Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: James Urquhart.

If you are looking to cloud computing to simplify your IT environment, I’m afraid I have bad news for you.

Yeah, you might find yourself having to worry less about infrastructure, less about how storage systems work or what networking to use to connect a virtualized resource pool, or even what middleware settings are optimal for your applications. However, for every problem eliminated by choosing cloud, you’ll find it just creates more of the problems you remain accountable for—and may even create some new problems that you never had to face before.

Which is as it should be. Let me explain…

Grazed from WBJournal.com.  Author: Peter Marsh.

The past year saw an overwhelming adoption of cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and hosted applications, as many businesses chose to store their data online rather than on physical computers and servers. A new report from Cisco estimates that cloud computing usage is expected to grow twelvefold by 2015, But an increasing number of local companies are finding that simply having the cloud in their business isn’t enough; it’s how quickly and reliably they can access that cloud (and the applications in it) that will determine their success in 2012.

Businesses are also finding that the cloud helps reduce energy consumption and offers them the flexibility to purchase more data storage for only as long as they need it, rather than being forced to invest in costly office equipment that takes years to pay off…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Rackspace is a growing cloud computing capability provider that differentiates themselves by what they call “Fanatical Support.”  We try not to dwell too long on the marketing slogans of firms but have first-hand experience with Rackspace and can tell you their support is really really different. It must be the culture, but every support experience has left me convinced they are a great company to do business with.

We host several sites at Rackspace, including CTOvision.com  We also host data in Rackspace’s clouds and use their Cloud Files as part of a content delivery system. Additionally we use Rackspace cloud servers for standing up testing and prototyping environments and have also stood up Hadoop analytical clusters in the Rackspace cloud…

Grazed from CTOVision.com.  Author: Bob Gourley.

Amazon didn’t invent cloud computing, but they deserve lots of credit for transforming the business model for providing cloud services through elastic computing (for some history see Jeff Bezos’ Risky Bet from Businessweek Nov 2006). They have pushed the economics of cloud computing to be so efficient they are able to offer a 12 months worth of initial compute for free. This is a great opportunity to learn their interface and to test how their computing capabilities might serve your needs.

We have been using Amazon servers for a variety of purposes over the years and have just finished fielding a CDH3 cluster standup there and thought it would be a good time to capture some quickstart lessons to help you get started with your own systems (we have a similar post for Rackspace cloud servers here)…

Grazed from Datacenter Dynamics.  Author:  Yevgeniy Sverdlik.

The US Army has awarded a US$250m contract to four companies to build a cloud environment that will reside in both traditional and mobile data centers. MicroTech – one of the awardees – says this is the army’s first cloud computing contract.

MicroTech says it will provide, maintain and support mobile data centers for the Army Private Cloud Mobile (name of the future environment). Services will include providing application hosting in containerized data centers, application migration, as well as cloud services such as Infrastructure- , Platform- and Software-as-a-Service.

Grazed from Telecom Reseller.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The year 2012 will be the period when the media tablet revolution begins to have a transformative impact, imposing wrenching changes on the global electronics supply chain. This year will see a host of developments spurred by the rise of tablets, as the computing, semiconductor, storage, display, wireless and contract manufacturing segments scramble to react to the iPad and competing devices. These developments include the advent of ultrabooks, the increasing prominence of cloud computing—and the resulting impacts of these events on the technology supply chain. IHS (NYSE: IHS) examines 10 major transformations in the technology supply chain expected in 2012 related to the rise of media tablets below.

No. 1: Enter the Ultrabook

With the media tablet having decimated the netbook market and also putting the brakes on notebook sales growth, the PC supply chain is embracing the ultrabook as its potential savior…

Grazed from Military & Aerospace Technologies.  Author:  John Keller.

Advantech Co. Ltd. in Milpitas, Calif., is introducing the ROM-1210 heat sink-free RISC-based computer-on-module (COM) for low-power applications such as cloud computing, portable applications, and industrial automation.

The embedded computing board, based on the RTX COM form factor, offers ARM Cortex-A8 1 GHz Freescale i.MX53 series low-power system on chip (SoC) and I/O chips. The ROM-1210 uses 512 megabytes of DDR3, 2 gigabytes Flash supporting OpenGL ES 2.0, and OpenVG 1.1 hardware 2D/3D accelerators. The board also supports HD 1080-pixel video decoding and an HD 720-pixel video encoding hardware engine…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author:  Jason Brooks.

The corner of cloud computing known as platform as a service has been heating up over the past year, with new products and projects coming online that are aimed at abstracting away application deployment details and enabling developers to focus primarily on their code.

Early on, most platform as a service (PaaS) options have favored languages such as Java and Python, paired with largely open-source application stacks. With the exception of Microsoft’s own Azure service, most of the PaaS focus has been aimed away from Microsoft’s .NET framework and its corresponding stack.

Recently, however, this situation has been changing, with the emergence of .NET-targeted options such as Apprenda Inc.’s Apprenda 3.0, which enables organizations to deploy their own .NET PaaS atop the Microsoft Web application stack…

Grazed from GovWin.  Author: Ronald Sherwin.

I have to admit that I am basically an idealist and naively believe that government agencies progress through data center consolidation to the eventual cloud computing service delivery model should be based upon a carefully developed business case analysis developed by the agency CIO and sold through the budget justification process.

But I live in the Washington metropolitan area and have watched the 12,000+ registered lobbyists continue to wield their literary prose upon the budgetary process.So it was no surprise when the trade press announced that the 2012 National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) contained language that forces the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to curtail their focus on becoming the government-owned private cloud provider for the Department of Defense (DoD)…

Grazed from Zacks.  Author:   Eric Dutram.

Technology investing has been quite rocky as of late thanks to troubling setbacks form some of the major players in the industry. Giants such as Oracle (ORCL), Amazon (AMZN), and HP (HPQ) have all seen some level of weakness over the past month, casting a shadow over the sector heading into 2012. Yet, despite these recent concerns, the tech SPDR (XLK) has still outperformed broad markets over the past few months and could continue to do so if some of the high growth corners of the market can carry the weight of the industry in the new year. One such segment that has great promise from both a practical and investment standpoint undoubtedly has to be the cloud computing industry, an increasingly important part of the tech world (also read Intel Report Crushes Semiconductor ETFs)…