Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

An energy company and a technology startup in the Netherlands are the latest companies to test whether housing servers in residences can help families reduce their heating costs as the systems run their workloads.

Eneco is installing radiator-size servers that the energy company is calling eRadiators in five homes in the country. The servers, built by 2-year-old Nerdalize, will be part of the system maker’s compute cloud. While the servers are churning away, the heat they generate will be used by Eneco to heat the homes…

Grazed from TelecomPaper. Author: Editorial Staff.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced a three-year partnership with Ericsson to drive innovation around IT cloud and telecom cloud products, the latter in line with OPNFV. The move will help both organisations respond to increasing demand from telecoms companies and enterprises for more flexible, scalable options to meet the ever-growing appetite for new services.

Under the terms of the partnership, Ericsson will deploy Ubuntu as the host OS for Ericsson’s Cloud System platform. Ubuntu Server OS will underpin Ericsson’s offering for its telecommunications network, internal data centre and cloud computing customers. Ericsson chose Ubuntu Server OS as the host OS for its Cloud Execution Environment, a core component of the company’s cloud infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ http://www.telecompaper.com/news/ericsson-canonical-enter-cloud-partnership–1073693

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Availability is not merely disaster recovery in the cloud Relevant Products/Services — it’s the empowering connection between a data Relevant Products/Services center and the cloud for protection Relevant Products/Services and value creation. That’s what Microsoft Azure Product Marketing Group Manager Joel Ferman said when he announced new features for the Azure Backup service.

Microsoft now offers on-demand availability in Azure for both hybrid and heterogeneous environments. That lets organizations harness a nearly unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for developing and testing cloud bursting, migration, reporting and analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention, Ferman said…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sedar Yegulalp.

Google’s latest enhancement to Cloud Platform is not a new feature but a repackaging of an existing innovation. But it’s a downright useful offering all the same. Cloud Launcher is a gallery of applications that can be deployed to Google Cloud Platform with one click. Many of the offered apps are courtesy of a partnership with an existing app-packaging solution, Bitnami. The service’s catalog includes many commonly deployed applications, such as WordPress or SugarCRM, plus development stacks (LAMP) and stack components (Nginx, Node.js).

The blog post detailing Cloud Launcher indicates that the service is aimed mainly at admins who want to deploy VM-based applications — as opposed to containerized ones — but don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting up a VM, then deploying an app into it. Enter Bitnami, which has been providing VM-packaged application solutions for some time…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2902931/cloud-computing/google-cloud-launcher-spins-up-vm-based-apps-in-a-snap.html

Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Cheryl Kemp.

A new 104-page document describing best practices for cloud providers was released on Tuesday by OpenCloud Connect (OCC). The organization’s focus is to provide cloud providers with guidelines for scaling and enhancing ethernet technology to better deal with the increasing demands of cloud services.

“One of the primary goals of OpenCloud Connect is to advance technology standards, vendor interoperability and best design practices,” stated the executive summary. “These initiatives will help businesses create a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure.” “Where other standards bodies had the space to shape standards in advance of market penetration, cloud computing is already surging ahead in every direction powered by NFV, SDN, virtualization technologies and networking – technologies that are themselves still evolving quickly…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Don Tennant.

Cloud computing will either cause the CIO role to morph into a CTO role, or will leave the CIO to “bow down to the CTO” by becoming a manager of cloud providers and of what’s left of in-house operations. That’s the view of Marc Malizia, co-founder and CTO at RKON Technologies, a managed cloud services provider in Chicago.

In a recent interview, Malizia provided an intriguingly candid assessment of the current and future roles of the CIO and the CTO. It’s worth noting up front that RKON doesn’t even have a CIO. “As a technology company we are strategically driven by the CTO role,” Malizia said. “We also have the luxury of leveraging our internal consultants and managed service team to run our operation, which has somewhat eliminated the need of a CIO.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/from-under-the-rug/cio-or-cto-which-one-will-survive-the-cloud-and-keep-a-seat-at-the-table.html

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

HP has launched a Helion Rack offering that comes pre-configured with OpenStack cloud software, combined with the rich Cloud Foundry development platform. This optimized hardware package is aimed at enterprise customers looking to build out a private cloud infrastructure.

HP is trying to recoup ground heavily contested by competitors Dell, Red Hat, Microsoft, and IBM. These vendors already offer their own on-premises OpenStack private-cloud-building services. However, HP is the sole public cloud service-provider that is also a major supplier of x86 servers, giving the company a shot at shipping pre-configured servers…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Most enterprise IT departments now manage applications across multiple environments in a dizzyingly complex overall IT architecture. They also must constantly reevaluate their unique mix of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure to meet new business goals and determine how applications can be migrated to the public cloud in a cost-effective way.

This is no small feat. Dozens or even hundreds of applications built at different times, in different languages, and by different teams need to be evaluated for migration to the cloud, which often requires deep knowledge of the existing IT infrastructure as well as the public cloud resources that could replace these functions…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Frederick Lane.

In a move aimed directly at the crowded cloud Relevant Products/Services storage market, Amazon announced on Thursday that it is now offering all consumers two plans for unlimited storage on its Amazon Cloud Drive. The new products will put pressure on existing cloud storage companies such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and the dozens of other storage competitors.

“Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up,” said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive. “With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space — they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music and files in one convenient place.”…

Grazed from SoftNAS. Author: PR Announcement.

Faction, an enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service provider offering hybrid, private, and public cloud solutions, today announced its partnership with SoftNAS™, a leading cloud storage software company. Faction partners with SoftNAS to complement its NetApp storage portfolio and address a growing need for on-demand, enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) and cloud file gateway capabilities with advanced Network File System (NFS)/Common Internet File System (CIFS) shared storage in the cloud, a mainstay storage solution for customers moving to the cloud.

With Faction’s recent rebranding, the company introduced a flexible cloud computing portfolio designed the way customers want it — with deep access, broad customization capabilities and patented layer 2 private pathways to the Faction cloud. Faction’s core bundles called Cloud Blocs are modular, flexible, and completely customizable so customers can design them with their unique network, processing and storage requirements. Storage is an essential component for enterprises of any size, so they can archive, back up and protect their business-critical data environments and applications…