Grazed from Network World.  Author: Colin Neagle.

Having just released its new cloud operating system, Piston Cloud Computing finds itself in a contentious position — and company co-founder Josh McKenty says that is exactly where the company wants to be.

"We’re building a product that’s great for private clouds, and that puts us head-to-head with VMware," McKenty says. "And I’m ready for that fight."

McKenty didn’t mince words when describing his young company’s new product, which it is touting as the industry’s first private cloud operating system based on the OpenStack framework.

"The thing that I want to make sure is crystal clear is that Piston Enterprise OS is an alternative to VMware," says McKenty, a former technical architect with the NASA Nebula team that originally designed the OpenStack framework. "This is an alternative to the proprietary walled garden approach to cloud that VMware has adopted."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NJVC(R), one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense, and Virtual Global, a premier provider of software and cloud computing platform solutions for a variety of industry and federal customers, announce the release of a joint white paper, "Platform a Service (PaaS): What Is It? Why Is It So Important?."

The paper clarifies the confusion surrounding PaaS for IT decision makers in the federal government. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests PaaS as a component of the Federal Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, but one major challenge exists: Most buyers do not understand what PaaS is, why it is important and how it can help federal agencies cut development costs by more than 50 percent…

Grazed from ThomasNet News.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, today announced the launch of its first hands-on Cloud Computing training course, "Building and Using a Cloud with Nimbula Director". This course will teach students how to build and administer private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Nimbula Director is powerful cloud software that works out of the box and can be used to implement a number of business enabling cloud use cases, such as deploying a private cloud in minutes instead of weeks or months…

Grazed from Information Management.  Author:  Justin Kern.

Although federal researchers were generally upbeat about the agile capabilities of cloud computing, they found that shifting their niche data sets for scientific experiments to virtual environments might not hold the same savings seen in other industries.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) recently released its final report on the Magellan project, which investigated the performance, usability and cost roles cloud computing can play in midrange computing and data-intensive workloads. Over the last two years, the Magellan project particularly probed how the cloud could address the unique big data needs for research by the federal energy department’s Office of Science.

A cloud infrastructure testbed of more than 8,000 CPU cores and 1.4 petabytes of storage were deployed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. With that infrastructure in place, researchers evaluated the performance of cloud models for IaaS and PaaS, virtual software packs, and MapReduce and Hadoop…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Joyent, a global provider of cloud computing software and services, today announced it has completed an $85 million funding round, with European group Weather Investment II providing the majority of the round. Weather II was advised by Accelero Capital, an investment and management group. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies that clearly hold promise in the rapidly and profoundly changing telecom and enterprise markets worldwide.

Telefonica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom leader Telefonica, is also participating as a strategic investor. Cloud-based services are a key focus area for Telefonica’s new Digital unit, and Joyent’s technology expertise in this area will help Telefonica enhance its product offering.

Existing Joyent investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Scott Campbell.

CRN talked to top executives at eight IT distributors to find out how they are approaching cloud computing and carving out their own roles within the evolving technology landscape.

Here’s a look at their game plans:

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics’ Enterprise Computing Solutions group launched its cloud computing services initiative in the summer under the Arrow Fusion brand with data center monitoring and management, Security-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Peter Wayner.

It’s been a big year for Apache Hadoop [1], the open source project that helps you split your workload among a rack of computers. The buzzword is now well known to your boss but still just a vague and hazy concept for your boss’s boss. That puts it in the sweet spot when there’s plenty of room for experimentation. The list of companies using Hadoop in production work grows longer each day, and it probably won’t be long before "Hadoop cluster" takes over the role that the words "crazy supercomputer" used to play in thriller movies. The next version of the WOPR is bound to run Hadoop.

The area is flourishing as the core project attracts a wide collection of helper projects that organize the workload and make it simpler to manage a collection of jobs to run at particular times. There’s HDFS, a standard file system that can organize the data spread out around the cluster; Hive, a data warehousing layer for making sense of this data; Mahout, a collection of routines for trying to learn something from said data; and ZooKeeper, a tool for keeping all of the balls in the air. At least a half-dozen or more other open source tools live in a stable orbit around Hadoop…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Phil Wainewright.

Enterprises are adopting two types of cloud. One is less risky but inherently flawed. The other offers greater rewards but very few so far have succeeded with it.

There’s a huge variety of different definitions of cloud floating around. Some are just plain wrong, while others are only valid in specific circumstances — cloud strategies that are right for certain organisations at certain times aren’t necessarily right for others (or even for the same organisation later on in its evolution). It’s tough for any enterprise decision-maker to figure out the right path…

Grazed from Tech.Blorge.  Author: Susan Wilson.

While many people are still trying to figure out what “cloud computing” really means, various businesses specializing in cloud services are going after the U.S. government’s business.  Companies like Box and Amazon Web Services are looking to pick up federal government business by providing extra security and specialized “cloud areas”.

According to TechCrunch the federal government is a $70 billion market. One of the biggest cloud storage companies, Box, is going after that market this year.  It currently provides cloud services to “77% of the Fortune 500”.  In pursuit of that goal, the company is beefing up its security in order to lure federal government storage contracts its way.  The company already provides services to several state and local governments…

Grazed from Times of India.  Author: Kshitij Sobti.

In our daily working with computers, it’s not uncommon to come across software that provide such obvious benefits that it becomes hard to live without them. Of late, with cloud computing, this has also become the case with web services. Below are some utilities that will make your life simpler:

Use Ifttt to build bridges between different services

We are well-versed with the concept of ‘events’ and ‘responses’ . When a phone rings, we pick it up; if the oven’s timer goes off, we check on our baking. The Web service ‘If This, Then That’ (IFTTT) now brings this concept of events and responses to the internet…