Amazon promises further S3 price cuts as it touts cloud computing security
Amazon has revealed that another price drop for its Simple Storage Service (S3) is on the cards, following the cuts made at the beginning of February.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels, speaking at an event in central London on Tuesday, said the 12 per cent to 13 per cent reduction in storage costs offered to customers this year was only the beginning.
"At the beginning of the year, we dropped the storage pricing of S3 and some customers saw a 40 per cent drop in their bill," said Vogels…
Cloud Computing: EMC Reportedly After Flash Storage Start-Up XtremIO
EMC is reportedly hot to buy three-year-old Israeli flash storage start-up XtremIO.
According to Globes on Sunday, EMC is dangling $400 million-$450 million in front of its quarry and closing in for the kill.
Supposedly EMC rivals including NetApp have also been after XtremIO.
One of XtremIO’s founders previously sold Rainfinity to EMC and there are other family ties. XtremIO’s CFO Robin Ren was once director of R&D at EMC subsidiary VMware.
Globes says EMC CEO Joe Tucci, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod and VMware finance VP David Golden have all been in Israel. NetApp’s M&A guy and its EMEA VP also made the pilgrimage, but EMC usually brings a bigger checkbook to such affairs as NetApp can testify…
Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Cloud Enhancements to Help Organizations Increase the Value of Unstructured Data
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), today announced significant new enhancements to its award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and its bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI). These new enhancements reduce overall costs by enabling organizations to better manage unstructured data growth, ensure content security in shared storage environments and reduce the complexity and inefficiency in traditional, cloud computing and distributed IT environments.
“Organizations are looking for new, innovative approaches to deal with the expansive growth of unstructured content and extract the full value of their data,” said Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, Hitachi Data Systems. “Our content cloud approach allows organizations to store billions of data objects and use intelligence layers to index and search the data independently of the application that created it. The data is available across devices, anytime and anywhere. By deploying HCP and HDI, customers will cut costs in managing, storing and accessing data and build a foundation for the information cloud.”…
Cloud computing leads training priorities
The majority of local organisations believe their IT staff will require training in cloud computing and virtualisation in the next 12 months.
This was one of the major findings of the ITWeb/Foster-Melliar IT Training Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for 14 days, attracting 190 responses.
Besides cloud computing, which was selected by 40.72% of respondents, IT security is the next training priority, at 39.52%. This was closely followed by ITIL (38.32%), networking (32.93%) and project management (26.95%)…
Dell and Internet2 NET+ Services Increase Access to Research Computing and Enable Discovery with Cloud Services
Dell is working with Clemson University to provide more Internet2 institutions and organizations access to high performance research computing technology, responding to the Obama administration’s Big Data R & D Initiative and a continued commitment to the global research community. Scientific research requires intensive computation capabilities to help solve complex, and many times life-saving issues. Dell and Clemson University will support members with cloud-based research computing solutions and services that can efficiently meet these demands.
Dell and Internet2’s NET+ Services program will provide high performance computing solutions and services that support the next generation of collaborative research and simplify research computing from the desktop to the datacenter including:…
Cloud Computing: Skytap Unveils SmartClient for Secure Remote Access From Any Browser or Device
Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced a new secure remote access experience called SmartClient, which offers users a fast, easy, and secure way to connect and interact with computing environments in Skytap Cloud. SmartClient offers the flexibility to access Skytap Cloud virtual machines using a new browser app, or a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-capable client, on any device including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets.
SmartClient brings to market innovation that spans both the unique software layer that powers Skytap Cloud and the remote access clients used by Skytap customers. These new capabilities make it easy for users to access any Skytap Cloud supported guest host — including Windows, Linux, or virtual appliances — just like they were sitting in front of a physical machine…
Cloud Computing: SoftLayer and RightScale Partnership Speeds Customers’ Time to Market
SoftLayer(R) Technologies, a leading provider of global cloud infrastructure, and RightScale(R), Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, have partnered to provide unmatched scalability and automation solutions that allow internet-centric companies to speed their time to market. Companies such as social gaming developer Broken Bulb Game Studios are able to use SoftLayer’s public and private cloud infrastructure with RightScale cloud management to easily deploy, automate and manage their computing workloads across the globe.
"Our business is growing dramatically as we launch new games on Facebook and mobile platforms," said Robert Nelson, CEO at Broken Bulb Game Studios, which is the developer of games such as My Town, Braaains, Ninja Warz and Miscrits. "The combination of RightScale and SoftLayer has made our cloud environment more robust and simplified our deployment process, enabling us to automatically scale to meet customer demands. With this solution, we have lowered our costs and increased our redundancies allowing us to quickly react to massive influxes of new traffic as our games spread extremely rapidly to new players."…
Even the Tech-Savviest Struggle With Cloud-Based Business Models: Study
If you are still somewhat in the dark as to how to move forward with cloud computing, don’t feel so bad. Even high-tech companies are still fumbling their way along with the new cloud business model.
Cloud computing offers an interesting value proposition to businesses of all stripes because it offers cheaper technology resources and greater flexibility. But that’s only half the story. Every company also has the potential to become a cloud services provider as well as a cloud services consumer. If you run a ball-bearing factory, and you have a private cloud and extend some online capabilities to members of your supply chain — such as checking your inventory levels or something more complex such as running product simulations — you are a service provider…
ScaleXtreme Offers Cost Control, Budgeting and Enforcement for Cloud Computing
ScaleXtreme, the leading provider of server and cloud management products, today released a new set of tools that enable IT professionals to gain visibility into cloud provider costs, establish role-based budgets and prevent the launch of unauthorized cloud machines. With this new functionality, ScaleXtreme is the only product on the market that ties together cost monitoring and budgeting to actual server launch control.
ScaleXtreme’s cloud management tools give IT professionals the power to set budgets based on user, role or organization and obtain granular usage information. Customers can set soft and hard budget limits to either warn systems administrators of over spend or actively prevent individual users from launching new machines. This additional control comes directly integrated into ScaleXtreme’s powerful cloud server management console, which customers use to build, deploy, monitor and patch public cloud instances…
Future of computing: The tablet and cloud will be king, report says
A paradigm shift may be coming to the digital lifestyle. Instead of the PC being the center of the personal computing universe, consumers will be opting for tablets as their primary computing device and relying on cloud storage to access their content across their devices, according to a new report.
"This burgeoning market is set to disrupt the personal computing device and OS markets," says the report from Forrester Research on the future of computing.
Instead of serving as a supplement to a desktop or laptop computer, the report said, these burgeoning cloud services will play such an integral role in the connected future that consumers will first choose a service, then the compatible device as the focus shifts from device to personal content storage services. And tablets such as iPad will become the conduit between consumers’ digital devices such as smartphones and PC and the cloud-stored content…