SoftLayer Announces Turnkey Private Clouds
SoftLayer, a leading provider of global, Internet-scale cloud infrastructure, today unveiled its new SoftLayer Private Clouds solution that provisions and configures full private cloud deployments on demand. These scalable, secure and high-performance deployments leverage the company’s automated architecture, worldwide data center locations and private network, and customer-controlled infrastructure management system.
"For some time our customers have used our portfolio of dedicated servers, network resources, and virtualization options to build their own private clouds. Now, with SoftLayer Private Clouds, instead of starting at square one, you begin with a pre-configured cloud ready for whatever you want to do with it," said Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer for SoftLayer. "We’ve built our Private Clouds solution out of our experience creating and managing our own cloud, and our unique capabilities in automating sophisticated deployments. At the push of a button you have a dedicated cloud at your command, with full access and control over every aspect, and the ability to scale infinitely, on demand."
SoftLayer Private Clouds streamlines ordering, enabling customers to simply choose the number of physical servers that they need as client hosts and then customize the configuration and resources for those servers as desired. In as few as two hours, SoftLayer’s automated provisioning system will have automatically:
Cloud Service Providers From Around the World Gather for the 5th Annual Asigra Cloud Backup Partner Summit
Asigra Inc., a leading Cloud Backup, Recovery and Restore (BURR) software provider since 1986, announced today that hundreds of cloud backup service providers and experts from around the world will gather at the Sheraton Centre downtown Toronto from June 11th to June 13th at the 2012 Asigra Cloud Backup™ Partner Summit. The sold out event is focused on providing attendees with the opportunity to network with their peers, discuss strategies on how to grow their cloud backup and recovery business by embracing marketing best practices and proven sales methodologies to enhance customer acquisition, retention and service while also getting a roadmap preview of the next generation of Asigra Cloud Backup. Attendees will leave the Summit feeling empowered to OutMarket, OutSell and OutPerform which happens to be the theme for this year’s event.
“The market changes year by year and one of the signs of that change is that the market has become more crowded,” said Tom Dugan, CEO, Recovery Networks. “More companies are considering the value of cloud backup and recovery and updating their disaster recovery plans, all of which leads to more competition. So staying ahead of the wave is paramount to not only success but survival. The Asigra Cloud Backup Partner Summit gives us the sales, marketing and technical tools and knowledge we need to stay ahead of that wave.”
Nimbula and UShareSoft Partner to Simplify Software Delivery Across Private and Hybrid Clouds
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.
GlassHouse Introduces Accelerated Cloud Enablement (ACE) Service
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.
Cisco Accelerates Businesses’ Transition to the Cloud With Innovative Cloud Connected Solution
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…
ActiveBatch V9; Workload Automation Product First to Combine Virtual/Cloud Provisioning With Historical and Predictive Analytics
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…
Did NASA ditch OpenStack for Amazon?
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:..
Centralizing healthcare big data in the cloud
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…
Peer1 powers up UK-based GPU cloud
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…
AWS now stores 1 trillion objects in S3
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…