Cashing in on the cloud
Grazed from Dynamic Business. Author: Clive Gold.
Cloud computing is catching on more and more in the small business world as people increasingly get a better understanding of what it is. The benefits for those that embrace it are potentially enormous, with the opportunities to be exploited by harnessing cloud technology not reserved for larger businesses only, as once thought. What needs to be understood is that the cloud can add a lot of value to small businesses due to its simplicity, accessibility and flexibility – as long as you are able to stay clear of some mistakes that businesses commonly make during their journey to the cloud…
Is “the Cloud” overrated?
With so much hype around how great cloud computing is, it’s hard to imagine it any way other than good. The news is full of stories about what the cloud can do, the increased adoption rate of the cloud, and how more and more businesses are developing cloud applications. As a result, it would be really easy for businesses that are not on board with cloud computing to think that they’re way behind the times…
Inside the Cloud
You could call me an observer of technology more than an expert. I have been involved in computing since 1967 and have seen a variety of techniques and ideas come and go. The cloud is the "next big thing," though it has been around for a long time…
Amazon Silk is the First Step in Giving Mobiles Unlimited Computing Power
What’s missing from the story of Amazon’s new cloud-turbocharged Silk browser, presently available only on its Fire tablet but probably coming to other devices, is the larger context of this technology. What would happen, for example, if Amazon used its massive cloud computing infrastructure not merely to pre-process the user’s browsing experience, but also to offload much of the processing powering of the rest of a device’s apps and OS?…
NASA Vets Lead Rival Cloud Startups
Two veterans of NASA’s Nebula cloud computing project, former NASA CTO for IT Chris Kemp, and former NASA technical lead and cloud architect Joshua McKenty, are squaring off in competing cloud computing ventures, less than a year after each left the space agency.
The duo’s companies both build on the free, open source OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service project sponsored by NASA and Rackspace with participation from dozens of companies, including Citrix, Dell, Intel, and Cisco, among others. OpenStack itself grew directly out of NASA’s Nebula project, famous for its use of shipping containers to house computing equipment….
Citrix Optimizes XenServer for the Cloud Era
Citrix Systems today announced the availability of XenServer(R) 6, the most recent edition of its server virtualization product line. As a key component of the Citrix cloud computing and virtualization strategy, XenServer 6 brings new optimizations and improved scalability and performance for cloud infrastructure, desktop virtualization and networking. XenServer continues to grow market presence and adoption, fueled by the strong leadership of the underlying open source Xen(R) technology, the virtualization platform of choice in a majority of the public cloud today. XenServer was recently positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant of the "2011 Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure, and was listed as a "Champion" in Info-Tech Research Group’s Vendor Landscape report on server virtualization…
How To Support Cloud Applications
Cloud computing gives user organizations and IT alike the freedom of maneuvering and long-run flexibility that was never possible with traditional enterprise applications. However, that freedom makes for new levels of unpredictability when it comes to big deployments, and some new requirements for support.
As I’ve written endlessly, CRM applications are different from other enterprise applications, largely due to the needs and habits of its users. Generally speaking, sales and marketing folks put a much higher priority on success (both the appearance and the reality) than they do on process discipline or little details like data quality. Couple that with the shifting sands of marketplace competition and evolving sales models, and the result is a system that must frequently accommodate significant degrees of change…
The Shift to Cloud Computing: Overcoming Resistance to Change – Part 1
No one likes change, and a shift to cloud computing represents that very change that people oppose. Consequently, in spite of the very obvious advantages of cloud computing (See: Which Cloud Computing Quality Works For You? ), there are many who want to persist with the traditional IT paradigm. In order to determine how to overcome this resistance to change, it is necessary to know the underlying reasons behind this resistance. This article presents these reasons and discusses possible solutions…
Violin Claims to Pull the Curtain Down on Disk Arrays
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.
Comparing itself to kryptonite, Violin Memory thinks it’s got the stuff in hand to put an end to classic mechanical storage arrays in the data center.
The disk arrays would be replaced by Violin’s built-from-the-ground-up 6000 Series NAND flash Memory Arrays, which it calls the industry’s first all-silicon storage systems…
Business meets IT in the Cloud
It is an established fact that the Cloud is one of the hottest technology trends that is being talked about across the industry and in various discussion forums. Thoppil talked of the importance of exploring and harnessing Cloud computing…