When it comes to the future of enterprise IT, there’s a lot of talk about how IT needs to evolve into a set of on-demand services. No trend better illustrates that issue than the move to cloud computing.

Dell (NSDQ:Dell) has agreed to acquire cloud-based medical archiving company InSite One to help healthcare organizations simplify the keeping of their data, according to Dell.

InSite One, based in Wallingford, Conn., manages nearly 55 million clinical studies and 3.6 billion medical images and supports almost 800 clinical sites using a secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, according to Dell.

Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/att/vol12/article1/article1.html

Cloud infrastructure as a service has evolved primarily from the Web hosting market, but the cloud has created new opportunities for cost savings and business agility. The market is immature, the services are all unique and evolving rapidly, and vendors must be chosen with care.

Cisco’s CTO for the Cloud, Lew Tucker, is no stranger to large-scale computing efforts. Tucker joined Cisco in late June and had previously worked for Sun Microsystems working on Sun’s cloud and large scale web property efforts.

At Cisco, Tucker’s responsibilities span multiple business units as the cloud includes enterprise, service provider and partner efforts. For Tucker, the cloud isn’t just a new name for grid computing or other previous efforts at large scale distributed computing, though there is a connection.

A few weeks ago, we looked at using Corntab to make it easier to create entries for cron. What if you want to avoid cron altogether? You can, thanks to several cron alternatives.

One alternative is hcron, a GPLv2 alternative to cron. Written by John Marshall, hcron has several advantages over cron. First, hcron’s event definitions are much easier to read and are more expressive.