Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

ClusterHQ today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners and existing investors. The company may not be a household name yet, but its Flocker tool has gotten quite a bit of attention among developers because it makes it easier to move apps that run in Docker containers and their data. Almost by default, Docker is more about handling stateless services — that is, the application logic and not the data.

Whenever you shut down a Docker container, after all, all the data stored in it is lost. Flocker expands the Docker ecosystem by giving developers a tool for managing data volumes in Docker clusters and making them as portable as their Docker containers. It supports many of the most popular databases, key-value stores and message queueing services and runs on most cloud computing platforms, with support for CoreOS, Cloud Foundry and Mesosphere coming soon…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the price/performance leader in Cloud Computing IaaS, today announced it has earned recognition on The Channel Company’s CRN 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors of 2015. This annual list recognizes some of the most innovative cloud companies supporting the IT channel today. This marks the third year ProfitBricks made the list.

The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors honor is presented to companies based on their approach to creating innovative products, services or partner programs that have helped channel partners transform into true solution providers, ultimately helping customers take advantage of the ease of use, flexibility, scalability and savings that cloud computing offers…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified monitoring and analytics solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications, today announced it was named in a recent Forbes article as one of the best cloud computing companies and CEOs to work for in 2015. "It is an honor to be recognized by Forbes in this category and we congratulate the other top performing companies as well.”

This analysis was constructed using a combination of the latest Computer Reseller News CRN list, The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2015, as a baseline to compare Glassdoor.com scores. These standings include the (%) of employees who would recommend companies to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO…

Grazed from ARNNet. Author: Brian Karlovsky.

VCE has launched a new converged infrastructure solution with VMware and EMC to embrace the shift to hybrid Cloud. The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is an integrated solution designed to further speed and simplify the deployment and management of hybrid Cloud environments.

According to a company statement, it drives an even greater degree of convergence by extending the standardised, repeatable practices of the unique “VCE Experience” to the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, enabling factory integration of additional VMware and EMC technologies including VMware NSX network virtualisation, VMware vRealize management and orchestration software, and EMC ViPR software-defined-storage…

Grazed from Microsoft. Author: Todd Thibodeaux.

Creating a unified operating system with Windows 8 seemed brilliant from a development perspective. But Microsoft (MSFT)’s inability to implement that vision led to less-than-enthusiastic adoption rates among enterprise customers (and contributed to the now notorious "Windows Pattern"). Microsoft is eager to correct these flaws with Windows 10 and has demonstrated a commitment to incorporating many enterprise-oriented features as well. Here are three of the top improvements that have the potential to make Windows 10 the new bedrock of corporate workstations:

A Smarter Command Prompt — While most of us have moved on to PowerShell to handle most of the heavy lifting, the fact remains that neither the command prompt nor PowerShell utility has received much attention from Microsoft over the years. Windows 10 is poised to change that with a variety of simple but helpful features, including text selection, transparency, text wrapping and keyboard shortcuts for common tasks…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Nick Booth.

HJ Heinz Company has become the first organization to number crunch its data both ‘in memory’ and across the globe, after hiring a migration specialist for its maiden cloud voyage. The food giant used Virtustream’s xStream to create a platform as a service (PaaS) environment on which SAP’s HANA in-memory database system could analyse masses of data quickly.

The company’s ‘in memory’ cloud system ran across its computing resources in 40 different countries. Heinz’s first foray in cloud computing has seen it roll out SAP HANA globally and, according to Heinz, ahead of schedule. Heinz said the exercise will give it a granular, real-time visibility into company performance, which it can budget for on a consumption-based billing model…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

Throughout the channel, it is obvious that the cloud is not only a great way to expand your business model but also to enhance the customer IT experience and drive incremental revenues. The opportunity is substantial. Gartner has predicted that the public cloud services market will exceed $244 billion by 2017. That’s only two years away.

This reality check has provided many of us–from ISVs, distributors, MSPs and VARs–to realign our business models and get a bigger piece of the proverbial pie. Is Infrastructure as a service or hybrid cloud the solution? Or, should DaaS or DBaaS be at the top of our list of initiatives?…

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Steve Brooks.

China is vast, it is the second largest country by land mass in the world with 9.6 million square kilometres and a population of 1.3 billion. The challenges of providing cloud services to such a huge market are huge and China Telecom as one of the main providers in China has turned to Nuage networks to solve one of its key issues.

With the need to build a dynamic software defined network (SDN) to enable it to deliver new services, China Telecom has turned not to Huawei, as one might expect, but to Nuage networks. With a large and increasingly complex network the SDN technology will be important to meet the growing demand on its network and cloud services. Part of the contract also includes security services to mitigate against Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), which because of the volume of computers on the network becomes almost a certainty as a result of events rather than malicious intent. In the event of targeted attacks against specific customers the technology is able to isolate parts of the network to mitigate that attack…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Stephen F. Deangelis.

In “Practical Artificial Intelligence Is Already Changing the World,” I promised to write a follow-on article that discussed why Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly), the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a former IBM employee and strategic advisor to Citigroup, are optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

In that article I noted that some pundits believe that AI poses a grave threat to humanity while other pundits believe that AI systems are going to be tools that humans can use to improve conditions around them. I also wrote that it would be foolish to predict which school of thought is correct this early in the game…

Grazed from NewScientist. Author: Jacob Aron.

These days it’s easy to access ultra-powerful computers: just borrow one from Amazon, Microsoft or other firms offering cloud computing services. But analysing data on someone else’s hardware means they can see what you’re doing – not ideal if you want to keep it secret. Now it seems a dash of quantumness might be the best way to stay safe in the cloud.

There are currently two ways to run secure cloud computing. The first is called homomorphic encryption, essentially a complex mathematical trick that means you can send your data to a cloud provider in an encrypted form. Without this trick, the cloud computer would normally be unable to run calculations on data that was obscured like this. Computer firm IBM has been working on this since 2009…