Grazed from IntelligentUtility. Author: Kathleen Wolf Davis.

The cloud—however you may define it—has morphed most of the modern world, but utilities are still a bit behind with this disruption. So, we sat down with Richelle Elberg, principal research analyst in energy with Navigant, to talk the how, whats and whys of this utility/cloud disconnect.

How are utilities utilizing cloud computing?

Elberg: For right now, minimally. Cloud computing can be done on a multitude of levels. With public cloud, there’s not a whole lot of that happening in the utility space. With managed services in a private cloud hosted by a vendor with limited access, there is more going on there. Some functions are being done in that way, especially back office items or areas related in some way to AMI…

"The market has started to realize that do-it-yourself approaches to deploying private clouds are too time consuming, too expensive and too prone to failure," said Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. "As the first to offer an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution, SUSE continues to focus on providing the OpenStack solution of choice for businesses. We combine rapid and simple deployment, configuration, management and maintenance with enhanced high availability features and the widest hypervisor support in the industry to give our customers access to the benefits of OpenStack without the complexities that hold some companies back."

ElasticBox, the hybrid cloud application manager, today announced updates to its enterprise SaaS and virtual appliance products. This release brings enhanced capabilities to enable IT organizations to drive value, productivity and confidence throughout the enterprise. ElasticBox enables enterprises to scale and update private and public cloud deployments, and to easily migrate workloads from one cloud to another. ElasticBox provides a highly adaptive model that helps customers standardize the process of deployments and provision environments to ensure the ongoing performance of production applications.

"Based upon customer feedback, we continue to enhance ElasticBox to help our customers maximize the efficiency of their cloud operations. We’re excited about these enhancements which help enterprises take advantage of the latest services from cloud providers and the promise of containers," shared Carol Carpenter, CEO of ElasticBox.

"We are honored to present the 2016 lineup of CRN Channel Chiefs, comprised of outstanding executives who move our entire industry forward by cultivating exemplary partner programs and executing cutting-edge business strategy," said Robert Faletra, CEO, The Channel Company. "They represent an extraordinary group of individuals who lead by example and serve as both invaluable advocates and innovators of the IT channel. We applaud their incredible strides and look forward to following their accomplishments in the coming year."

The panel, chaired by Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, will be held from 1:30 pm – 2:15 pm EST on March 8 in the Sun D Room of the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Fla.

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and eBiztech today announced the availability of Zadara’s award-winning Virtual Private Storage Array(VPSA) at Kinx data center, supporting the newly launched AWS Seoul, South Korea, region. The Zadara expansion follows the recent AWS announcement of their Seoul region. Zadara has previously announced regional support following AWS expansion into Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo and Frankfurt.

The South Korean market continues to show signs of rapid growth, driving the need for increasing amounts of high-performance, enterprise-class storage. IT professionals are leveraging the flexibility and economic benefits of public and private cloud architectures as they grow their infrastructures. However, they are quickly realizing that traditional Capital Expense-based (CapEx) storage does not meet their scalability and cost targets. Zadara Storage, with its Operating Expense-based (OpEx) offering provides a cost-effective, infinitely scalable, block (SAN) and file (NAS) Storage-as-a-Service solution.

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has agreed to waive some charges the academic and research community must pay to transfer data out of its cloud. As such, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company is offering to wipe up to 15% off users’ monthly bill on AWS services, and dropping the upload charges when researchers and scientists choose to shift data between its storage, compute and database services.

In a blog post outlining the move, AWS said it wanted to lower the cost barrier to making scientific discoveries. “The pace of research is no longer limited by the availability of computing resources. Researchers are beginning to rely on cloud computing to drive breakthrough science at breakneck speeds, and AWS wants to fuel the pace of new discoveries by making it possible for all scientists to have their own supercomputers in the cloud,” the company said in the blog post…

Read more from the source @ http://www.computerweekly.com/news/4500277797/AWS-cuts-cloud-data-transfer-fees-for-academic-and-research-user-groups

Grazed from SCMagazine. Author: Karen Epper Hoffman.

There used to be a time when large enterprises, in particular, took pride in the idea of managing all their various and sundry IT functions, every backend process, in-house. The idea was that these organizations fielded such depth and breadth of talent and infrastructure that they could manage all their IT tasks, store all their data and manage their security quite well.

But, arguably, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, directed by the prevailing winds of reducing capital investments and ongoing maintenance costs, improving technology assets more rapidly, and a growing appreciation for outsourcing opportunities. With that in mind, more and more organizations are utilizing cloud computing, software-as-a service (SaaS) and managed security services providers (MSSPs) to gain greater efficiencies and better scalability and taking advantage of newer technologies and more specialized expertise…

Carl Eschenbach, VMware’s president and chief operating officer, has announced that he is leaving the company after 14 years of service.  In an official company statement made today, VMware confirmed that Eschenbach has resigned from his operational role to "pursue a new career opportunity."  VMware also stated that he would continue to strategically advise VMware chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger, the VMware Board of Directors and the executive team.

Although the official announcement did not specify where Eschenbach was headed, Fortune reported that he will land at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital as a partner.

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Cisco is bulking up its hybrid cloud technology portfolio. The networking giant kicked off the month today by announcing that it is acquiring CliQr Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of application-centric hybrid cloud management software in a deal worth $260 million. "Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds.

With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment," said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development in a March 1 announcement. CliQr co-founders Gaurav Manglik and Tenry Fu, both formerly of VMware, founded the company "to provide a uniquely easy and powerful way to make cloud computing simple and application-centric – a platform to model, deploy and manage the entire lifecycle of applications onto any data center or private or public cloud environment," wrote Manglik in a blog post today…