Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

While the average enterprise IT shop remains firmly grounded in its virtualized data centers, cloud computing is the next phase of evolution. The problem is, companies don’t quite know how to get there with the tools that they have.

A number of new cloud management software offerings from vendors large and small promise to move virtual infrastructure to the vaunted private cloud and serve as a bridge to public clouds…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Nancy Gohring.

Despite Microsoft’s stated commitment to Hyper-V in OpenStack, buggy code designed to support the hypervisor will be removed from the next version of the stack, developers decided on Wednesday.

An OpenStack developer wrote a patch that removes the Hyper-V support code, and two members of the core OpenStack team have approved the patch. That means the code will be removed when the next version of OpenStack, called Essex, is released in the second quarter. The code would have allowed a service provider to build an OpenStack cloud using Hyper-V…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Stuart Corner.

Cisco has announced the addition of 100GBE and 40GBE ethernet capabilities to its Nexus Switches and 40GE to its Catalyst switches in anticipation of surging data centre workloads driven by cloud computing.

Cisco’s first Global Cloud Index, released in November 2011 predicted that more than 50 percent of computing workloads in data centres will be cloud-based by 2014 and global cloud traffic will grow more than 12 times by 2015, to 1.6 zettabytes per year.

According to Cisco, "Data intensive applications such as cloud, ‘big data,’ video, virtual desktop solutions and virtualisation are accelerating the adoption of 10GE at the server level and network access/aggregation layers, introducing bandwidth bottlenecks in the core interconnects connecting the data centre to the campus to the service provider."…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Mark Brunelli.

A newly adopted and highly aggressive cloud computing strategy has led AAA Northern California, Nevada and Utah (AAA NCNU) to choose Dell Boomi cloud integration tools over IBM Cast Iron and Jitterbit, an IT official with the organization said.

The popular auto club, a $600 million company that provides roadside assistance, sales and membership services to about 4 million customers in the Western United States, said the decision to go with Dell resulted largely from financial considerations and a matter of multi-tenancy.

AAA NCNU wanted a “truly multi-tenant” cloud-based integration tool—a single version of the application that serves multiple clients—but IBM Cast Iron and Jitterbit didn’t fit the bill, according to Kirk Heughens, the auto club’s application integration leader…

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is the latest buzz word. Many companies are adopting this convenient, on-demand service to enable themselves to save the costs involved in establishing computing infrastructure such as hard drives, development platforms, databases, computing power, or complete software applications.

Whether you are using public cloud, private cloud, virtual private cloud and/or hybrid cloud for your organization, cloud computing focuses on core business processes and offers greater efficiency by allowing data center upkeep and maintenance to be managed offsite. Cloud computing is certainly an alternative technology to get the job done in with less money.

Cloud computing has penetrated each and every department of any organization including human resources, maintenance/operations, marketing, product development, IT (maybe), logistics (if shipping/movement of items), customer service (if needed)/product support, and legal (if a large corporation)…

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

IBM is buying a privately held 12-year-old Israeli outfit called Worklight for its write-once-run-anywhere application platform and tools for smartphones and tablets.

The price IBM is paying wasn’t disclosed.

Worklight’s widgetry, which can be used to create and run HTML5, hybrid and native apps, is supposed to put new and existing consumer and employee-facing apps on multiple mobile devices – including iPhones, BlackBerries and Androids – and then securely connect them to a company’s data center…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a core layer of the cloud computing architecture, and its evolution will affect the future of most users and vendors in enterprise software markets, according to Gartner, Inc.

"With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPassage, the leading cloud server security company, today unveils Halo NetSec, an automated solution that provides advanced network access control for servers running in public clouds including Rackspace and Amazon EC2. Halo NetSec is specifically designed for multi-cloud environments, installs in less than five minutes and provides administrators with easy-to-manage perimeter controls.

"Cloud computing has ushered in a new set of security risks and challenges that are not addressed at the IaaS level, and traditional firewall defenses do not adequately translate into the cloud," said Andrew Hay, senior security analyst for 451 Research. "A host-based server security solution designed specifically for cloud environments picks up where the IaaS leaves off, providing organizations with the scalable security they need to consider when migrating traditional on-premise systems to the cloud."…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Frank Ohlhorst.

EnterpriseDB has announced a new database-as-a-service offering, which will bring  EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL Plus database products to the cloud.

The company has already forged agreements with leading cloud services hosts to immediately offer EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service. Service providers, such as CloudBees and Engine Yard, will use  PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service for their core offerings while Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud Compute will offer PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service directly to customers.

Offering the service as an alternative to entrenched Oracle users means that EnterpriseDB must include some specific features to support enterprise customers. One critical feature that EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service includes is support for fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant relational database service…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Gridstore(TM), the leader in grid based, scale-out storage solutions, today announced that the company has been awarded the first Cloud Computing Excellence Award from TMC. Gridstore was selected as one of the top 30 companies that most effectively leveraged cloud computing in efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. The winners will be published in the January 2012 issue of Cloud Computing Magazine.

With Gridstore’s scale-out storage solution small and medium sized organizations enjoy simple plug and play scaling of capacity, IO and performance without the cost, complexity and 3X capacity bloat of first-generation cluster based offerings. Gridstore’s unique grid based NAS is the only scale-out solution that provides a fault tolerant system designed to withstand multiple, simultaneous failures without downtime or data loss to ensure customers can run 24/7 non-stop…