Grzed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

In a new twist, Amazon has again repackaged and repriced its services, this time allowing Amazon EC2 instances to be treated as if they were scheduled jobs — at up to 10 percent off Amazon’s usual prices. SRI (Scheduled Reserved Instances) allows customers to "reserve capacity on a recurring basis with a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule over the course of a one-year term," according to the blog post announcing the new feature.

Purchasing an SRI is similar to setting up a conventional reserved instance. After the user selects a time frame for running instances, Amazon provides a list of instance types available for that segment. To that end, using SRIs slightly resembles using EC2 Spot instances. Instead of bidding for capacity, as one would with a Spot Instance, customer bids for one of a limited number of usage slots available in a given window…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3022758/cloud-computing/amazon-web-services-offers-part-time-computing-at-a-discount.html

Grazed from PEHub. Author: PR Announcement.

Fugue (formerly Luminal), a Maryland-based startup developing an infrastructure-level operating system for cloud computing, announced it has closed a $20M Series C financing round, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Previous investors, including Core Capital, also participated in the round. This brings the total amount of financing to $34M. The company also announced its name change to Fugue [few-g], which is the name of its cloud operating system.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing brings new challenges as applications have become distributed and infrastructure has proliferated. Fugue reins in this complexity and simplifies operations by building, enforcing, and optimizing cloud infrastructure, continuously and automatically. Fugue can be used to operate cloud-native workloads and to migrate and run traditional datacenter applications in the cloud. It will initially operate workloads on Amazon Web Services…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

If you’re a CIO the chances are good your computing environment looks something like this: A hybrid cloud comprising core business software hosted internally but interfacing with software-as-a-service applications that are important but not mission-critical. And you also have public cloud services where you test applications.

Eighty-one percent of 3,000 vice presidents of IT, network and infrastructure architects surveyed last summer by F5 Networks fit that profile, indicating that they plan on operating a hybrid cloud environment in the next two to five years, says Karl Triebes, CTO of the application services provider. He says some respondents are also considering migrating their networking systems to software-defined networks (SDNs), and embracing DevOps to gain greater operational efficiencies…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ingram Micro today announced it has extended the availability of IBM Cloud to five additional Cloud Marketplaces around the globe, providing companies increased access to infrastructure capabilities from SoftLayer. Building on its existing distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in the U.S., IBM Cloud is now available through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K., with plans to extend the offering into additional markets soon.

The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is an ecosystem of buyers, sellers and solutions that allows channel partners to purchase, configure, provision, and manage cloud technologies with confidence and ease. It removes the complexity in procurement, management, and support that is often characteristic in cloud technologies, while helping channel partners simplify success in the cloud…

Grazed from TheDataCenterJournal. Author: Bob Lamendola.

In today’s competitive market, cloud computing offers an outstanding opportunity not just to innovate, but to do so more quickly and more cost-effectively than ever. It is an exceptionally efficient platform for IT-service delivery. Because you can create new virtual servers in a cloud with unmatched speed and consistency, as well as allocate IT resources like processing power and storage automatically on the basis of policies, clouds can bring new services into production much faster than traditional architectures.

Additionally, operational costs—particularly capital expenditures—fall because of cloud computing’s utility-style billing, which is based on real use. This approach makes it much less risky for organizations to experiment with new services. Unsuccessful services that see little utilization will generate low bills. On the other hand, if service usage is high, the costs will be justified by the fact that the service is successful, end users are receiving the intended value and, in the case of external services, significant new revenues are generated…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The start of any year is always a good time to take stock, inspect the landscape, and see where the puck is moving. That is exactly what Tariff Consultancy (TCL) has done, with the company’s latest cloud pricing report revealing that while enterprise cloud computing prices have dropped by two thirds on average since 2014, the race to the bottom is finally letting up.

The report, entitled ‘Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020’, assessed a total of 24 vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google, and cited the former two as a reason for stability in public cloud pricing. Price drops continue to fuel cloud adoption, but the landscape is different to 2014. Back then, both companies were offering free initial tier compute instances; now, free elements only come as part of promotional periods, or to entice customers in to paid options…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Clive Longbottom.

Over a decade ago, Quocirca looked at the current means of securing data, and decided that there was something fundamentally wrong. The concept of solely relying on network edge protection, along with internal network and application defences misses the point. It has always been the data that matters – in fact, not really even the data, but the information and intellectual property that data represents.

To our minds, enterprise content management (ECM) has not lived up to expectations around information security: it only dealt with a very small subset of information; it was far too expensive; and has not evolved to support modern collaboration mechanisms. It is also easy to circumvent its use, and far too easy for information assets to escape from within its sphere of control…

Grazed from TheIrishIndependent. Author: Editorial Staff.

The company is to grow its Irish workforce over 1,800 as part of a multi-billion euro investment across the Europe. A further boost will see 70 jobs created over the next 18 months by 3D4Medical, an Irish medical technology company which is one of the world leaders in developing applications for the healthcare sector.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Jobs Minister Richard Burton, as well as officials from IDA Ireland which has supported the Oracle investment, were given a tour of the company site as the announcements were made. Oracle’s cloud technologies deliver everything from secure computing infrastructure to enterprise cloud applications. It currently offers more than 600 different cloud applications…

Read more from the source @ http://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/jobs-boost-for-dublin-with-520-new-positions-announced-34363685.html

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Simon Sharwood.

Amazon Web Services has just done something rather interesting, in the form of making it possible to reserve servers in advance for short bursts of computing. The new “Scheduled Reserved Instances” caper does what it says on the tin: you can decide what kind of server you want to run, how long to run it for and what you’re prepared to pay. You can even add a schedule to get the same instance type each week. Or each day. Or whatever, provided you commit for a year.

AWS is talking up the new plan as ideal for those who predictably run certain jobs at certain times. Of course there’s also an upside for AWS in this new feature. Running a big public cloud means spending astounding amounts of cash on kit and operations. The more AWS and its ilk can predict usage rates, the easier it gets to plan future purchases, cashflow and capacity…

Gartner, a research and advisory firm, has estimated that by the end of 2019, 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN products in all their branches, up from less than 1 percent today.