Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary Branscombe.

Given the strength of SQL Server in business, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft has spent the last five years building a distributed NoSQL database – until you remember that services like Power BI, Bing and the Office Web apps face the same challenges as services like Netflix. They’re problems more and more enterprises have to deal with too: the deluge of data, the demands of mobility and the need for low latency even though you’re relying on cloud services.

That’s why Microsoft’s Dharma Shukla, who previously built key technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation (and worked on both Live Mesh and the never-shipped Courier tablet), has been developing Microsoft’s global-scale distributed database since the end of 2010. DocumentDB, which launched in April 2015, emphasizes the fact that NoSQL really stands for “not only SQL,” because the aim is to give you the best of both worlds…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Clare Hopping.

Bright Computing and ProfitBricks have joined forces to offer an elastic high performance computing (EHPC) solution to speed up deployment of clusters and save costs with a pay-per-use model. The new offering combines ProftBricks’ IaaS with Bright Computing’s infrastructure management tech to offer a fully-scalable way of managing the infrastructure to power data-intensive workloads.

Supporting both traditional HPC and HPC-based Big Data analysis with Hadoop or Spark environments, ProfitBricks and Bright Computing’s solution allows enterprises, research institutes and universities to have a more flexible approach when running analysis. “Cloud-based solutions are increasingly appealing as they offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premise solutions," Petra-Maria Grohs, CSO EMEAA at ProfitBricks said. "Infrastructure is no exception and we are excited at the level of interest we are seeing in moving HPC and Big Data environments into the cloud, in order to unlock cost and time savings.”…

Grazed from OnWindows. Author: Lindsay James.

A new blog post by Elena Bonfiglioli, senior director of the EMEA health industry in Microsoft’s Public Sector division, has highlighted how cloud computing can help the European healthcare sector improve medical care in powerful ways. “It empowers 3,600 mobile caregivers working in the field of mental health in Arkin to be more productive and deliver better care,” she explains.

“It opens up new ways of engagement for mental health patients in Finland through the Health Village. It optimises care processes with remote support and post stroke management in the NHS. It provides a digital identity and a resilient future proof infrastructure for all care givers in the HSE ensuring doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers have access to the real-time information they need – when they need it…

Grazed from CXOToday. Author: Bino George.

The Indian manufacturing sector has clearly taken center stage post the announcement of the current government’s ‘Make-in-India’ initiative aimed at raising global competitiveness of the sector for the country’s long term-growth. The vision of this first-of-its-kind policy is to witness an increase in the share of manufacturing in the country’s Gross Domestic Product from 16% to 25% by 2022. The government has listed technology as of the key contributing factors in achieving this target.

A lot rests on the Indian manufacturing sector to up the ante in terms of growth performance to compliment efforts made to make India ‘the next manufacturing destination’. According to a research report on the technology adoption trends among manufacturing enterprises in India, ERP is the largest priority for spend in a CIO’s budget with significant growth expected over the next 5 years…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Naina Khedekar.

DigitalOcean, a cloud computing platform, brings its first data centre in Bangalore, India. Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean offers simple on demand cloud computing resources to more than 700,000 registered customers across the globe. Bangalore becomes DigitalOcean’s eighth region globally, following New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, and Toronto.

More than 700,000 developers around the world have launched over 14 million cloud servers on Digital Ocean’s platform in just four years. In a conversation with Tech2, Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean said that the Bangalore datacenter will feature DigitalOcean’s latest servers and network architecture aimed at offering a consistent and seamless experience for users everywhere regardless of which region they select…

Building on the existing API-first platform from Cloud CMS, the move to Docker itself was relatively straightforward.

While bundling various tiers into container images, Cloud CMS realized that it had already gone a long way toward defining a proper set of microservices. Docker formalized this reality by providing a way to package service code as well as automate the necessary testing and deployment.

This now makes it incredibly easy for Cloud CMS to manage and deliver the same Software as a Service offering on AWS while also saving in overall costs. Equally important, it opens up a world of possibilities for our customers.

The Xen Project, a project hosted at The Linux Foundation, today announced the program and speakers for the Xen Project Developer Summit that brings together developers, integrators and power users for in-person collaboration and educational presentations. The event will take place in Toronto, Canada from August 25-26, 2016 co-located with LinuxCon North America.

The Xen Project hypervisor was built to be forward-looking and nimble like the cloud itself. It powers the new needs of computing and virtualization through a rich ecosystem of community members that focus on everything from security, embedded, and web-scale environments. The Summit is an opportunity for developers and software engineers to collaborate and discuss the latest advancements of Xen Project software. It is a neutral event focused on education and collaboration amongst those interested in Xen Project technology, virtualization and cloud computing.

Altaro Software, developers of Altaro VM Backup and Brien M. Posey, a Microsoft MVP, have announced a new and free eBook titled, "A Hyper-V First Aid Kit: Troubleshooting 5 Common Issues."  

This eBook was written in an effort to help Hyper-V administrators diagnose various problems with the Hyper-V hypervisor and its virtual machines.  Rather than try to discuss every problem that could potentially occur, the book focuses on some of the more common issues that admins will likely encounter.  For each of those problems discussed, a short description of the problem and one or more step by step solutions to the problem will be provided.