Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

I’ve followed Splunk Inc. for quite some time and have always thought that its approach to exploring and analyzing data found in operational and machine logs to be clever and, potentially, quite useful. The company recently launched its newest edition of its enterprise product, Splunk Enterprise 6.2.

The idea is to make it easier for IT and business analysts to search through mounds of data, find patterns and glean useful and actionable insight. Splunk makes it possible for analysts to discover previously hidden relationships in their data, regardless of whether it’s being created and stored on-premises, off-premises or in a cloud service provider’s datacenter…

Grazed from BusinessWorld.  Author: Ajay Gupta.

 few years back we used to store hard copies of the images we clicked in smart, colourful albums. Those were the days when the best we could do to preserve our important documents was to put them in a folder. With the advent of today’s fast paced digital age, these safe-keeping tasks have been pushed to Cloud. Ironically, we are made to believe that our personal data is safe on some remote server that is unknown to us and out of our physical reach!

No wonder the recent series of Cloud Storage hacks and password leaks has managed to spread pandemonium amongst the enterprises and the users alike. One is left to wonder that inspite of major chinks in its armour, why are more and more number of enterprises pushing for Cloud?…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

A lot of people back up their data to the cloud. But how do you back up the cloud itself? Convirture, the company that until now has specialized in cloud and virtualization management solutions, hopes to answer this question with a new backup and disaster recovery solution for the OpenStack open source cloud operating system running on the KVM hypverisor.

The tool, called Convirture Backup, "is a software-based product that provides automated, policy-based backup for OpenStack compute pools and tenants with fast," according to the company. It has a Web-based interface and is designed to work efficiently by minimizing the load on virtual and physical infrastructure, bandwidth usage and storage requirements…

Read more from the source @ http://thevarguy.com/cloud-computing-services-and-business-solutions/103114/convirture-expands-product-line-openstack-cloud-back

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Michael Vizard.

In one fell swoop this week EMC transformed into a force to be reckoned with in the cloud management space with the launch of new hybrid cloud services and the acquisition of three separate companies.

The EMC acquisition list included The Cloudscaling Group, a provider of a cloud operating system that spans public and private clouds; Maginatics, a provider of global namespace services; and Spanning Cloud Apps, a provider of a backup and recovery service designed specifically for software-as-a-service applications…

Grazed from ProgrammableWeb.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Most organizations to one degree or another will wind up deploying applications on multiple public and private cloud computing environments. To help streamline that process, Accenture has developed a set of APIs designed to make deploying and managing applications across a hybrid cloud computing environment simpler.

Michael Liebow, global managing director for the Accenture Cloud Platform, says the latest version of the system integrator’s hybrid cloud framework, announced this week, provides a set of APIs that creates an overlay over public clouds and private clouds based on VMware, OpenStack and Cisco platforms…
 

Grazed from ComputerDealerNews. Author: Paolo Del Nibletto.

Tech Data’s StreamOne platform for cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) has arrived in Canada. As part of a global launch rollout, Tech Data Americas president Joe Quaglia told CDN that StreamOne will be made available wherever the distributor does business. Going forward, these types of rollouts will be part of a North American strategy.

The StreamOne platform offers channel partners cloud services that they can resell to their own customers along with software in an as-a-service model. Through an online solution store solution providers in Canada can now search, compare, quote and order products for independent software vendors and cloud providers. This also includes Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Coughlin.

Many folks, particularly in the open source community, have been pushing for some time to move to commodity hardware with more sophisticated software to control that hardware rather than proprietary systems. This is true of servers, networking and also digital storage systems. Organizations such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and other hyperscale data center companies take this approach to a huge scale. In many of these environments functions, such as virtualization, are often installed directly into a storage system rather than within a host operating system (referred to as a bare metal environment).

Companies such as Mirantis and SwiftStack, are open source software companies that recently raised $100 M and $16 M to increase their penetration in the cloud computing and cloud storage markets. Other companies, such as Storient offer low cost private cloud storage capabilities that they say can scale to Exabyte storage environments…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In a wide-ranging interview with Bill Hilf, HP’s VP of Helion cloud product and services, Network World editor in chief John Dix and I asked him among other things about competition with Amazon Web Services – the leading public IaaS cloud computing vendor. Hilf says he found it amusing when he saw reports that AWS hired a head of enterprise strategy.

“I kind of laughed at that,” Hilf said, noting that HP’s heritage is selling to enterprise customers. “We don’t need one of those,” he added. “That’s all we do. We don’t have a special enterprise guy.” AWS reportedly hired former Dow Jones & Co. CIO Stephen Orban as the company’s new head of enterprise strategy and brought on Douglas Menefee, the former Schumacher Group CIO in March. Both are expected to act as evangelists to promote the company’s cloud platform…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2841457/cloud-computing/hp-exec-unlike-amazon-we-dont-have-to-hire-enterprise-sales-experts.html

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Justin Stoltzfus.

Midsize companies with finite IT budgets are increasingly moving workloads to the cloud using specialized vendor cloud services, and that means developing strategies. This can require substantial communication and development of carefully thought-out goals, but when it comes to the adoption itself, putting the cloud into action often comes down to a few core principles.

Four-Part Adoption

A CSO Online report details some of the best practices for cloud migration, from working this move into a business plan to considering service-level agreements (SLAs), provider choices and public or private options. The report also highlights four fundamental elements of adoption that are important for choosing the right cloud provider: service levels, support, security and compliance…

Grazed from ComputerReview.  Author: Editorial Staff.

70% find more difficult to handle privacy and data protection regulations in cloud.  Only 38% of global organisations have defined roles and accountability for preserving confidential or sensitive data in the cloud, a new survey of IT professionals has found.  According to the latest Ponemon Institute study commissioned by SafeNet, about 44% of corporate data stored in cloud environments is not supervised or controlled by the IT department.

About 70% of respondents find it more difficult to handle privacy and data protection regulations in a cloud environment, while about three-quarters of them consider cloud as very vital now, and three quarters of them deem it will be vital over the next two years…