June 12, 2012 Off

Nimbula and UShareSoft Partner to Simplify Software Delivery Across Private and Hybrid Clouds

By David
Grazed from Nimbula.  Author: PR Announcement.

Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, and UShareSoft, provider of a cloud software factory and app store platform, today announced that they are partnering to simplify enterprise application delivery to private and hybrid clouds by integrating UShareSoft’s UForge with Nimbula Director. The partnership helps joint customers improve business agility by providing automation and self-service capabilities across not only compute, network and storage resources, but also software and applications.

UForge enables enterprises to automate the creation and maintenance of custom application stacks as cloud server templates ready for provisioning to a Nimbula Director-based cloud. Customers can build and maintain a single code base for their server templates, then simply generate the required format at the push of a button to deploy to their cloud. This helps enterprises manage consistency of their application stacks across hybrid clouds, easily extending to public clouds if required.

 
June 12, 2012 Off

GlassHouse Introduces Accelerated Cloud Enablement (ACE) Service

By David
Grazed from GlassHouse Technologies.  Author: PR Announcement.

GlassHouse Technologies, a global provider of vendor independent data center consulting and managed services, today announced its Accelerated Cloud Enablement (ACE) service. Based on GlassHouse’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud services, this service addresses the escalating market demand for rapidly deployed, secure and manageable private cloud environments that meet defined business objectives.

For virtualized environments, the ACE service delivers operational intelligence with a cloud management layer and includes:
June 12, 2012 Off

Cisco Accelerates Businesses’ Transition to the Cloud With Innovative Cloud Connected Solution

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cisco — According to the 2012 Cisco(R) Global Cloud Networking Survey, the majority of IT decision makers cite a cloud-ready network as the biggest requirement to enable the migration of business applications to the cloud.

To meet these challenges, Cisco today announced the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution, a new product solution that delivers cloud-enabled routing and wide area network (WAN) optimization platforms, along with Cloud Connector software and services, enabling users to securely connect to cloud services.

The Cisco Cloud Connected Solution helps organizations easily and securely take advantage of cloud computing and accelerate the deployment of cloud services while delivering an optimal user experience at the lowest cost…

June 12, 2012 Off

ActiveBatch V9; Workload Automation Product First to Combine Virtual/Cloud Provisioning With Historical and Predictive Analytics

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) today announced the availability of Version 9 of its ActiveBatch® Workload Automation and Job Scheduling Software. A significant turning point in the development of IT automation, ActiveBatch V9 uniquely addresses the rise in both cloud computing and in Service Level Agreement (SLA) management by automatically and intelligently provisioning systems in advance of critical workflow execution, using an optimal mix of virtual and cloud resources.

IT organizations must be able to automate and manage both simple and complex workflows based on business policies in which virtual and cloud resources are automatically provisioned due to either a SLA-sensitive workflow or based on peak demand requirements in which many workflows are executing. ActiveBatch V9 delivers this by providing new functionality to allow users to set policies governing both the execution of workflows and the provisioning of workflow resources to ensure SLAs are being met. Finally, ActiveBatch V9 enables IT to deliver cost savings by allowing resources to be provisioned and de-provisioned based around workflow execution and completion…

June 12, 2012 Off

Did NASA ditch OpenStack for Amazon?

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

If folks were given to reading tea leaves, they might read a lot into a recent blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cureton in which she discussed IT reform at the U.S. space agency.

She mentioned a few specific cloud computing efforts, including a project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that uploaded 250,000 photos of Mars onto Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform as a service. The resulting Be A Martian initiative served up more than 2.5 million data queries, “proving that the cloud can be a terrific way to reach and engage the public,” she wrote.

She also said Amazon Web Services played a big role at NASA:..

June 12, 2012 Off

Centralizing healthcare big data in the cloud

By David
Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Chris Poelker.

Can the medical community make better use of big data, government regulations and the cloud to improve service and save lives? 

There is a lot of buzz going around about big data and cloud computing, but there is also a lot of confusion about how to incorporate them for an advantage. Cloud computing is all about providing services over the network, and big data is all about analyzing lots of data to gain insights and find trends. Government regulations are all about protecting the data and forcing the owners of the data to save it, just in case…

June 12, 2012 Off

Peer1 powers up UK-based GPU cloud

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jack Clark.

Peer1 Hosting has launched a GPU-backed cloud service designed for high performance computing workloads.

The HPC Self Serve Cloud became available to buy on Tuesday, Peer1 announced at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London. It has enough scalability to let customers provision up to 50 physical servers in 15 minutes and gives them the option of using Nvidia GPUs.

When asked why a company would go for Peer1 rather than cloud king Amazon Web Services which launched its GPU service in 2010, Mike Bainbridge, a solutions engineer for Peer1, told ZDNet UK he thought the company was "a lot more flexible" and noted that Peer1 is in talks with a major UK university to run chemistry analysis workloads on its cloud…

June 12, 2012 Off

AWS now stores 1 trillion objects in S3

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3) now hosts more than a trillion — yes, a trillion — objects for its cloud computing customers, proving once again that AWS is the king of the cloud.

To get a concept of how big a trillion is, Amazon’s Jeff Barr in a blog post announcing the new peak calls on the following examples: “That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.” I recently heard TED founder Richard Saul Wurman discuss the national debt by noting that in order to reach a trillion-dollar debt, you’d have to lose $1 million a day every day for about 2,739 years…

June 12, 2012 Off

Five Signs Your Cloud Computing Security Is Out of Control

By David
Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author:  Josette Rigsby.

There is almost universal agreement that cloud computing is a good thing. It can simplify administration, help control cost, and even expand the capacity of technology teams to deliver services. However, even with all the many benefits of cloud computing, the cloud can introduce challenges. Computerworld reports that many technology leaders are beginning to realize that software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption is reducing their control of enterprise data.

According to Computerworld, technology departments are discovering that they cannot control access to popular cloud applications like Salesforce, Box, and GoogleApps because in many cases, the department that purchased the application handles provisioning. The articles goes on to identify five signs that signal IT has lost control of security for cloud applications:..

June 12, 2012 Off

Telcos and the Cloud: Brave New World?

By David
Grazed from Wired.  Author: Anthony Behan.

While the IT world drives out cloud computing and gradually evolves its systems architectures onto cloud infrastructures, Big Telco is making some interesting moves of its own.  While the consumer business is being attacked on all sides with cratering voice revenues, an imbalance between wireless data costs and revenue generation, and new over the top competitors (Facebook, Google, etc.) — the enterprise market offers some real hope. And cloud offers a real and diverse opportunity.

Telcos have existing relationships with IT departments and the larger the telco and the larger the enterprise, the deeper the relationship.  Already there are quasi-cloud offerings such as software as a service, hosting, and even data center management services offered by the carriers.  In those instances where the relationship is that deep, cloud becomes, in part, a formalization of the relationship, and in part an extension of strategic intent…