Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Managed hosting and colocation business, Pulsant, has launched a customised decision engine, created to help C-level executives and management to evaluate the cloud buying process and make more informed choices. The new interactive tool has been developed to assist buyers in wading through the myriad options of cloud services that are available.

The decision engine — ‘Cloud Intelligence’ — caters for technical and non-technical visitors, ensuring visitors are able to find the information that meets their needs. The configuration tools separates technical users familiar with the technology landscape from those less knowledgeable, like procurement personnel tasked with researching technical solutions…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Advanced Micro Devices is continuing a steady drumbeat of product releases as officials look to make the chip maker a larger player in everything from high-end gaming PCs and virtual desktops to cloud computing. The company on Feb. 1 unveiled virtualized graphics cards that can be housed in data center servers and delivered as needed to a range of devices, including remote workstations and other client systems. A day later, officials introduced two new desktop processors—the A10-7860K and Athlon X4 845—featuring AMD’s new Wraith Cooler thermal system that they said generate less than a 10th of the noise of previous chips.

"Customers can build a capable, near-silent online gaming PC in a surprisingly small form factor for an unexpectedly low price," Kevin Lensing, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s Client Business Unit, said in a statement. "The low-power requirements mean you can build a tiny system perfect for a small dorm room, for use in the living room as a home theatre PC … and portable enough to take to a LAN party."…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: David Needle.

Microsoft may have been late to the cloud party, but steady investment and improvements to its Azure cloud have made it a worthy competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yet like most cloud platforms, Azure pricing is filled with potential complexity. Among the many advantages of moving to the cloud for cash-strapped IT departments is saving on continued investment in on-premises infrastructure by off-loading to an off-premise cloud platform. In addition to savings in hardware costs and the real estate required to maintain a datacenter, management and security is handled to a great extent (though not completely) by the cloud provider.

Cloud systems let you pay for what you need and scale up, which is far better than guessing at, for example, how many servers you need to buy and maintain in-house and risk getting more than you need or scrambling to add as demand increases. One reason some industries – like retail – overbuy is to handle demand spikes around the holidays even though that means a fair bit of capacity will go underutilized during other parts of the year…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Last month LinkedIn published an analysis of the 25 Skills That Could Get You Hired in 2016. There’s a 19 page report available on Slideshare that provides a breakout of the hottest skills of 2015 on LinkedIn by country. Countries included in the analysis include Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Netherlands, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States. Key takeaways from the study include the following:

1) Cloud computing was the hottest skill in demand in France, India, and the United States in 2015 and will continue in 2016. LinkedIn found that cloud computing skills have progressed from being niche to mainstream as the world’s most in-demand skill set.

2) Statistical Analysis and Data Mining is the only skill set that ranks in the top 4 across all countries analyzed. LinkedIn found that businesses are hiring expertise in data storage, retrieval and analysis as fast as they can be on-boarded. LinkedIn also found that there weren’t enough members with big data skills including Hadoop, HBase, and Hive listed on their profiles to rank the category on the global list in 2014. In 2015, LinkedIn saw a rapid increase in members worldwide listing these types of skills on their profiles…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/02/01/cloud-computing-leads-linkedins-25-skills-that-can-get-you-hired-in-2016/#16d769fc4e90

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…