Grazed from CIO.  Author: Bernard Goldstein.

A continuing controversy in cloud computing is its putative cost benefits; specifically, whether public cloud computing can provide cost advantages over computing carried out within a company’s own data center.

Certainly, billions of bytes have been expended on this discussion, with steadfast advocates for both positions. I have often heard people confidently state that their internal cloud environment is cheaper than the public alternatives. I have even seen spreadsheets proving that an internal cloud has lower costs than the primary public provider, Amazon.

Briefly summed up, the argument in favor of private clouds goes something like this: If one examines the posted prices of Amazon and projects a given application’s resource demands to those prices, it seems clear that an IT organization could achieve lower costs running its own infrastructure…

Grazed from Channel Pro.  Author: Ian Masters.

Where can the channel capitalise on Recovery-as-a-Service?

Business continuity and disaster recovery will always be necessary investments for companies – data and applications are critical tools that support revenue generation, service to customers and their overall success. However, budgets for investment in technology have been severely hit over the last couple of years. To cope with these challenges, organisations are looking at how cloud computing could be used to meet this need around continuity…

Grazed from Cloud Beat.  Author: Sean Ludwig.

There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming…

Grazed from ZD Net.  Author: Alan Priestley.

Rewind a few years and ‘mobility’ was the word that represented the exciting new direction for enterprise computing. The vision was that mobile devices would help enterprises spread their wings, cut their costs and thrust forward into a realm of new opportunity. Today the benefits of enterprise mobility are pretty much unanimously recognised. The real focus now is how to fuse enterprise mobility with the cloud.

To briefly spell out the issues around enterprise mobility and the cloud just think of all the different mobile devices out there and their different capabilities. Some can run web productivity and communications apps with no issues, others can’t. Now consider all the new platforms that are emerging: smartphones that are becoming ever smarter, tablet platforms that are seemingly proliferating by the week, laptops with the computing power of high-end PCs and more…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Synergy Research Group announces the publication of its Cloud Market Share Report, which provides quarterly market shares, sizing, and forecasts for the Public and Private Cloud equipment markets. The foundation of Synergy’s segmentation includes the networking, computing, and storage platforms deployed for Private Cloud, Public Cloud (VPN), and Public Cloud (non-VPN)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Anne Lee.

A simple definition of cloud computing is that it’s a unique storage service that involves storage of data and software. With cloud computing, the person or company who enjoys the service is not fully aware of the location, storage facilities or configuration of the system used to offer the storage services. A good analogy to explain this concept is the regular power grid that supplies power to homes and businesses. The end user who enjoys the services is hardly aware of all the power generation and distribution devices and components used to deliver the service.

Since its introduction, cloud computing has evolved through several stages like virtualization computing to autonomic utility form of cloud computing. It has also evolved from service-oriented architecture…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Austin (Tex.)-based start-up Spanning has embraced the concept of cloud computing so much that its product is a backup service for Google Apps (GOOG), completely hosted and run from Amazon Web Services (AMZN). The idea of backing up one cloud service via another intrigued me, so I asked Mike Pav, Spanning’s vice-president of engineering, how he does it.

The company charges people or businesses $30 a year to back up Google Apps, including e-mail and documents. That covers customers who somehow delete or lose those files. Google will support users if it loses their data, but it won’t search for your files if you mess up…

Grazed from WinSuperSite.  Author: Paul Thurrotte.

n 2007, Apple released its first take at cloud computing, an intriguing service called MobileMe which apparently bombed with consumers. Certainly, MobileMe was a bit buggy out of the gate. But what most people don’t realize is that Apple actually fixed the bugs and delivered a pretty excellent service for a few years there, one that really did follow-through on its original promise of bringing Microsoft Exchange capabilities to the masses.

This past year, then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs infamously dissed MobileMe during the introduction of the service’s follow-up, iCloud. But as the laughter subsided, I became intrigued. It was immediately clear that iCloud would be a much bigger deal than MobileMe, more aggressive and offering far more functionality. And unlike MobileMe, iCloud would be free…

Grazed from Tech.Blorge.  Author: Susan Wilson.

Data centers give off heat, a lot of it.  At least half the cost of a data center is the cost to cool the servers.  With all of that heat going to waste, researchers at the University of Virginia and Microsoft Research wrote a paper suggesting that data centers broken down into data furnaces would make great whole house heaters and still save corporations money.

According to The New York Times, the paper, The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing was presented at a recent Usenix conference.  Basically, your home could become a mini data center with one to three cabinets of servers hooked up to your heating fans and duct work…

Grazed from Business Line.  Author:  Mahananda Bohidar.

A look at the changing IT storage trends in most companies will tell you that everyone wants to move, at least a part if not all of their IT needs, to the cloud. To serve this purpose, they look for companies that take care of all their network storage and security worries while giving them the ability to opt for flexible solutions, customised plans and affordable rates. It’s no wonder then that tech biggies like HP and Dell are going all out with their innovations in cloud computing.

Dell recently held it’s first DellWorld 2011, a seminar to discuss and showcase the latest trends in social, cloud and mobile innovation. Business Line spoke to Mr Praveen Asthana, Vice-President, Enterprise, Storage and Networking Services, Dell after the event…