Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Amid reports that IBM will restructure to refocus its cloud computing strategy, it’s worth taking a close look at how its current cloud offerings stack up against its biggest competitor — AWS.  IBM finds itself among large technology companies that struggle to revamp themselves for the cloud era, according to David Linthicum, senior vice president for cloud consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, based in Boston, Mass.

"The biggest hindrance to IBM is who they are — they sell hardware and software," Linthicum said. "And so every cloud service that they sell is going to, in essence, cannibalize their existing base."…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Xen, one of the oldest open-source hypervisors, has long been popular with major cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Public Cloud, and Verizon Cloud. Now, with improved performance, quality, security and scalability that today’s cloud and enterprise data-center computing workloads demand.

In particular, for x86-based solutions this latest version offers improved cache monitoring technology. This, in turn, helps to resolve the "noisy neighbor" dilemma. A noisy neighbor is a virtual machine (VM), which demands more than its fair share of system resources thus slowing down other VMs.  The other significant new features and capabilities in Xen Project Hypervisor 4.5 include:…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author: David Linthicum.

"Cloud-related skills represent virtually all the growth opportunities in IT employment worldwide and demand for cloud-related positions will grow by 26 percent annually through 2015."  Jennifer Warnick, news and feature writer for Microsoft, wrote these words in 2013. Two years later, the demand persists, but a skill shortage looms.

Skills Shortage and the Associated Cost

The report observed the skill shortages as one of the main issues impeding cloud adoption among enterprises. The dearth of qualified cloud-related skills to fill the expected vacancies continues…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

An end-user research study conducted by Enterprise Management Associates(EMA) uncovered data that shows more than half of enterprises consider cloud-based analytics important to their businesses.

The firm’s report,"Analytics in the Cloud", found that 32 percent of respondents indicated they had adopted cloud-based strategies for analytics — and that those strategies were considered important to their business. An additional 24 percent of respondents said they had adopted cloud-based analytics strategies that were essential to their businesses…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

I’ve sworn it off: No longer do I remind people younger than myself that many of today’s concepts we call new and innovative are based on much older concepts popular a long time ago — when I was young. The ones that immediately come to mind are big data and Internet of things (IoT).

Big data — at least the notion of it — was always the objective in the world of database technology. However, back in the days when I was a college professor who taught database technology, it was simply a cool concept. The hardware and software that could provide analytics across petabytes of data simply did not exist…

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author:  Jennifer LeClaire.

Big Blue just launched what it’s calling one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built. IBM’s new z13 mainframe caps a $1 billion investment and five years of development — and taps into over 500 new patents in collaboration with more than 60 clients.

IBM is pointing to three “firsts” with the z13. It’s the first system that can process 2.5 billion transactions a day — that’s equal to 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year — which is a key capability given we’re headed toward about 40 trillion mobile Relevant Products/Services transactions a day by 2025, according to Big Blue’s research…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has been beefing up its Azure cloud computing platform, and the company has the certifications to prove it, according to Lori Woehler, principal group manager for Compliance and Trust at the software and cloud computing giant.

Woehler revealed in an Azure blog post that Microsoft Azure had "completed an ISO 27001 renewal audit to the 2013 version of the standard, following the ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 27002 best practices for comprehensive information security and risk management." ISO 27001 is a set of standards governing information security within organizations…

Grazed from BroadGroup.  Author: PR Announcement.

Europe’s most prestigious awards recognising Datacenter and Cloud achievements will be announced at an evening ceremony in Monaco on 2nd June 2015. Organised by BroadGroup, the Information Media Technology and Professional Services company, the awards will be hosted prior to the opening of Europe’s ‘must-attend’ Datacloud Europe conference and exhibition.



Now in their 8th year, the Judges have announced a number of exciting changes to keep pace with fast moving industry developments, as the Datacloud Awards sustain their integrity and position as the only pan-European recognition of demonstrable leadership in datacenter and cloud...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Robert Cohen.

Over the next few years, the majority of IT infrastructure will be delivered through converged offerings that bring together compute, storage and networking. Converged infrastructure is a positive response to IT’s demand for greater agility, simplicity, and scale. Converged infrastructure provides economic, technical, and business benefits over traditional, often siloed servers, storage, and networking resources.

With it, vendors integrate hardware, software, storage, and networking with infrastructure management software to support the deployment of new applications. The next step is to provide interfaces that align more easily with legacy systems. This report will help CIOs, systems administrators, IT directors, cloud architects, and business decision-makers understand the value of converged infrastructure and virtualized systems…

Read more from the source @ http://research.gigaom.com/report/converged-infrastructure-cloud-based-intelligent-operations/

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Although cloud computing has gained an enormous following, it still garners only a small fraction of IT spending. To increase cloud usage, cloud computing has to drive changes in how companies build and use applications. Those changes will focus on the intersection between cloud components and legacy applications — the hybrid cloud.

The most important trends in hybrid clouds are the evolution from compartments to components, the emergence of "migratory processing" and the movement toward event-based applications. Nearly all the early cloud applications that enterprises adopted were forms of hosted server consolidation. These applications were logical starting points because they used hardware and support resources very inefficiently, and they were largely independent within the businesses’ overall IT processes…