Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Customers that view cloud computing as a way of cutting costs by reducing IT provisioning to commodity services may be getting the wrong end of the stick, as the market is increasingly turning to value-added services that are a better fit for customer requirements. The latest Cloud Price Index report from analyst 451 Research claims to show that, rather than being dominated by cut-throat commodity pricing, the cloud market sees customers increasingly looking for value-added services, and providers are moving up the stack to meet this demand and maintain profits.

"Despite all the noise about cloud becoming a commodity, our research demonstrates a very limited relationship between price and market share. Certainly, being cheap doesn’t guarantee more revenue, and being expensive doesn’t guarantee less," said Dr Owen Rogers, research director of 451 Research’s Digital Economics Unit…

Grazed from CryptoCoinsNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

The grid refers to a group of heterogeneous machines in offices and homes that different economic actors manage. The cloud refers to the homogenous servers in data centers that single entities like Google or Amazon manage. Since the launch of Amazon Web Services, the cloud has been the better-known of the two paradigms (cloud and grid) and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

What Hinders The Grid?

The grid concept has existed for decades, but it has not been adopted widely. The two best large-scale grid computing applications are SETI@Home and Folding@Home. These are academic projects that essentially “pay” status to a distributed network of volunteer computers by displaying a leaderboard of the top compute time contributors…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Servers have been a key part of the data centre for so long that it is easy to see them as an immutable part of the IT landscape. They might get a faster processor, more memory or more storage with each hardware generation, but the underlying architecture has changed remarkably little since the days of the first PC servers in the 1980s.

That could soon change, as developments in the data centre related to cloud computing and software-defined infrastructure are driving a move towards more modular and less monolithic servers. Rather than being the ‘atomic’ building block of the data centre as they are today, tomorrow’s servers may be just a collection of hardware resources that form part of a larger system that could extend across the entire data centre…

Grazed from Yibada. Author: Editorial Staff.

Alibaba is reportedly trying to cement its cloud business with plans to open a data center in India this year. According to Indian newspaper Business Line, China’s e-commerce titan has plans to boost its cloud computing business in India likely through an acquisition. "When they start on-boarding millions of sellers and suppliers on the platform, it is clear they will need a means to support that kind of data," said Greyhound Research’s CEO Sanchit Vir Gogia in an interview with Business Line.

"It is less expensive compared to relying on a third-party data center and also there are no issues of data theft." The move is now seen as an attempt to shake the presence of Microsoft and Amazon, two of Alibaba’s biggest competitors in cloud computing, in the Indian market, added the newspaper…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Eugene Kim.

Salesforce and Amazon Web Services just announced a new deal that will take their renewed partnership efforts a step further. According to AWS, Salesforce has picked Amazon’s cloud computing service as its "preferred public cloud infrastructure provider" for its international expansion plans.

That means Salesforce will start using AWS across all of its core products, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and App Cloud, for parts of its international services. Until now, Salesforce has run the majority of its workload in its own data centers, except for its app development platform Heroku and parts of its new Internet of Things Cloud service…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Stephanie Condon.

EMC on Tuesday officially announced the launch of Unik, an open source tool that allows developers to build and manage unikernels — specialized, lightweight kernels that could open up possibilities in the cloud computing ecosystem and Internet of Things (IoT) market. Unikernels are specialized operating system kernels written to act like individual software components.

Because unikernels represent the smallest subset of code needed to run an application, they inherently offer more security and faster boot times than traditional operating systems, which is particularly useful in the cloud and IoT maret. Unikernels have picked up steam thanks to attention from the likes of Docker, which acquired Unikernel Systems in January of this year…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Nicole Henderson.

Citrix has selected Microsoft Azure as its preferred and strategic cloud partner, according to an announcement Tuesday at Citrix Synergy. The extended partnership will help customers move to the cloud, and more specifically, migrate to Windows 10 and Office 365. Citrix Synergy is taking place this week in Las Vegas where Citrix is making a number of announcements, including an expanded Citrix Cloud, which brings together every major Citrix product and can be accessed individually or together as a unified Workspace as a Service solution.

Citrix and Microsoft will work together on new integrations between Citrix XenMobile, NetScaler and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) as well. “Companies of all sizes across all industries around the world have an amazing opportunity to embrace digital transformation and empower their people to work productively from anywhere at any time,” Kirill Tatarinov, president and CEO of Citrix said in a statement…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Don Clark.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. plans to spin off most of its technology services operations and merge them with those of Computer Sciences Corp., in an $8.5 billion transaction that marks HP Enterprise’s latest adjustment to a shifting landscape that is roiling the market for corporate technology.

HP Enterprise will shed a business that accounts for roughly 100,000 employees, or two-thirds of the Silicon Valley giant’s workforce. The deal, a blockbuster follow-up to the breakup of Hewlett-Packard Co. last fall, will create a corporate technology services specialist that will be led by Computer Sciences executives and have roughly $26 billion in annual revenue, the companies said…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brian Butte.

In the early 2000’s when the IT world was in the throes of ERP, CRM, SFA and ecommerce, IT infrastructure was invariably designed to support the absolute worst-case scenario. I quickly learned there were two options when launching any self-serve solution: it either flat-lines or takes off like a rocket—there is no in-between.

The capacity planning challenge drove the development of grid computing, then virtualization, and finally cloud computing. Although with cloud we now have a way to rapidly scale up to meet increasing demand, it seems we have forgotten scaling down to conserve resources is equally important. Instead of provisioning “just in case” our worst fears came true, I find repeated examples where cloud is provisioned “just because.”…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: David Auslander.

Even in mid-2016, very few who are serious about cloud computing will tell customers that out of the box public cloud services are as secure as their corporate data centres. At the same time no-one would suggest introducing mission critical applications and data into a brand new data centre environment without first planning and implementing proper physical, network, server, and application security controls.

Many organisations distrust moving corporate data and application assets into the public cloud. Loss of control of these assets is the most common reason stated; this is code for loss of control over the security aspects of the environment. To answer this, public cloud providers have developed some form of Shared Security Responsibility model…