Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Life used to be so simple for Oracle. Back in the good ol’ days, the company could build a great database, charge a king’s ransom for it, and milk the maintenance stream forever. Rinse. Repeat. Unfortunately, this model no longer works, as a series of earnings misses over the last few years have shown.

While a number of factors are at play in Oracle’s stumbles, one of the most persistent is the rise of open-source databases, both relational and non-relational (NoSQL), as a recent Bloomberg article posits. As Powa Technologies CEO says, "They scale and operate extremely well, and they don’t cost anything."…

Grazed from Techspective. Author: Rahul Dasgupta.

According to a Gartner prediction cloud adoption will rise to $250 billion by 2017. 42 percent of IT leaders plan to spend more on cloud this year as per a ComputerWorld forecast. These statistics prove how the cloud is becoming increasingly popular as the enhanced flexibility and the potential cost savings that cloud computing offers is continuing to intrigue an increasing number of businesses.

However, there is a thin difference on how cloud vendors operate. One type of vendor offers proprietary cloud services, while the other outsources some of the services covered in the contract to another cloud-computing service provider. While every business is aware of the first type of provider, most organizations fail to consider the security concerns involved if their provider outsources to a third party…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published “The Coal Question,” a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England’s coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

On the face it, this seems counter-intuitive. Improved efficiency leads to greater productivity which should lead to a resource savings. In fact, however, it meant just the opposite: As coal power got cheaper, people found more and more things to do with it. In the end, people consumed so much more coal at the lower price that the total amount spent on coal rose rather than fell. This phenomenon came to be labelled the “Jevons Paradox.”…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Just over a year ago, Cisco unveiled its ambitious plan to spend $1 billion creating a cloud computing platform that could compete with the $6 billion juggernaut that is Amazon Web Services – a plan it calls Intercloud. That plan took a big step forward today with some announcements out of Cisco Live, the company’s big annual conference.

The crux of the Intercloud gambit is that instead of offering this cloud itself, from its own data centers, Intercloud will unify smaller cloud service providers into one big happy family of products that are all compatible with each other. Instead of taking Amazon on directly, Cisco is trying to unify all of the smaller guys into a competitive system…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Behind every great ecommerce website is a database, and in the early 2000s Amazon.com’s database was not keeping up with the company’s business. Part of the problem was that Amazon didn’t have just one database – it relied on a series of them, each with its own responsibility.

As the company headed toward becoming a $10 billion business, the number and size of its SQL databases exploded and managing them became more challenging. By the 2004 holiday shopping rush, outages became more common, caused in large part by overloaded SQL databases. Something needed to change…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Two pizza teams; being vocally self-critical; primitive building blocks and a vitriol hate for PowerPoints. These are some of the ways AWS innovates. Amazon.com is ranked by Forbes as the sixth most innovative company, but one could argue that its cloud computing division is the most innovative.

Amazon Web Services invented the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in the mid-2000s and to this day is anointed by analysts as the market leader, both in terms of the scale of its distributed system, the size of its customer base, and perhaps as important as both of those things: its pace of innovation…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Chris Mellor.

In the name of server and storage efficiency, Nutanix has added KVM hypervisor support, erasure coding and new management to its hyper-converged systems, and promised VVOL-type integration, container and file-serving support. The aim is evidently to increase scale-out X86 server node, storage and admin efficiency, and top-level simplicity, by converging functionality stacks below the app and admin interfaces.

At its .NEXT conference in Miami, the city where DataCore is based, it announced its Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) with Acropolis compute and storage software and its Prism management product. Acropolis consists of a customised KVM hypervisor, which along with ESXi and Hyper-V presents compute and storage services to guest OS’ and their applications…

Grazed from CNET. Author: Ben Fox Rubin.

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing business, plans to support the construction and operation of a roughly $150 million solar farm planned in Virginia, with the project being named Amazon Solar Farm US East. The new initiative underscores Amazon’s effort to maintain satisfaction and curry favor among customers of AWS, one of Amazon’s main profit engines.

In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and "still growing fast." An Amazon representative declined to specify Amazon’s financial commitment to the project, saying the company wouldn’t comment beyond a press release sent out Wednesday…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-backs-150-million-solar-project-in-virginia/

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Jeff O’Heir.

Vendors need to do a better job training its VAR partners on providing cloud services to SMBs. If not, the ire of dissatisfied end users will continue to hurt the channel. That’s the conclusion of a new report from ZS Associates called “Diamonds in the Rough: SMB Cloud Channel Preferences.”

The report’s intent is to assist vendors in identifying VARs with the background and expertise needed to help SMB customers choose, implement and maintain the right software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions. The problem is that not enough of them exist to properly satisfy SMB demands for the latest cloud technologies…

Grazed from BCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

Notforprofit environmental advocacy group Green America is launched a campaign to try and convince Amazon to reduce its carbon footprint and catch up with other large cloud incumbents’ green credentials. cGreen America said Amazon is behind other datacentre operators – including some of its large competitors like Google, Apple and Facebook – in terms of its renewable energy use and reporting practices.

“Every day, tens of millions of consumers are watching movies, reading news articles, and posting to social media sites that all use Amazon Web Services. What they don’t realize is that by using Amazon Web Services they are contributing to climate change,” said Green america’s campaigns director Elizabeth O’Connell…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/06/10/green-america-hits-out-at-amazon-for-its-dirty-cloud/