Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brian Butte.

Every once in a while I get asked what my background is, and my answer is always that I’m a generalist: a jack of all trades and master of some. Being a generalist is not easy in a world where IT professionals have been told since the beginning to specialize. However, it requires a generalist to see the forest for the trees, an analogy well-suited to the continually emerging world of cloud computing.

In 2001, I started my journey into the world of cloud computing. With a background in plant-floor automation and embedded systems, my point of view was admittedly skewed with a natural affinity for distributed computing. The hot topic at the time was grid computing, and as I was learning about it, I recognized a model that made sense: CPU scavenging. CPU scavenging virtualizes all the spare CPU cycles wasted on desktops and servers as they wait for something to do (when operating on a scale measured in billionths of a second, it turns out a lot of time is wasted waiting for something to do)…

Grazed from StorageReview. Author: Adam Armstrong.

Today IBM and Catalogic announced that a new set of solutions that combines Catalogic’s flagship product, ECX, with several of IBM’s products. The new joint solutions are aimed at modernizing IT infrastructure including automation of storage and data management, self-service capabilities, and complete RESTful API management. This modernization should deliver superior results while lowering OPEX. The joint solutions will enable companies to accelerate implementation of new use cases and workloads.

As we stated previously: ECX manages the full lifecycle of Copy Data. The software is deployed as a virtual appliance allowing IT to leverage the existing storage investment without going to the "rip and replace" method of expanding storage. And ECX has several use cases including: leverage copy data by orchestrating and automating consistent SnapMirrors to automated disaster recovery, Test Dev, and analytics; next generation data protection through instant recovery and disaster recovery by leveraging snapshot data; hybrid cloud “killer app” that uses orchestration to leverage liquid compute resources in the cloud, and copy data analytics with advanced search, report and analyze…

Grazed from TheEdgeMarkets. Author: Jeffrey Tan.

Oracle Corp, the IT giant best known for its enterprise database solutions, this year concluded a special recruitment drive in Asia-Pacific (APAC). But unlike what one might expect, the new recruits were not engaged to fill the technical positions in the company. Instead, the Fortune 500 company had gone on a hiring spree to bolster its sales team.

Last March, the company embarked on an ambitious goal to hire 1,000 sales personnel within a three-month period. It managed to recruit talents from a “fairly even distribution” across countries in APAC during that time frame. Oracle declines to provide a breakdown of the numbers, but declares the recruitment drive was a success. Today, the recruits have fully integrated into their roles after completing several training initiatives by the company…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Jonathon Vanian.

Grazed from ITBusinessNet.  Author: Editorial Staff.

 EcomNets today announced the industry’s first Smart Hybrid Cloud Computing platform, designed specifically for Combining Private & Public Environments. Even though cloud computing has been around for quite some time, it is still considered a new frontier for some organizations.

Many companies are dabbling in private clouds or have some non-essential data stored in public clouds, but others are still waiting for the right combination to meet their needs. For that reason, interest is growing in hybrid cloud approaches that are designed to combine the best of both worlds for organizations that cant rely primarily on only a private or public cloud environment…

 Grazed from FarmWeekly.  Author: Tom McKenny.

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Gavin Clark.

 Microsoft’s second fiscal quarter showed a company at dangerous stage in its transition. It also revealed a firm that is clearly unable to rely on the certainties of old.  Not so long ago, Microsoft relied on three engines of growth to drive its business – Office/personal productivity, server and tools, and Windows client machines.

Grazed from Business-Standard.  Author: Editorial Staff.

 Satya Nadella has put cloud computing at the centre of Microsoft’s strategy. It is a move that looks to be paying off, at least in the eyes of investors.  On Thursday the company said its revenue and profit fell in the last quarter. But it mattered little, as Microsoft made more from cloud computing, and its stock jumped more than five per cent immediately after the numbers were released.

Article written by David Marshall

In an earnings call made earlier this week, VMware reported some bad news, even as the company released some pretty solid financial earnings numbers.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger admitted that last year was, as he called it, a "challenging time" for VMware investors.  And the company’s core compute virtualization products were reaching maturity and would play a decreasing role in the company’s future business.

VMware announced total revenues for the fourth quarter reached $1.87 billion, that’s an increase of 10% from the fourth quarter of 2014, or up 12% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.  And license revenues for the fourth quarter were $825 million, an increase of 6% from the fourth quarter of 2014, or up 11% year-over-year on a constant currency basis.  With the coming Dell acquisition of EMC, Gelsinger said the company would see, over time, a significant revenue upside from up selling VMware’s full portfolio of products and services to Dell’s new equipment sales and from accessing their incredibly strong SMB go-to market engine.

Asigra Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986, today announced that it is delivering Asigra Cloud Backup, an agentless, multi-tenant NIST FIPS 140-2 certified data-protection software solution, with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance. For managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises seeking a higher financial return on their backup infrastructure investments, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance provides a cost effective solution that delivers exceptional features and performance.

“As the storage world moves from its hardware-focused roots to the current semantic love affair with all things software-defined, Oracle is one of a small group of vendors placing the emphasis for storage on applications, database, and data,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “It’s called Oracle ZFS Engineered Storage. The Oracle ZFS product line offers exceptionally high performance, and is well tuned to today’s market needs in terms of providing a very attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). This storage option for data protection offers service providers a competitive advantage when deployed as the core of their backup infrastructure.”