Grazed from ITWeb.  Author: Nadine Arendse.

Cloud computing is to take some credit for the £52 million raised by this year’s Sport Relief, The Cloud Circle reports.

The record-breaking sum of money received by the Sport Relief charity in 2012 came through more than 300 000 donations, peaking at an incredible rate of 149 payment transactions per second. The resilient and scalable features of the cloud have been hailed as an integral factor in allowing the charity to cope with such demand.

Over the course of the campaign earlier this year, the www.sportrelief.com Web site attracted more than three million unique visits. On one day alone, the site received 500 000 hits.

Carrenza operates and manages two core cloud platforms for Comic Relief, a donation platform and a core Web sites platform, The Cloud Computing Journal writes…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Piston Computing plans to build a bridge to EMC VMware’s Cloud Foundry, meaning it will link Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud IaaS offering. What does this mean for cloud development? It’s the start of many other such integration efforts, I suspect, to battle the meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source platform service, which VMware promotes as a PaaS for any infrastructure. Piston is one of many companies that rely on OpenStack. The OpenStack fraternity includes Akamai, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, CloudScaling, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NTT, Rackspace, and Yahoo. The OpenStack movement is really a competitive pushback on AWS in the IaaS space. Both Cloud Foundry and Piston’s OpenStack are available under the Apache 2 license…

Contributed Article.  Author: Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces Technologies

 

Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs on a private cloud or datacenter and bursts to a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. A burst is a specific amount of data sent or received in one intermittent operation when a threshold is reached. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra compute resources only when they are needed.

Neal Sample the former CTO of X.commerce at eBay gave an interesting talk last year on the economic benefit of Cloud Bursting. Neal pointed out eBay traffic statistics and showed some real numbers of the business impact of bursting peak load activities using on-demand cloud resources as presented in the diagram below.

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today welcomed T-Systems, corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telekom, to the organization’s steering committee, as well as Cloudera, Hortonworks, Lenovo, Link4Dev , MapR, SAS and Symantec as solutions provider members. The membership of the Alliance continues to grow as companies recognize the need for a common voice in the expansion and development of cloud computing requirements.

The ODCA also announced a call for papers for ODCA Forecast 2012 Poster Chat and Birds of a Feather discussions. Held on June 12, in conjunction with the 10th International Cloud Expo in New York City, ODCA Forecast 2012 will bring together hundreds of members of the Alliance, industry experts and leading technology companies to showcase how ODCA usage model adoption can accelerate ROI for businesses deploying cloud solutions and services…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Michelle Boisvert.

Public clouds make enterprise IT uneasy. For one thing, it’s a disruptive technology — a significant shift toward compute resources becoming a shared utility. It also creates a lack of visibility and less control over IT assets. Add concerns about data loss and security that BYOD creates and it’s no wonder some cloud rookies are breaking out in hives.

SearchCloudComputing.com spoke with Jim Reavis, executive director of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), about the true security concerns of public and private cloud as well as common misconceptions that are keeping enterprises from diving headlong into cloud…

Grazed from ServicesAngle.  Author: Matt Weinberger.

In a guest editorial for Forbes Mike Pearl, the cloud computing leader for international professional services giant PricewaterhouseCooper, succinctly and clearly explained just why the cloud is so awesome. Okay, maybe he didn’t use the word “awesome.”

That editorial, more properly called “Looking At Cloud Strategy Through The Lens Of Value,” starts with a high-level view of cloud strategy, and how vendors that don’t market cloud solutions as such are falling behind. Pearl likens the cloud to the role of credit in financial services, insofar as it enables an organization to grow and move beyond their physical assets. But putting aside the technology itself, there are really four distinct ways in which the cloud can add value to a business, he writes…

Grazed from TheServerSide.  Author: Lucas Stewart.

Private cloud computing seems to be surrounded by much fog and misinformation as to exactly what it means for the enterprise. What types of companies are a good fit? Who might need a private cloud? Are security issues the only reason? Developing your private cloud takes considerable skill but is a viable option for companies looking to achieve economy of scale behind the corporate firewall. So say respondents of the 2011-2012 TSS Java Trends survey.

What exactly is a private cloud? It is simply a marketing term for a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services to a limited number of people behind a firewall. A private cloud is typically implemented by first virtualizing internal commodity hardware, then adding an application services layer, and finally managing the new infrastructure as a single resource. This single resource is often allocated to applications that process and store sensitive and private company information in accordance with internal or government policies, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

With a spotlight on its cloud computing platforms in booth #508 at the 2012 Interop Expo May 8-10 in Las Vegas, Premio ( http://premioinc.com/ ) is demonstrating how data centers or enterprises who wish to offer reliable, flexible, elastically-scalable and price competitive cloud computing services can do so seamlessly within their existing infrastructure.

Premio is a U.S.-based premier provider of complete design, engineering and manufacturing services to OEMs and ODMs around the globe and excels at "build-to-order" technology solutions in a wide range of markets that are unmatched in both quality and affordability. Demonstrations at Interop will showcase Premio’s expertise in computing, storage and cloud technologies as well as the company’s association with strong ecosystem providers such as Intel, MPSTOR and EchoStreams…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack(TM) company, today announced its Co-founder and CEO, Joshua McKenty, will be participating in a panel session at Interop Las Vegas titled, "Is OpenStack the Answer to the Walled Garden?" taking place at the Mandalay Bay Casino in Las Vegas from May 6-10, 2012. Interop features the latest innovations in virtualization, mobility, cloud computing and the data center.

What: Learn which companies are involved (and how involved) with OpenStack and how OpenStack’s open source community approach is destroying the value proposition of closed and proprietary models from other vendors…