The new offering will dramatically lower the barrier to leveraging the high performance, energy efficient power of FPGAs to accelerate high end computational workflows across all industries.  Developers can now run these tools in the cloud and then test and deploy on the latest Xilinx-accelerated hardware with no upfront investment or equipment purchases.

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

You don’t need Sherlock Holmes to tell you that cloud computing is on the rise, and that cloud traffic keeps going up. However, it is enlightening to see the degree by which it is increasing, which is, in essence, about to quadruple in the next few years. By that time, 92% percent of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; versus only eight percent being processed by traditional data centers.

Cisco, which does a decent job of measuring such things, just released estimates that shows cloud traffic likely to rise 3.7-fold by 2020, increasing 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 (the latest full year data for which data is available) to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. The big data and associated Internet of Things are a big part of this growth, the study’s authors state…

Grazed from TheTennessean. Author: JJ Rosen.

The shortage of tech professionals has been a hot issue in the Nashville business community for years now. Running a technology consulting firm myself, I can attest that the challenge to find, hire and retain top tech talent is the No. 1 barrier to growth. The problem is pretty simple: a matter of supply and demand.

Since most every organization is dependent on technology in some respect, the demand curve for tech know-how is on a steep, never-ending climb. So far, the supply side has simply been unable to keep up. Despite increased training opportunities for anyone seeking a career as network engineer or software developer, nationally we are still coming up short of candidates to fill the thousands of job openings…

CloudJumper, a Workspace as a Service (WaaS) platform innovator for agile business IT, today announced coverage in a new Workspace as a Service vendor landscape report by MarketsandMarkets Research. The 2016 Vendor Comparison on Workspace as a Service providers offers an analysis of the top vendors in the category, including CloudJumper, Amazon Web Services, Citrix Systems, IndependenceIT, Microsoft Corporation (Azure), and VMware.

The MarketsandMarkets report is based on the research firm’s DIVE methodology based on a comprehensive study of the major players offering workspace software and/or services to channel partners and/or independent software vendors. MSPs, ISVs, agents, and other IT service providers are increasingly turning to WaaS to facilitate the easy deployment of digital workplaces at client locations. WaaS is a combined set of pre-integrated services to enable smooth deployment of digital workspaces at client locations. The key vendors in this WaaS market report were shortlisted based on their service capabilities, technology innovations, industry coverage, viability, and breadth of services offered.

In today’s unveiling of the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index (2015-2020), cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020. This rapid growth of cloud traffic is attributed to increased migration to cloud architectures due to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centers.

With greater data center virtualization, cloud operators are also able to achieve greater operational efficiencies while flexibly delivering a growing variety of services to businesses and consumers with optimal performance. To better understand data center growth, new analysis on application workloads was developed for this year’s report. The following business and consumer projections were revealed:

In addition to its existing automated processes for SAM, the updated Snow Automation Platform introduces new off-the-shelf automation workbooks to manage mobile and cloud investments.

Grazed from OpenMinds. Author: Monica E. Oss.

Greetings from Washington, D.C.! As I prepared for tomorrow’s 2016 OPEN MINDS Technology & Informatics Institute, I came across some stats in a technology survey OPEN MINDS conducted in 2001. It was a trip down memory lane. Wikipedia launched online. Microsoft released the Xbox. The use of wireless local area networking (LANs) exploded. Apple released the iPod. AOL topped 35 million members. Those were the tech developments everyone was talking about. Where were health and human service provider organizations in 2001?

• 32% of organizations reported that all of their employees had access to the internet
• 22% of organizations communicated with consumers via email
• 78% of organizations had a public website
• 44% of organizations had practice management software…

Grazed from BitCoinist. Author: Editorial Staff.

Golem wants to provide what it calls the “Airbnb for computers,” a first-of-its-kind decentralized market for shared computing power. The company hopes the public will find its goals appealing, as it will open a crowdsale for the Golem Network Token (GNT) on November 11, 2016.

This decentralized, Ethereum-based service, once up and running, will reportedly allow people to rent out unused computing power in exchange for cryptocurrency. On the other end of the service, costs for resource-intensive processes will decline, according to Golem, making tasks such as CGI rendering, scientific calculation and machine learning more efficient and accessible…

This week Tintri announced that it has been named a Visionary in Gartner Inc.’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays. This is the third straight year that Tintri has received this distinction. Gartner placed Tintri in the Visionaries Quadrant for completeness of vision and ability to execute. 

This year, it was Tintri’s VMstore T800 Hybrid-Flash series that was evaluated. In its final 2016 report, Gartner notes, "Tight budgets and skills shortages have caused vendors and users to focus on technologies and features that lower acquisition and ownership costs while improving performance and throughput. This has resulted in thin-provisioning, auto-tiering, hybrid configurations (Flash and HDDs) and near-autonomic operation becoming ubiquitous general-purpose disk arrays. It is also driving the deployment of SSAs into I/O-intensive environments and creating opportunities for emerging storage companies that can refactor infrastructure designs to obtain incremental improvements in performance, economics and staff productivity." 

Available now at no additional charge to itopia partners, the Cielo app simplifies and streamlines the support cycle for IT service providers and MSPs while dramatically improving the user and customer experiences. The new app is also proven to help technicians make better use of their time and manage support costs by reducing — and in many cases eliminating — the need for onsite trouble-shooting resources.