March 30, 2011 Off

Korea’s Largest Landline and Mobile Service Provider Using Open Source Cloud Computing Platform for Public Cloud

By David
Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Heather Fitzsimmons.

Cloud.com, a provider of open source cloud computing software, today announced that KT, Korea’s largest landline operator and mobile service provider, has selected its flagship technology, CloudStack™, as the foundation for its new public cloud offering, KT ucloud. Currently in beta, KT ucloud will offer its users a stable, secure and cost-effective cloud environment that ensures enterprises are making the most efficient IT investment. As enterprise IT managers are looking for cost-effective cloud computing platforms, KT ucloud guarantees the most competitive pricing and benefits among its competitors. Additionally, KT ucloud reduces electricity consumption by two or three times, ultimately aiming to reduce more than 60 percent of electricity used within their datacenter operations and passing those efficiencies through to their customers…

March 29, 2011 Off

Cloud Computing – The IT force that can’t be stopped

By David
Grazed from Government Computer News.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Cloud computing is like a force of nature that cannot be stopped, even if there is a change in the White House in two years, according to panelists at a cloud computing briefing today at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C.

Like open-source software, cloud computing will grow whether people want it to or not, said Bob Gourley founder of CTO Vision and former chief technology officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

March 29, 2011 Off

Amazon leads the way on multi-media storage in the cloud

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Warwick Ashford.

Amazon has stolen a march on Apple and Google with two services that enable users to store multi-media files in the cloud and stream them to computers and smartphones.

Google and Apple are working on similar services, according to AP reports.

Amazon Cloud Drive is for storing music, images, video and documents, while Amazon Cloud Player enables users to access stored media on any PC, Mac or Android smartphone.

The Cloud Drive service allows users to upload content from PC, Mac and iTunes, but not from mobile phones. Songs with Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions are also not allowed, and Cloud drive supports only MP3 or AAC file formats.

March 29, 2011 Off

Maintaining App Performance in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

To read the headlines of late, it would seem that virtualization and cloud alone are the keys to IT nirvana.

But now that the enterprise industry is gaining some practical experience with these new technologies, it’s obvious that things aren’t quite so simple.

For one thing, things like application performance and general data flexibility are still subject to the same old traffic jams that plague traditional infrastructure. The most scalable set of resources in the world won’t be of much use if data can’t get from one place to another.

March 29, 2011 Off

Cloud Cost Analyses and ‘Inherent Conflict of Interest’

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Ann All.

IT Business Edge blogger Art Cole recently wrote that "the simple economics behind cloud computing is enough to foretell its imminent rise to data center dominance," citing data from Quest Software’s Dmitry Sotnikov that shows many popular cloud services are bargains based solely on the energy needed to run a typical in-house server — never mind cooling, maintenance, security and backup costs.

 

March 29, 2011 Off

Security zone: Extending compliance to the cloud

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: James Hanlon.

Most security and compliance mandates were simply not designed with cloud environments in mind – an unfortunate state of affairs as a huge amount of our data is about to go "cloudwards".

Even recent updates to common compliance mandates such as PCI DSS 2.0 do not adequately address compliance issues when using cloud services. The key benefits of cost saving, agility, collaboration and availability often overshadow the implications of expanding your audit scope to include your chosen cloud provider. How do you guarantee your compliance when moving to the different forms of cloud services?

March 28, 2011 Off

Data quality responsibilities ‘should be made clear’

By David
Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: James Glass.

Companies often struggle to determine what department is responsible when it comes to the issue of data quality.

This is according to Rob Karel, a Forrester analyst who has recently written a report on the topic of process data headaches for the organisation, reports Information Week.

In his study, it is pointed out that business departments often believe data quality to be the concern of IT teams.

March 28, 2011 Off

Why high-performance clouds are best kept in-house

By David
Grazed from Government Computer News.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Most commercial entities don’t have the infrastructure to handle the intensive workloads of high-performance computing, And, if they do, it will probably be more expensive – in one case, 10 times more expensive – for them to run dedicated services than for some agencies to run their own private clouds.

At least that’s the case for officials from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who spoke at a recent symposium on high-performance computing.