CloudConnect, a leader in Cloud Infrastructure technology and application delivery, announced today that it has released version 3.6 of CloudConnect’s DesktopConfig.

CloudConnect announced release of the latest version of its Cloud deployment tool. DesktopConfig manages lifecycle management and provides tight integration with Microsoft Windows, augmenting Citrix to include items such as common bug fixes, workarounds, and reliability of the Current Release XenApp track. With DesktopConfig, CloudConnect enables customers of Citrix technologies to realize the full benefits of Citrix and the XenApp Long Term Service Release.  

Virtualization

New to IDrive BMR, virtualization allows users and IT administrators to easily backup images of their entire system locally to the appliance for recovery to a new machine in case the original machine is compromised or destroyed.

Specific to IDrive, the virtualization feature enables users to create up to four virtual instances of their clients and store them locally on the BMR server. Users can access these instances and resume working without losing any data in case of any disaster. IDrive BMR uses top of the line hardware, with server grade Xeon E5 processor with 16GB RAM for ultimate performance.

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Jonathan Vanian.

GoDaddy is giving up on a business that it debuted just a little over a year ago. The website hosting company is ending its cloud computing business, which it unveiled in March, 2016 as an alternative to Amazon Web Services (AMZN, -0.43%) and other cloud companies. GoDaddy confirmed to Fortune that it is shutting down the business unit, but did not say why. Tech news site TechCrunch first reported the planned closure.

“After serious consideration, we have decided to end-of-life our cloud servers’ product,” GoDaddy senior vice president of hosting Raghu Murthi said in a statement. “GoDaddy Cloud Servers provided numerous learnings for us that we’ve already been applying to other products and services.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Editorial Staff.

As enterprises continue to adopt cloud technology, the looming IT skills gap, particularly around public cloud, poses an ongoing challenge. "Many firms are having trouble finding qualified individuals for their cloud projects," said James Stanger, senior director, product development, for CompTIA. While demand for IT pros with generic cloud computing skills continues to be high, those with specific experience in public cloud and open source platforms, such as Cloud Foundry, are especially coveted.

Cloud continues to drive IT hiring

At 24%, cloud is the second biggest driver of demand for technology skills — right behind digital marketing skills at 25% — according to a survey by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm. "Cloud projects are near the top of CIOs’ priority lists," said John Reed, senior executive director at the company…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/tip/Demand-for-cloud-computing-skills-continues-to-outpace-supply

Grazed from NewYorkTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

A few years ago, Microsoft appeared to be another tech has-been, having whiffed on its efforts to compete in mobile phones and internet search. Although it is too soon to say whether Microsoft can pull off a full-blown renaissance the way Apple has, the company is firmly back in favor.

Not long after its shares reached another all-time high at the close of regular trading, Microsoft reported on Thursday that its profit in the most recent quarter more than doubled from a year ago. One reason for that jump was the failure of its mobile phone business, which produced big losses for the company in past years, yielding a $1.8 billion tax benefit that Microsoft was able to recognize last quarter…

Businesses today must quickly adapt to the demands of a global economy and workforce. Success is increasingly defined by the ability to optimize and protect the information surrounding people, organizations and devices. To help businesses tackle these challenges and fully embrace the benefits of flexibility and scale that cloud delivers, Citrix today announced extensions to its long-term strategic relationship with Google. Customers will be able to use Citrix Cloud to provision and manage secure digital workspaces, including Citrix Workspace Service, on Google Cloud Platform. Citrix and Google are working together to bring cloud delivery of applications and desktops, and secure cloud-optimized endpoints to their enterprise customers who are increasingly looking to both public and hybrid clouds to solve their business requirements for secure digital workspaces.

Grazed from Government Cloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft and Baidu have signed a deal under which Microsoft’s cloud-computing network will power the Chinese search giant’s autonomous driving project outside of that country’s borders. Baidu earlier this month said Microsoft was among the more than 50 companies pitching in on its open-source Apollo driverless-car program, a bid to jump-start its autonomous-driving program.

Microsoft has taken a back seat in the highly competitive race to develop self-driving cars. Instead of building its own platform to wire the brains of cars or help them see the world around them, the Redmond company has offered its Azure network of on-demand data storage and computing power for other companies to use…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Software giant SAP SE raised its annual revenue outlook and said it would buy back up to a half billion dollars in stock after reporting a better-than-expected jump in sales, lifted by a revamped version of its flagship software. The German maker of applications that run businesses’ finances, manufacturing and personnel is projecting sales of 23.3 billion euros ($26.8 billion) to 23.7 billion euros this year, based on constant currencies.

That’s up about a 100 million euros on both ends of its prior forecast. SAP is about to start a share buyback of up to 500 million euros this year, and it raising its outlook for cloud and software revenue. Shares of SAP fell 0.4 percent to 90.94 euros at 9:26 a.m. in Frankfurt. SAP had lost 2 percent since its first-quarter report April 25, while Germany’s 30-stock Dax Index was largely unchanged as of Wednesday’s close…

Article Written by David Marshall

Interesting news out of Redmond — Microsoft users will now be able to enable nested virtualization (or the ability to run a virtual machine within another virtual machine) in Azure, as this is now a valid deployment option under Microsoft’s new Dv3 and Ev3 series Azure virtual machines (VMs).

The Dv3 and Ev3 series VMs use Hyper-Threading technology found in Intel’s Haswell and Broadwell chip architectures, packing more of a punch in the underlying hardware and allowing it to support larger VM sizes.  The new Dv3 VM sizes are a good balance of memory to vCPU performance, with up to 64 vCPU’s and 256GiB of RAM.  And the newly named Ev3 sizes provide users with more memory to vCPU than the Dv3, so that larger workloads can be run on sizes up to the largest E64 size, with 64 vCPUs and 432GiB of RAM.  And it is that extra power that helps provide for nested virtualization.

By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, Microsoft has been able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings.  These new Hyper-Threaded sizes are said to be priced up to 28% lower than the previous Dv2 sizes.

What’s the reason for running nested virtualization?