Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

During the week of October 5th I had an opportunity to attend the AWS re:Invent 2015 conference in Las Vegas, of all places. As someone who has built an entire career on putting together custom application server software, I should be the last one to get excited about server-less applications. Just like Salesforce’s “no software,” Amazon’s “server-less software” mantra is about a world where application development is not limited by IT, software to install and servers to manage.

Traditionally, in an on-premise environment, putting together an enterprise application involved building out three pieces: the data store, the server and the client. Between the hardware, the software and the infrastructure associated with the aforementioned on-premise application, there were hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of up-front capital expense…

Grazed from ETFDB. Author: Justin Kuepper.

Dell Inc. agreed to buy EMC Corp. (EMC) in October for $67 billion in the largest technology acquisition in history. While some analysts attributed the deal to tech market froth, the acquisition also signifies the growing importance of cloud computing. The move is also just the latest in a trend of such acquisitions, including International Business Machine’s (IBM) acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013 for $2 billion after selling off its PC business. Investors looking to capitalize on these trends may want to take a look at the ISE Cloud Computing Index Fund (SKYY B), which is a $500 million exchange-traded fund (ETF) that provides them with exposure to cloud computing technology.

Massive Shift Spurs M&A

According to Cisco Systems Inc.’s (CSCO) Global Cloud Index white paper, more than three-quarters (78%) of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers by 2018 compared to just 22% processed by traditional data centers. The growth will be largely driven by software-as-a-service’s 33% CAGR, although infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service technologies are also expected to realize double-digit annual growth rates…

Read more from the source @ http://etfdb.com/news/2015/10/19/cloud-computing-the-top-of-trend-or-beginning-of-an-opportunity/

Grazed from OpenStack.org.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Quobyte, technology leader in data center file systems, starting rolling out version 1.2 of its next-generation software storage system. Tried and tested in production, Quobyte presents the first fault-tolerant storage system that provides an all-in-one solution for an OpenStack infrastructure, hosting virtual machines, shared file systems and object storage in a single software-defined deployment.

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud builders, operators and users unwrap a lengthy wish list of new features and refinements today with the Liberty release of OpenStack, the 12th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. With the broadest support for popular data center technologies, OpenStack has become the integration engine for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud services.

Available for download today, OpenStack Liberty answers the requests of a diverse community of the software’s users, including finer-grained management controls, performance enhancements for large deployments and more powerful tools for managing new technologies like containers in production environment.

• Flexible and configurable dashboards help sysadmins see and present the right information
• Intuitive and fast navigation allows sysadmins to quickly gain insight and take action
• Executive-level views arm IT executives with valuable data to drive decisions
• Service-level reports inform business leaders of service uptime and ensure alignment with IT

Opsview Monitor 5.0 is ideal for existing Opsview users who want to take another step up in efficiency and service uptime, freeing more IT resources for critical IT projects that support the business. With 5.0, Opsview has improved the time to insight by 50 percent.

To help today’s organizations make strategic and informed decisions when it comes to secure cloud implementations, Armor has sponsored a new Ponemon Institute study, Cloud Security: Getting It Right.

The new findings reveal organizations are divided when it comes to who is responsible for cloud security. Some rely upon their cloud provider to keep SaaS applications secure (31 percent), while others see end-users as being most accountable (20 percent).

Only 16 percent of respondents believe that keeping SaaS applications secure is a shared responsibility between the end-user company and the cloud provider. This runs counter to the fact that the majority of cloud services operate on the premise of shared responsibility, especially when sensitive data is involved.

Just 15 percent of organizations believe the IT security team should be most accountable for securing SaaS applications; however, more than 60 percent of the respondents shared that IT security is rarely or never involved when it comes to evaluating cloud services.

Set up as a joint initiative by the Netherlands province of Overijssel and the cities of Zwolle and Kampen, Shared Service Center (SSC) Zwolle’s objective is to share and lower the costs of providing datacenter resources to local municipalities. Atlantis and its partner TenICT have created an entirely new IT infrastructure that has the ability to move data, virtual machines and application workloads between sites, enabling zero recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) between multiple data centers.

To support business growth and respond to the changing demands of the industry, PFD sought to modernise its data management strategy and information infrastructure, ensuring speed and flexibility.

"Food distribution is a fast and often unforgiving business; there is a narrow window to match supply and demand for customers, while the market is fiercely competitive," said Richard Cohen, Chief Information Officer of PFD. "We have to do everything we can to give ourselves that competitive advantage, which means the free flow of strategic business information. Systems downtime is simply not an option."

The modernisation of the food distributor’s data management strategy has coincided with the establishment of a second data centre, acting as a source for essential back-ups, decreasing the risk significantly. The data centre also operates as a corporate hot site, providing rapid up-to-the-minute failover if required.

Cohesity, the pioneer of converged secondary storage, today announced the public launch of the Cohesity Data Platform, the first product designed to consolidate all secondary storage use cases on a unified environment that helps organizations control growing data demands. The Cohesity Data Platform combines a web-scale storage architecture with standards-based hardware components that enable companies to transition from today’s expensive silos for different data use cases to a simple, pay-as-you grow solution for data management. By consolidating a wide range of functions onto a single platform, Cohesity can reduce storage costs by more than half and make enterprise data management incredibly simple.

According to the global research firm IDC, organizations will manage a total of 44 trillion GB of data by 2020, the vast majority of which will be held in secondary storage environments dedicated to a range of use cases, from backup and recovery to test/development and analytics. In order to manage this data, enterprises have traditionally invested in multiple solutions from different vendors to address each use case, resulting in a fragmented enterprise storage approach that is both expensive and difficult to manage. To bring order to data management, Cohesity has launched the first converged secondary storage solution, which scales seamlessly while maintaining the management flexibility necessary to handle a wide variety of workloads. Cohesity empowers companies to control the growing volume of data by replacing the sprawl of point solutions with a single, consolidated platform.