Grazed from Telegraph.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

Frequently Asked Questions on cloud computing

Q: Why should we be doing business in the cloud?

A: Businesses are increasingly investing in cloud computing services because they offer resources such as networks, servers, applications and data storage without having to directly manage the systems that deliver them…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Beverley Head.

The advent of ubiquitous and affordable cloud computing is bringing to an end a 30-year long era during which change in IT systems was synonymous with risk.

According to Paul Strong, chief technology officer global customer and field initiatives for VMware who is currently visiting Australia, advances in cloud computing means that it is now far simpler and less risky to introduce information systems change to organisations as applications were increasingly being decoupled from infrastructure.

This he said would allow CIOs to be restored to their proper position as chief information officers, rather than chief infrastructure officers…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Geoff Simon.

When customers go online and complete web forms, they’re creating business opportunities. Millions of companies manage those opportunities with intranet-based CRM systems that help them process leads and orders. But for most companies, there was no fast, easy way to exchange information among ecommerce sites, CRM, and the intranet. Now there is, according to Bitrix, Inc. who recently launched Bitrix24, a cloud-based service that allows companies to create digital workspaces. And now with this integration, website orders and leads are automatically imported to the CRM via a smart connection.

With so much competition surrounding collaboration in the cloud, Bitrix has taken a unique approach in it’s design. By allowing companies to take their entire instance of their Bitrix cloud and move it to an on-site server of their choice, the worry about the whole public vs. private cloud computing deployments going forward aren’t affected by decisions to use Bitrix24 today. This gives customers the flexibility to deploy whatever solution they want down the road without having to worry about an existing system limiting their options later…