Grazed from SeattleTimes. Author: Angel Gonzalez.

Amazon.com said Monday that it’s commissioning a new wind farm in Ohio to help offset the power needs of its cloud computing business. Amazon Web Services, as the tech giant’s cloud computing division is known, has vowed to fulfill at least half of the energy needs of its big data centers with renewable energy by 2017.

That’s up from 40 percent in 2016, a goal that Amazon says it is on track to meet or exceed. The data centers that house the computing power and storage that Amazon and other cloud giants rent out have been called out by environmentalists as a growing source of emissions. Amazon’s new wind farm will be in Hardin County, Ohio, 70 miles northwest of Columbus, and when it opens in December 2017 it will be its second such facility in the state…

Read more from the source @ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-orders-new-wind-farm-in-ohio-to-help-power-cloud-business/

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

The third-quarter results are in and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a commanding lead in the worldwide public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. "In many ways, public IaaS is the poster child of cloud computing and in that segment Amazon/AWS absolutely dominates the market, with a worldwide market share of 45 percent in Q3," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a research note sent to Datamation. It’s an impressive feat, given how quickly rival cloud platforms are growing.

"That market share has been achieved despite Microsoft and Google both continuing to grow their cloud service revenues at well over 100 percent per year," continued Dinsdale. Nonetheless, Amazon is still more than twice as big as Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM combined…

Read more from the source @ http://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/amazon-leads-in-public-iaas-ibm-has-the-private-cloud-edge.html

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

Cloud backup and recovery have long been a priority for enterprises running production workloads in the cloud. But, today, as trends like the internet of things spur massive amounts of data for organizations to store and protect, IT teams must evolve their cloud backup and recovery strategy — and make recovery a prime concern.

"Data protection is changing in the world of cloud computing, as IoT comes into play [and] big data systems come into play," says David Linthicum, SVP of Cloud Technology Partners, a cloud consulting firm based in Boston. "We have a lot more data to protect these days."…

Amazon Web Services is vastly overpowering its competition in the cloud computing market, says Synergy Research Group.

In its latest quarterly analysis, the market research firm says that AWS accounted for 45% of the revenue generated by public "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) providers.

IaaS is the cloud market that Amazon helped to pioneer. It’s where companies rent computers and storage over the internet, only paying for what they use.

Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins is set to rally solution provider partners at the networking leader’s Cisco Partner Summit this week to take the cloud high road by focusing on multicloud and hybrid cloud rather than competing in head-to-head Infrastructure-as-a-Service warfare with Amazon Web Services, sources told CRN.

Cisco insiders say the new strategy represents a broad, far-reaching bid to be what the company is calling solution providers’ "No. 1 preferred cloud vendor" by looking beyond just the IaaS opportunity and focusing on monetizing cloud across the entire spectrum of cloud — public, private, hybrid or Software-as-a-Service.

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

As many of you in the technology industry are aware, in 1965, Dr. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors producible within a silicon wafer could economically double every year. Although the doubling rate has been revised several times since then, the prediction has served as a target and benchmark for semiconductor technology growth.

Moore’s law has fueled exponential computing advancements over the last several decades. For example, we have seen microprocessors with a few thousand transistors and kilobytes of memory transform into multi-core server chips with billions of transistors, gigahertz clock rates, and equally impressive storage and networking capabilities…

Grazed from Arnnet. Author: Editorial Staff.

The evolution of cloud computing, IoT, AI, and augmented reality are some of the technologies that will pave the way and shape 2017. In its 2017 Predictions: Dynamics That Will Shape The Future In The Age Of The Customer report, Forrester identified the top 15 trends that will shape 2017. It indicated that the next wave of technologies is poised to remake industries and customer experiences, and that these technologies will come in three forms:

• Engagement technologies that will create different virtual, physical, and digital experiences.
• Insights technologies that aim to convert personalisation and predictive analytics into reality.
• Supporting technologies that will drive new levels of speed and efficiency in the next technology revolution.

Read more from the source @ http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/609376/what-technologies-will-shape-2017/?fp=2&fpid=1

Grazed from Forbed. Author: Greg Stall.

Apple is no longer the darling of the tech world it once was. It used to be that if you wrote something that even mildly suggested problems at the company, you were subjected to howls of execration by a seemingly endless legion of Apple fan boys. Yet clearly, those days are now over.

Consider this. In just the last few weeks, veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg called Siri stupid, Silicon Valley guru Steve Blank questioned the company’s vision in Harvard Business Review and Business Insider reported that people are now saying that Microsoft is more innovative than Apple. Ouch!…

According to Gartner, “In 2017, forward-thinking IT organizations will realize that rigid data architectures will not scale to meet the needs of a competitive, growing digital business. Technical professionals must utilize the lower-cost, flexible, componentized data management and analytics platforms that are emerging to enable their enterprises to be successful into the digital business era.”