Grazed from Cloud Pro.  Author: Jennifer Scott.

We all appreciate something new. From a new mobile phone to a new car, even a nice new pair of shoes can makes us grin like a Cheshire cat who got the cream.

But the definition of ‘new’ is becoming a bit of a joke within the IT industry.

Since the inception of cloud computing as a term to describe a number of IT services, old school hosting companies have claimed the technology is nothing new at all.

Then, as the trend began to take off, numerous companies packaged up their products and stuck the word ‘cloud’ on them to try and sell more units and make them appear to keep up with the times – otherwise known as "cloud-washing."..

Grazed from Boston Business Journal.  Author: Kyle Alspach.

Verizon said the acquisition would accelerate its capabilities in cloud computing, and that CloudSwitch will be combined with Verizon’s Terremark IT services subsidiary. Ellen Rubin, co-founder and vice president of products at the company, said in an interview that the company was attractive to Verizon for its software development expertise and proximity to the Boston area’s development talent pool.

CloudSwitch assists enterprises with more easily moving applications or workloads between company data centers and the cloud. The technology eliminates a key barrier to widespread cloud adoption, according to CloudSwitch…
 

Grazed from PR News Wire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The network is the cloud. AT&T* has embedded cloud computing capabilities directly into its network, allowing it to manage, distribute, and deliver them to enterprise customers as a total solution straight down to nearly any device. Now, industry analyst firm Current Analysis is recognizing certain AT&T cloud capabilities in a recent report…
 

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: PR Announcement.

NTT America, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications (NTT Com), a global infrastructure services provider, today announced it has extended its suite of private cloud services beyond its data centers to support hybrid cloud requirements after achieving VMware vCloud® Powered status for the NTT Communications private cloud service offering. In addition, the company is announcing the new Global Enterprise Portal, which was designed to simplify the administration of cloud computing services, while increasing the level of security required in the cloud. NTT America will showcase the portal and have cloud architecture experts on-hand at the NTT Communications booth #320 at VMworld® 2011, August 29 through September 1 at The Venetian in Las Vegas, NV…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

The US military has always been at the forefront of technology. From transportation to materials science, from detection to communication, US military technology has always led its commercial counterparts. The Internet, GPS, jet aircraft, even the non-stick material Teflon – all these were developed for military purposes before finding civilian applications. By anecdotal accounts, US military technology leads civilian technology by at least a decade, if not more. However, it seems to have dropped the ball as regards to one of possibly the most influential technologies of the future – cloud computing…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

A New York Times article does a great job defining the issues around cloud adoption within the U.S. government — or, I should say, the glaring lack thereof. As the Times reports, "Such high praise for new Internet technologies may be common in Silicon Valley, but it is rare in the federal government."

Convenient excuses for skirting cloud computing are easy to find these days; for example, attacks on internal government systems from abroad this spring and summer are easy to recall. In July, the Pentagon said it suffered its largest breach when hackers obtained 24,000 confidential files...

Grazed from OpenPR.  Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft ISV Gold Partner Layer2 today has announced V2.0 of its Cloud Connector replication service to integrate corporate on-premise data – e.g. files, SQL databases, ERP/CRM, SAP etc. – with the Office 365 cloud.

Hamburg / GERMANY, 2011-08-25 – Microsoft’s new cloud computing offer Office 365 currently is going to attract a lot of new customers. It allows companies of all sizes to leverage the combined power of market-leading productivity tools such as Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office by simply subscribing to an online service to provide their employees with an enterprise grade solution for an affordable monthly subscription rate…
 

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Lori MacVittie.

That’s Cloud “Network of Women” and it’s a new opportunity to collaborate on cloud and emerging technologies.

Many, many years Fritz Nelson (then Vice President, Group Publisher for the Network Computing Enterprise Architecture) answered a question during an interview on the intersection of women and technology – particularly the lack of the former in the latter – essentially saying it was incumbent upon those women who were active and had a voice to use it in ways that encouraged other women to join, participate, and take up the reins of leadership when possible within the world of technology…

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb.  Author: David Strom.

We all know that there is a lot of wasted space in most VM storage repositories due to duplicate data. (Or we should.) But what isn’t as well known is the way the disk storage is configured can introduce a lot of delays in its throughput. This is because most storage arrays aren’t aware of the peculiarities of how VMs have to store their data on the specific blocks of their arrays, and the array can waste time seeking and retrieving information from its VMs…