May 27, 2015 Off

Akamai, China Unicom strike cloud deal

By David

Grazed from BCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

China Unicom and Akamai have announced a partnership that will see the two companies integrate their cloud services and content delivery network, respectively. The deal between China Unicom’s cloud division CU Cloud and Akamai will see the former offer the latter’s full portfolio of content delivery, web performance and security offerings, a move CU Cloud said will improve global access to its growing suite of cloud services.

Akamai’s turnkey CDN technology will also underpin global delivery of its cloud services, CU Cloud said. “China Unicom is a major carrier in China, serving the global internet market,” said Noam Freedman, senior vice president of Akamai’s global networks division. “We’re excited to be partnering with CU cloud to tap into the fast-growing China cloud and CDN market. Akamai sees increased demand for delivering content to Chinese internet users from global customers…

May 27, 2015 Off

Which IaaS vendor to choose? High price doesn’t always mean high performance

By David

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud Spectator, an analyst firm, has put together the second of its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) pricing reports, and found Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) crown slipping. The latest study, which collected over one million data points over a 24 hour period on processor and memory, examined performance alongside other patterns, such as instability and unpredictability.

Performance tests were conducted on five different virtual machine sizes across 15 IaaS providers. The results were described by the analysts as “eye-opening.” AWS’ T2 micro, with burst performance features, revealed a controlled period of high performance alongside a controlled period of lower performance, putting it right at the bottom of the table…

May 27, 2015 Off

Why Amazon dominates cloud computing yet should not be your knee-jerk choice

By David

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dion Hinchcliffe.

Will Amazon ultimately dominate the public cloud and IaaS? It’s perhaps the prime question now on the minds of IT strategists today as they develop their organization’s digital roadmap, for key reasons we’ll examine below. Read More Certainly, the latest industry data sure makes it seem like it, with Gartner’s brand new report on worldwide cloud infrastructure making some astonishing statements: [Amazon] is the overwhelming market share leader, with over 10 times more cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers. [my emphasis]

This is essentially total industry dominance in a market that is still very much finding its way, just over a decade after credible Web services-based cloud offerings first arrived. Long-standing resistance by companies — and really, it’s mostly their IT, security, and compliance departments — to the cloud hasn’t stopped some industry watchers from claiming that up to 90% of companies have already adopted some form of it today, usually SaaS but most of the XaaS variants too…

May 27, 2015 Off

How are Cloud Applications Different?

By David
Article written by Leo Reiter
One of the most often misunderstood concepts in cloud computing is the architecture of the applications themselves. Cloud applications are different than traditional workloads in many ways, and getting the architecture wrong can mean the difference between something that scales while delivering reliable service and something fragile that falls terribly short.
 

Cloud “Hosting”?

May 26, 2015 Off

Which cloud company is next on the auction block?

By David

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Would-be cloud buyers and sellers play a high-stakes game of musical chairs. Buyers need technology, developer cred, and customers. Sellers need to be part of a big offering. Not everyone is going to win. With Tuesday’s news that EMC is buying Virtustream for $1.2 billion, there is one less independent cloud infrastructure provider out there. And those numbers are dwindling by the month.

In the past two years, legacy technology giants IBM IBM -1.21% , Cisco CSCO -1.06% , Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.97% , EMC EMC -2.05% and Datapipe gobbled up SoftLayer, Metacloud, Eucalyptus, Cloudscaling, and GoGrid respectively to build their cloud stature. Now, you have to wonder what company’s next to go…

May 26, 2015 Off

IT managers unconvinced on getting ROI from cloud adoption

By David

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

More than half of IT managers surveyed by West IP Communications say they expect to get full return on investment by moving to the cloud – but it’s an unconvincing figure. 54% of the more than 300 respondents said they would be able to fully recoup their costs of cloud computing adoption, which of course means 46% aren’t so sure.

Yet those with bigger IT budgets were more confident: two thirds (66%) of managers with company IT budgets over $5m were “confident” the savings of cloud computing would cover the operating costs. Of those who were expecting ROI, three quarters (74%) expected it to be through reduced costs of doing business, including maintenance costs and the size of the IT staff…

May 26, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: 5 Companies That Will Dominate Consumer IoT Market – Part 1

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Janakiram.

Internet of Things is no more a science fiction. From smart homes to connected cars to smart healthcare, consumers and vendors are gearing up for the next big thing. There is more to IoT than those fancy wristbands, gadgets, and watches. From chip manufacturers to communication providers to platform vendors to cloud providers, the IoT ecosystem is complex and diverse.

Like most of the technology segments, no single player will be able to dominate this market. But there are a few companies that are well-positioned to exploit the opportunity that exists in consumer IoT. They have a high brand recall, right design elements, proven leadership in software and substantial investments in infrastructure. IoT story has two sides to it – one is the consumer play, and the other is the software and infrastructure…

May 26, 2015 Off

Piston Computing Showcases Private Cloud Platform Using OpenStack

By David

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

IT staffs spend an inordinate amount of time and effort configuring the stacks of software to run applications. But if anything was made clear at the OpenStack Summit 2015 conference last week, it’s that much of the work associated with deploying tools like Hadoop is about to become automated.

Case in point is Piston Computing, which used the conference to showcase a turnkey platform for deploying a private cloud. Via the click of a single button, IT administrators can use Piston CloudOS 4.0 to not only launch OpenStack in minutes, but also to deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal servers. In the near future, Piston Computing plans to add support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm…

May 26, 2015 Off

EMC expands cloud push with $1.2 billion buy of Virtustream

By David

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Joe Tucci is at it again. The longtime EMC chief executive and chairman has made another purchase, buying Virtustream, an enterprise-oriented cloud computing company, for $1.2 billion in cash. This move follows EMC’s EMC -2.09% late 2014 acquisition of Cloudscaling and its OpenStack-based private cloud expertise.

Virtustream is focused on big corporate customers—SAP is among its investors—and fields data centers in the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands. It particularly suits financial customers and others who require payment card industry (PCI) compliance, as well as federal government customers, according to Gartner’s IT latest cloud computing report. Domino Sugar, Coca-Cola, Heinz, and Lexmark are some of Virtustream’s corporate customers…

Read more from the source @ https://fortune.com/2015/05/26/emc-expands-cloud-push-with-1-2-billion-buy-of-virtustream/

May 26, 2015 Off

Why the Underlying Laws of Cloud, Social, and Digital Business Matter

By David

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Dion Hinchcliffe.

I’ve spent much of my Memorial Day Holiday here in the United States pondering the Red Queen effect vs. network effects, seminal laws of technology and business both, that are often held as gospel by their adherents who believe they are the natural and intrinsic properties of their operating environments (digital ecosystems in this case.)

Both hypotheses apply to any connected, relatively closed environment of some kind, which very much includes everything from traditional marketplaces, online communities, app stores, cloud services, SaaS, enterprise social networks, social media, and cable/video networks to e-mail, telephones, and package delivery…