For years, the dominant animation studios like Pixar and DreamWorks Animation made their cinematic magic via expensive computers that ran in data centers at the studios. Now the rise of cloud computing, which enables anyone to buy computer power on demand, is allowing smaller, independent animation firms to produce very slick work…

Researchers from North Carolina State University and IBM are claiming a major breakthrough in the way cloud computing architectures protect sensitive information.

They have developed a new, experimental technique to isolate sensitive information and workload from the rest of the functions performed by a hypervisor – without, they claim, significantly affecting the system’s overall performance…

While the environment is heavily impacted by online use with things such as data centers leaving a big carbon footprint, EarthTalk said cloud computing could help move green IT forward by centralizing things a big more. Individual purchases aside, EarthTalk said the cloud is very important for the future…

Who’s planning to build or expand data centers in the next few years? Major growth in Internet service demands and cloud computing is pushing major companies to expand or build new data centers around the world. Follow the breakdown of investments, land size and reasons for data center expansion…:

Last week the OpenNebula project gave a keynote about HPC Cloud Computing with OpenNebula at the High Performance Cloud Computing Day hosted by the SARA Supercomputing Center and the Big Grid project to officially inaugurate its new HPC Cloud infrastructure. It was really impressive to see the work done by the HPC Cloud team during the last two years. It was 2009 when OpenNebula had the first technical discussions with this team about how to build an IaaS cloud that could address the challenging needs of the HPC community. At that time, they had the vision to understand the full potential of cloud computing for High Performance Computing, and since then they have done pioneering, innovative work that is now helping others to follow the same path. Moreover, from the beginning they involved the users in the testing of the platform to make sure the final infrastructure would fully address their needs…

A report from AMI-Partners finds that vendors that are able to offer cloud-based solutions are more successful and their customers are more satisfied with the solutions that they provide.  70 percent of vendors offering cloud-based solutions to small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) found that they found that most cloud pilots rapidly expand the number of users and typically roll out to the entire company after just one quarter of use…

Microsoft hopes to use the company’s Web Matrix 2.0 tool–now in beta–to lure new-age web developers to Azure, its cloud-computing platform-as-a-service.

While the Azure PaaS has a potentially huge built-in audience of .Net programmers, it lacks cachet among the “cool kid,”  next-gen web developers. Those developers tend to gravitate towards Linux and PERL, Ruby, Python or Java languages…

TELSTRA has added a crucial cog in its cloud computing wheel, joining EMC Australia’s cosy cohort of six to resell the storage giant’s wares.

The alliance will see Telstra bolster its cloud division with new specialist sales personnel, according to Mark Pratley, Telstra Cloud Computing general manager.

The telco joins EMC’s Velocity Service Provider Partner program alongside Melbourne IT, Infoplex, CSC, Macquarie Telecom and Dimension Data. They will also deploy and market EMC gear to cloud computing customers…