Cloud News, Resources and Information
Of all of the possible benefits of a private cloud infrastructure, one of the most valuable is flexibility. With a properly designed private cloud infrastructure, the data center environment can fluidly shift with the business. This allows new applications to be deployed to meet business demands as they’re identified, and legacy applications to be removed when the value is no longer recognized.
In order to have an environment capable of this rapid application deployment cycle, an infrastructure must be in place that can handle it. Hardware and software must be properly architected to provide both application and hardware scalability. This requires a rethinking of the design principles that have brought IT to where it is now…
Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.
Active Power, manufacturer of continuous power and infrastructure solutions, will deploy its high efficiency CleanSource UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system at one of the largest collocation data center facilities in China later this year.
The new, state-of-the-art modular data center is owned by a Beijing based IT services provider and located in eastern China. The 1000 kVA UPS system shipped in May 2012 and will be installed later this year. Once deployed, the UPS will provide full power conditioning and protection to the facility’s mission critical server loads against all types of power disturbances…
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.
AMD, which has been suggestively flitting about ARM for months without committing, finally has – but not in the conventional way.
It’s going to license ARM’s one-core Cortex-A5 smartphone processor and develop an x86 security processor using the A5’s TrustZone technology, which cordons off secure zones where hackers can’t modify the software.
AMD said Wednesday that it will integrate that widgetry into some new APUs – AMD CPU chips with advanced graphics on the same die – using a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. It expects to have those gismos on development platforms next year. Starting with chips for tablets and thin laptops, the portfolio will expand to all AMD’s chips in 2014 including, at some point, Opteron…
But Deutsche Bank (DB) and National Australia Bank are in the minority of banks actively strategizing about opportunities in the public cloud.
Though Deutsche Bank, of Frankfurt, said it began developing internal cloud computing capabilities in pieces starting about 2002, the external cloud represents its next frontier, and journeying there puts the bank face to face with the primary roadblocks all banks face when they think of moving computing beyond their own perimeters…
Western democracies, which are not typically associated with censorship, have demanded that Google take down certain political videos, blog posts, and other content, the company said Sunday.
The company as on previous occasions has been asked to take down political speech in many countries, Google said.
"It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst in a blog post…
Grazed from Backup Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.
Does your off-site data centre have to be within commuting distance? Perhaps not. Should it at least be in the same country? According to Megan Richards, a European Commission director and acting deputy director general of Information Society and Media, “it shouldn’t matter where data is held as long as our [EC] rules apply”.
Since 1995 there has been a directive, rather than a piece of legislature, for EU countries regarding off-site data storage. Currently, individual states can implement the directive as and how they wish, making off-shore data storage very risky for any company with sensitive data…
SUSE supports the notion that cloud computing and open source software are perfect companions for organizations that look to the use of cloud computing to lower their overall costs of IT infrastructure, offer freedom to deploy its workloads wherever appropriate, and avoid being locked into a single vendors hardware or software products.
Pete Chadwick and Doug Jarvis of SUSE stopped by quite a while ago to discuss cloud application stacks and why the company is so heavily involved with the OpenStack community. The story behind the story was that SUSE wanted to address the then-recent move by Citrix, another OpenStack member, to submit its own stack of technologies for a cloud computing environment…
The dangers of using consumer cloud storage systems became clearer earlier this month, when a hacker claimed that he accessed presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Dropbox storage and email accounts using an easily cracked password.
The apparent hack of Romney’s accounts came on the heels of IBM’s rollout of a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy that bans the use of Dropbox due to concerns that hackers could easily access sensitive information stored there.
Such examples make it clear that it’s risky to keep corporate data on consumer-oriented cloud storage systems, say IT executives and analysts…
Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey
The world of information technology is always changing. But over the last six years it has started to change more rapidly with the genesis of cloud providers, the growth in the number of giant webscale companies, and the widespread use of virtualization in enterprise environments. A new era is upon us.
In the next five years a new way of thinking about, constructing and operating IT will emerge. Data centers are no longer the size of mini-marts but instead are mega-marts like Rob Roy’s 2.2 million square foot Switch data center in Las Vegas. Servers are no longer the unit of computing, but instead are being taken completely apart or are a mere component in the new data-center sized computer, a trend being pushed by Frank Frankovsky at Facebook and at the Open Compute Foundation…
With Facebook engineers, it appears the high-performance database apple doesn’t far fall from the tree. On Monday, former Facebookers Eric Frenkiel and Nikita Shamgunov (who also spent six years as a senior engineer on Microsoft SQL Server) launched a startup called MemSQL that seeks to speed relational databases by taking a page out of the Facebook playbook. The company has raised a $5 million in venture capital thus far from First Round Capital, IA Ventures, NEA, SV Angel, Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit, Ashton Kutcher, Max Levchin and Aaron Levie.
As its name implies, MemSQL achieves its fast performance in part by keeping data in memory, but it doesn’t use memcached like Facebook does to keep its massive MySQL deployment up to speed. Rather, MemSQL takes a lesson learned from HipHop — Facebook’s tool for converting PHP code into faster C++ — and converts SQL to C++…