If you’re like many organizations, you hate your storage. It’s expensive, doesn’t keep up with new application performance needs, constantly requires capacity expansion, and requires expensive staff to keep it operational. Worse, it probably gets conveniently “end-of-life-d” at exactly the wrong time, forcing you in to costly upgrades.

It doesn’t have to be this way! With both current and emerging flash storage systems, companies are gaining benefits that were only dreams in the days of the disk-based SAN. Far beyond just providing crazy levels of performance, flash storage systems have the potential to help IT organizations focus on the business and less on technology. After all, when you have IOPS to spare, other metrics can take center stage. These can include cost per gig, power consumption, gig per rack unit, and many more.

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

In a bid to boost its cloud offerings, search giant Google Inc. launched Cloud Bigtable, the managed NoSQL database it has been using internally for a number of years to store huge amounts of data online. A public beta version is now available, that is, it’s open to all developers but doesn’t provide a service level agreement or technical support.

The service costs 65 cents per node with one node delivering up to 10,000 reads and writes per second. Storage on SSD is priced at 17 cents per gigabyte a month on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud Bigtable is claimed to be a fully managed, high-performance and highly scalable NoSQL (not only SQL) database service compatible with the open-source Apache HBase application programming interface (API) that most developers are already comfortable with…

Grazed from InvestorPlace. Author: John Kilhefner.

International Business Machines (IBM) last month posted an earnings surprise — good news that was dulled a bit thanks to disappointing overall sales thanks to a strong U.S. dollar. Cloud computing and data analytics made up about 27% of its business in the last year, but dwindling sales of IBM’s ancestral software and services is prompting Big Blue to put its cloud and data business on the front lines.

InvestorPlace’s James Brumley noted that this strategy of IBM effectively buying its way into the cloud race is working, though that premise at the time wasn’t enough to recommend investors start clamoring over IBM stock. IBM’s Vice President of Investor Relations Patricia Murphy reaffirmed the tech giant’s commitment to turning its business around with the more innovative and profitable ventures in the cloud and data analytics, allocating billions of dollars to cloud and data with initiatives in the Internet of Things and Watson Health…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Since a report surfaced in Bloomberg more than a week ago, it’s been the talk of the tech market: Will Salesforce.com be bought out? Perhaps a more intriguing question though is: Should Salesforce sell out? A sale of the $46 billion market-cap company would be one of the largest tech acquisitions in history and could dramatically help a potential acquirer gain a significant foothold in the fast-growing SaaS cloud computing market.

As the company has grown, it’s stuck with its message that business should ditch licensed software they run themselves. That’s an unrealistic proposition for most companies though, a new report by technology researchers finds. That fundamental disconnect between Salesforce’s business model and how enterprises are using the company’s products is one of the biggest reasons Salesforce.com may be sold…

Grazed from HealthCareNews. Author: Mike Millard.

Healthcare is among the top industries that could feel the impact of the emerging phenomenon of cloud-based robotics, according to a new research report from Frost & Sullivan. "Cloud robotics can be viewed as a convergence of information, learned processes, and intelligent motion or activities with the help of the cloud," the report explains. "It allows to move the locus of ‘intelligence’ from onboard to a remote service."

As robots are increasingly deployed for everything from manufacturing to surgery, Frost & Sullivan sees need to better manage them remotely via the Internet. With the Web used to augment robots’ capabilities – off-loading computation and providing services on demand – this will enable expanded memory and storage capabilities and access to shared knowledge, thus increasing their functionality…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Nearly everyone agrees that cloud computing is the future of information technology. But the market is fragmented and that could make it difficult for companies to choose the best home for their data and applications. In the OpenStack arena alone there are dozens if not more cloud infrastructure options and that makes for a bewildering choice for the chief information officer (CIO) or whoever picks the cloud.

You can bet that the old-line companies who sold servers and storage into his shop hope he just goes with their cloud. But most CIOs have relationships with more than one of these companies so something’s got to give. Who to choose? The latest: EMC said this week it is working with three OpenStack providers—Canonical, Red Hat and Mirantis—to make it easier to deploy the cloud framework in corporate accounts…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/too-much-open-stack/

Grazed from NorthEast Computer Services.  Author: Editorial Staff.

It is commonplace today to hear businesses voicing concerns about using cloud based services as though the cloud is much less secure than any system you might purchase or devise on site. In reality it is not the cloud or any other platform that determines how much of a security risk you are taking with your data.

The security of your data quite simply starts and ends with you. The commitment you make as the owner of a business to plan and do research to discover the best safety system fit for your company is easily the most important piece of the security risk puzzle. Once you have determined the most appropriate security configuration for your needs the next step is to put protocols in place from the top management on down to ensure the security systems as designed are working consistently and properly…

Grazed from CCI.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Do you know how many of your employees are using public cloud sync and share services? Despite many IT leaders’ best intentions, they remain a popular way to share and collaborate within the enterprise. Yet the truth is that these services are not only bad for your business but are failing commercially. So what happens if or when they start to disappear, taking your corporate data with them?

Do you have an exit strategy?

Watch the glossy marketing campaigns promoted by these public cloud file share providers and you’d be forgiven for thinking that business is booming. The likes of Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Drive, Box, Microsoft OneDrive and others all talk a good game. And they’re certainly popular in the enterprise, amongst staff looking to circumvent inflexible, non-user friendly corporate storage systems. But they represent just 1% of the total income of the enterprise storage market…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Crystal Bedell.

While the benefit of recurring revenue makes it worth the effort, transitioning from value-added reseller (VAR) to the cloud or managed service provider (MSP) business model is no easy task.

Solution providers encounter a number of challenges along the way, many of which can be an impediment to success. Here are 10 common mistakes solution providers make while transitioning business models and how to avoid or address them…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

ProtectWise, the provider of the Cloud Network DVR for enterprise security, has been included in the Gartner, Inc. report: "Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Services, 2015."[i] The report notes, "Gartner’s Cool Vendors in cloud security services offer highly innovative technologies that address an organization’s demand for agile, responsive and cost-effective solutions."

"We believe inclusion in the Gartner ‘Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Services’ report validates the value of our disruptive cloud approach to enterprise network security," said Scott Chasin, CEO and co-founder of ProtectWise.  "By leveraging the cloud, we give enterprises a level of visibility and detection of network security events, both in real time and retrospectively, that just isn’t possible using traditional, on-premises hardware solutions. This is imperative in a post-prevention world where network breaches go undetected for an average of more than six months."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/protectwise-named-a-gartner-2015-cool-vendor-in-cloud-security-services-300078670.html