Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Justin Lee.

Cloud computing technology owes a lot to the various open source projects that continue to propel the technology forward, along with helping to create a greater awareness — both within and outside the IT industry — for cloud capabilities.

OpenStack, in particular, has been one of the greatest contributors to cloud computing. Since Rackspace and NASA launched the open source cloud project two years ago, the community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing platform for both public and private clouds…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Xoreax, a 10-year-old Israeli software acceleration house, says it can employ the idle PCs and servers cycles in a corporate network SETI-like to create a so-called private processing cloud – Windows-based, of course – that’s got the heavy-duty commute of a virtual supercomputer.

It seems it’s a matter of accelerating time-intensive computational processes.  The company’s new signature IncrediBuild-XGE, an agent-based distributed computing solution, is supposed to let ISVs and application developers create this virtual cloud environment.

They can reportedly add features to it while tickling the processing…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Little six-month-old ClearStory Data, which calls itself a self-driven data exploration service, came out of stealth mode Monday with an undisclosed amount of seed money from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and some relatively eminent private parties.

Those personal investors include Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at Wealthfront; Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, senior VPs at Walmart Global e-Commerce and co-founders of Junglee and Kosmix; Tim Howes, co-founder of Rockmelt and ex-CTO of Netscape, and Nitin Donde, a one-time executive at EMC, 3Par and Aster Data…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix Systems today announced upcoming opportunities for global entrepreneurial companies to contribute to the next wave of innovation for mobile workstyles via the Citrix Startup Accelerator, its Silicon Valley-based seed investment initiative. The IT landscape is in a period of dramatic change, shifting expectations of IT and computing capabilities and providing an opportunity for entrepreneurs to contribute their ideas. Startups have always challenged the norms and assumptions in computing and in business. As the exceptions of the PC Era – mobile users, personal devices, and wireless access – become the assumptions of the Cloud Era, staying close to new thinking is important to Citrix as it continues to help shape the future…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Justin Lee.

Web and cloud hosting provider Rackspace recently introduced its new Rackspace Advisory Services to help enterprises with migrating to a cloud computing model.

As enterprises take on the complicated task of moving to a cloud computing model, they must decide which applications or platforms to transition to cloud computing, as well as prepare for the transformation that their internal IT departments will undergo.

The new Rackspace Advisory Services will provide the detailed intelligence and insight necessary for enterprise customers to complete their strategic IT vision, while providing Rackspace with another value-added recurring revenue stream…

Grazed from OneStopClick.  Author: Dan Blacharski.

The language of IT backup, security, disaster preparedness and business continuity can be confusing. Having a network backup procedure in place doesn’t necessarily mean you also have a disaster plan, and having a disaster plan doesn’t mean you also have a business continuity plan. In short, the disaster plan outlines what to do when disaster strikes, the business continuity plan outlines how to keep things moving in the aftermath.

As any CIO who has been through a fire, hurricane or earthquake can tell you, the hardest part doesn’t come until days after the terrible event has already occurred. Business failure occurs less as a result of immediate loss, and more a result of the delays suffered in getting back to business as usual. With every passing day, full recovery becomes less likely…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Patriot Technologies has launched a High Performance Computing (HPC) Solutions division that provides customized hardware solutions designed to enable the best-designed configuration at the lowest possible cost of ownership to support even the most demanding technical computing environments — including the Cloud and Hadoop.

Industries with the greatest need for HPC include life sciences, weather modeling, computer-aided engineering, energy and financial due to the massive processing power needed to optimize their applications. Patriot is able to help customers create the highest performing platform at the lowest total cost of ownership by utilizing our lifecycle approach; including discovery of needs and requirements, production & design of a hardware system, and a lifecycle management approach that includes post-sales maintenance and remote monitoring capabilities…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Ken Hess.

Bear with me, if you will, for a moment while I put forth an interesting idea concerning Microsoft’s future in the cloud computing business marketplace. I believe that traditional server operating systems (OSs) will go out of style long before desktop format computing will and there’s a very good reason for that: We just don’t need standalone servers anymore. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty strong statement in any arena but, as I wrote above, bear with me while I discuss this salient point with you. I think that Microsoft will replace standard, standalone Windows Server with Hyper-V and App-V. And, you’ll probably select which one you want to use during installation. Windows vServer 2015 or Windows Application Server 2015?

Click. Restart. Deploy.

Once your system is up and running, you can select through a series of Roles for your new Server, if you selected Windows Application Server 2015, such as Remote Desktop Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Communications Server, Media Server, Active Directory Server, Office Applications Server or Custom Applications Server. The Custom Applications Server would allow you to deploy applications that don’t fall into one of the other categories…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

What is it with data-transfer cloud computing performance? Some people think cloud services provide great performance, and some think they don’t perform well at all. The reality is that both beliefs are true, depending on how you use cloud services and the cloud providers themselves.

There are a few basic, core patterns that define data-transfer performance:

• Enterprise to cloud
• Mobile to cloud
• Cloud to cloud

Enterprise-to-cloud seems to be where the problems exist. Information is transferred, typically over the open Internet, from servers in the enterprise to public cloud computing providers. If you’ve ever checked out the speed difference in downloading data from a remote website versus an intranet site, you already know what the issues are in this arena. As a rule, try to avoid transfer of large chunks of data from the enterprise to the public cloud computing provider…