Grazed from WSJ. Author: Alistair Barr.

Google is opening up one of its most popular cloud-based app-building tools to run on other companies’ computer servers, in part to help developers deal with rules requiring data be stored within national borders. Google launched App Engine in 2008 to help outside developers write and run apps on Google’s network of data centers and servers, getting the company into the public cloud-computing business in competition with leader Amazon.com.

Cloud computing providers typically compete to get as many customers using their data centers as possible. But on Tuesday, Google unveiled a partnership with startup AppScale that lets App Engine apps, which number roughly six million, run on other cloud services or companies’ own data centers and servers without modification…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Agam Shah.

Dell is offering to helping cut business’ reliance on Windows PC hardware with a new management appliance, which could serve up virtual Windows desktops to Chromebooks. Dell’s Appliance for Wyse – vWorkspace product uses desktop virtualization technology to deliver Windows desktop software to Chromebooks and other endpoints. Though brokered from a remote location, the Windows OS will be fully functional and run as if it were loaded locally.

As part of its Chrome for Work program, Google has aggressively pushed Chromebooks into businesses as an alternative to Windows PCs. Chromebooks are thin, lightweight laptops for those who do most of their computing on the Internet. Google has said that Chromebooks are tuned for the future of cloud computing, as they were built from the ground up to run rich Web applications…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott took center stage today at Sapphire Now 2015 to expand on the enterprise resource planning (ERP)’s company vision of making the world a better place and improving the lives of people by introducing data-driven and seamless solutions into the marketplace.

"Data-driven businesses must be seamless," McDermott told conference attendees. "When you think seamlessly, you can be a champion." With more than 20,000 customers in attendance, Sapphire Now, being held this week in Orlando, Florida at the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC), promoted the concept of digitally transforming businesses by keeping things simple for its customers, something McDermott harped on during his keynote address last year at SAP Sapphire Now…

Grazed from ReCode. Author: ARIK HESSELDAHL.

NetSuite, the cloud business software company, announced a strategic alliance with Microsoft that will tie its products closely to both Office 365 and the Azure cloud computing service. The plan calls for Microsoft to integrate NetSuite’s cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning software that companies use to track their financial, supply chain and other operational data, to Office 365, the cloud-based office suite.

Additionally, Azure will become NetSuite’s preferred cloud platform for building custom software enhancements to NetSuite. NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson announced the tie-up in a speech in San Jose, Calif., at the company’s SuiteWorld conference. Nelson said the partnership was the result of a series of meetings with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella…

Grazed from TechVibes. Author: Knowlton Thomas.

Adoption of cloud computing continues to grow globally, according to a recent research report from EMC Corporation, with the hybrid cloud being the most popular option. However, 35% of executives believe their organization doesn’t have the right level of skills and knowledge to achieve key business priorities, while 69% of respondents believe training IT staff to keep pace with the implications of megatrends such as cloud, mobile, and big data will be a challenge for their organization over the next couple years.

Still, evidence for increasing adoption is undeniable: hybrid cloud adoption has grown 9% since 2013, with 27% uptake across the globe, driven, among other factors, by the fact that 74% believe that increasing automation in their infrastructure is imperative to business growth, according to EMC…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Elizabeth Montalbano.

Cloud security remains a big concern for solution providers and vendors alike, which is one of the reasons why two leading industry organizations have collaborated to offer a new certification that will ensure VARs have the training and experience they need to properly secure their customers’ clouds.

The (ISC)² and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) are now offering the Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) certification, which will require solution providers to have advanced skills required for cloud security. They also aim to establish an international standard for professional-level knowledge in the design, implementation and management of cloud environments, according to a Cloud Security Alliance press release…

Grazed from Intel. Author: Jonathon Donaldson.

A powerful trend sweeping through today’s data centers can be summed up in a single word: Containers. Container-based virtualization allows you to package applications and the required software libraries to create units of computing that are scalable and portable. Today, Nick Weaver shared Intel’s vision for containers and the mainstream democratization of sophisticated cloud computing at CoreOS Fest in San Francisco. If the level of the engagement at the conference is any indication, I expect the industry to join us on the path toward broad scale deployments of advanced, easy to consume, hyperscale technologies.

The container concept is a central feature of hyperscale cloud technology. Hyperscale technologies promise to make software developers more productive, data center infrastructure more efficient, and IT resources easier to deploy and consume. It is not hyperbole to say that broad proliferation of hyperscale cloud technology could have an impact on data centers that is similar to the impact that virtualization delivered years ago…

Grazed from StorageReview. Author: Adam Armstrong.

Super Micro Computer Inc. released a new extreme-density sever platform, MicroBlade. These new solutions are aimed at hyper-scale data center, cloud, web hosting environments and video streaming, VDI, high performance video/graphics applications. SuperMicro’s MicroBlade also enables VLP DDR4 16/32GB RDIMM, at the cost of regular DIMM, to increase energy efficiency and cooling. SuperMicro claims that the MicroBlade is a converged computing platform that combines the density, ease of use, manageability, high availability, serviceability, efficiency of blade servers with the cost advantage of rack-mount servers.

Super Micro Computer Inc. released a new extreme-density sever platform, MicroBlade. These new solutions are aimed at hyper-scale data center, cloud, web hosting environments and video streaming, VDI, high performance video/graphics applications. SuperMicro’s MicroBlade also enables VLP DDR4 16/32GB RDIMM, at the cost of regular DIMM, to increase energy efficiency and cooling…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Brien Posey.

You’ve done your homework and determined you need to extend your data center to the public cloud. You’ve researched the technology and determined the criteria you will use to make your purchasing decision. Now, it’s time to choose the public cloud provider to host your virtual machines.

But which provider offers the services and support that best matches your environment and needs? This is the final article in a series about cloud computing buying decisions. The first article described the benefits of hosting virtual servers in the cloud, while the second detailed public cloud costs and risks…

Grazed from ITNews. Author: Justin Warren.

When you see the word ‘internet’, odds are you think of the public internet, the battleground of net neutrality and data retention. But there is another side to the internet that runs quietly in the background, in parallel to this public or consumer internet: business internet. At the recent launch of data centre provider Equinix’s Melbourne site, ME1, the company’s APAC boss Samuel Lee [unsurprisingly] made much of the pitfalls of consumer internet. But he rightfully pointed out that individual consumers are not as concerned about security and uptime as are enterprise technology groups…

“If it goes down for 30 minutes, it’s no big deal as an individual, but when you’re running an enterprise application, if you are the CIO, you cannot let it go down," he said. The modern marvel of cloud computing arose because of the ability to house computing resources in a remote data centre somewhere out there on a functionally ubiquitous internet, and to provide software functionality as a remotely accessed service. Netflix and Salesforce would simply not have a business without it…

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