Grazed from The Register.  Author:  Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Cisco Systems didn’t necessarily want to be in the server racket. But a few years back, when the networking giant realized that converging server and storage networks would cut into its revenue streams. Therefore, to remain relevant – by which I mean to make money – Cisco could create converged infrastructure, including servers and networking together and partner for storage and hypervisors.

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Tim Anderson.

Analysis “We’re rebooting, re-pivoting, re-transitioning the whole company around betting big on cloud services,” said Microsoft CFO Kevin Turner at the company’s 2010 Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this year.

Turner was talking about hosted services – based mainly on Exchange and SharePoint – along with the Azure application and storage platform. Customers for Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) include Royal Mail, American Express, and the State of California.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: George Crump.

As vendors continue to mature the cloud storage on-ramps we discussed previously, the use case for cloud storage is becoming more wide spread. What was once primarily backup and archive storage destination is now quickly becoming an option for primary data storage. As a result the data that you are going to involve in a cloud storage solution may be different than it was only a year ago.As we discussed in our recent webinar "What’s Your Cloud Strategy, Answering The Top Ten Questions", cloud storage, at least in the public sense, still has a bottleneck in the connection from your data center to the WAN. When using cloud for primary storage, we are looking for use cases where only a small percentage of the data set is active at any point in time. That active data set would be cached in some manor locally…

Grazed from MIT Technology Review.  Author: Tom Simonite.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Juan Carlos Perez.

Things will get rowdier for vendors of cloud collaboration, communication and office productivity applications now that Microsoft plans to unleash a take-no-prisoners assault on the market with Office 365.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Jeff Jedras.

SAP has claimed that the cloud will render Oracle‘s stratgey of owning the entire hardware and software stack irrelevant.

Speaking to press and analysts gathered for SAP’s Influencer Summit via satellite from Dresden, German, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagermann-Snabe said cloud computing isn’t good news for Oracle, or for its own the stack mantra.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: James Niccolai.

Oracle has stepped up its efforts to rebuild Sun‘s hardware business, announcing a high performance clustered database system that could turn up the competitive pressure on rivals IBM and HP.

Called the Sparc Supercluster, the system can include dozens of rack mount servers based on Oracle’s recently released 16-core Sparc T3 processor, linked in a cluster with high-performance InfiniBand connections, Oracle’s Real Application Clusters software and Sun’s FlashFire solid state storage acceleration technology.

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author: Stephen Withers.

Izzy Azeri, vice president of business and corporate development at Acronis, reckons SMEs need backup software that can cope with physical and virtual systems, and that can store backups locally or in the cloud.

Doing all this from a single console and one set of policies keeps things simple to administer, while cloud storage means the images can be restored anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Grazed from Server Watch.  Author: Kenneth Hess.

If your data center costs are out of control, it’s time to consider moving to an agile data center. Agile is a buzzword that’s tossed around a bit too much these days, but learning what it really means will translate into significantly higher profits for your data center’s shareholders. An agile data center uses efficient hardware, better design, fewer employees and better tools. It also has less wasted space. You might think that the only driving force behind moving to an agile data center is the need to save money. It’s a good reason, but it isn’t the only one. There are 10 driving forces behind the move to agility in the data center. Are you there yet?

Grazed from Internet Evolution.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

There’s a great deal of debate over both the WikiLeaks disclosure of classified Defense Department and State Department documents, and over the response of the US government and other governments to those leaks. I’m not going to add to it here. Instead, I want to focus on what the WikiLeaks case — and the state of social media in general — can teach us about the future of such information leaks, and (for a lack of a better term) "information warfare."