Grazed from CloudExpo.  Author: Bernard Golden.

Cloud computing in the form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has revolutionized the expectations of IT. Infrastructure that used to take weeks to months to provision is now available in minutes.  Moreover, most of the traditional drawbacks associated with infrastructure have disappeared as IaaS has become more widely used.

The lengthy timeframes to add infrastructure resources to existing applications, which led to wildly over-provisioned environments, have disappeared. The heavy upfront capital investment that is required before using resources has also disappeared, supplanted by the pay-as-you-go model of IaaS cloud computing…

Grazed from SCDigest. Author: Dan Gilmore.

On-demand or Cloud-based software is coming on fast, and I continue to believe as I predicted several years ago that it will dominate the supply chain market very soon. I predicted that would occur by 2015 – that may be a year or two too soon, but it’s coming. There are a variety on terms of course, with the original term "hosted" also still out there in some cases, and "Software as a Service" (SaaS) still pretty popular along with on-demand and Cloud. Each of these terms has its own nuance, but I have found supply chain managers use them rather interchangeably to mean the same thing.

What they generally mean is a supply chain software application that is indeed hosted by the vendor or its third party (Amazon S3 is becoming increasingly popular), and that rather than the traditional model of an often large upfront license fee, the company pays based on some subscription/transaction fee arrangement with the provider…

Grazed from RackSpace. Author: PR Announcement.

Rackspace has created a business unit called Cloud Office which aims to unify its portfolio of Rackspace and Microsoft business productivity and collaboration tools. The suite of solutions available under Cloud Office at Rackspace includes hosted Microsoft Exchange and Rackspace Email, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft SharePoint collaboration tools and Jungle Disk backup services, all backed by Fanatical Support.

"We’ve combined the power and expertise of Rackers, who understand that each customer has unique needs in their work environment, with a broad selection of productivity tools to help customers manage and run their business in a way that meets their specific needs," said Bret Piatt, general manager of Cloud Office at Rackspace. "We are proud to deliver this IT productivity suite as a service to exciting new companies as well as established brand names including Star Network Services, Jordan Lawrence and 42 Inc." The announcement comes weeks after Rackspace announced it will be offering managed IT services for the full Google Apps for Work suite.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Just how much bigger is Amazon Web Service’s cloud computing division compared to Microsoft and Google? It’s hard to make a complete apples-to-apples comparison because none of these companies are extraordinarily transparent when releasing information about the financial health of their operations.

But, a new report from New Hampshire-based firm Technology Business Research estimates Amazon’s cloud revenue at more than $4.7 billion this year. TBR pegs Microsoft’s public cloud IaaS revenue at $156 million and Google’s at $66 million. If those estimates are correct than Amazon’s cloud revenue is 30 times bigger than Microsoft’s. 30!…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Matt Asay.

For years, the open source world has taken comfort in a bit of Gandhi wisdom: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Red Hat went so far as to emblazon the phrase on the walls of its lobby, a reminder to open sourcers everywhere to take courage against the proprietary software machine.

Open source has different problems today. In a world that has gone from accepting open source to expecting it, to paraphrase MongoDB’s Dwight Merriman, what machine should the open source world be raging against? Given the absence of an outside enemy, it’s likely that open source will turn on itself…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

ProfitBricks has slashed the price of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings and is claiming that it is winning the cloud price wars against its biggest competitor Amazon Web Services (AWS). For this volley in the cloud price wars, ProfitBricks has reduced its prices by 30 percent and "has doubled the price drop percentage of the industry leader in the last year," according to the vendor.

With this price cut, a cloud instance with two dedicated CPU cores, 7.5GB of RAM and 500GB of block storage is now $73.95 per month. That includes support. It’s the first big price cut from ProfitBricks in a year, when it challenged Amazon with a major price cut and claimed its pricing was 50 percent of its rival’s…

Grazed from InformationManagement. Author: Bob Violino.

The transformation of the technology channel continues to accelerate with the shift to cloud services, according to a Canalys survey of channel partners worldwide. A huge majority (96%) of the 352 respondents say they already deliver some of form of “IT-as-a-service”, including managing customer assets on-premises, off-premises hosting or public cloud services.

For most, this still accounts for less than a quarter of revenue. But by 2017, the research firm says, almost two-thirds expect IT-as-a-service to account for more than 25% of revenue. “Product resell is still the most important business model for over 60% of channel partners,” Rachel Brindley, research director, Channels, at Canalys said in a statement. “But they rate the importance of their managed services to their businesses very highly, just behind reselling products.”…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Jamie Hinks.

HP has announced the commercial availability of its Helion OpenStack and Development Platform that gives businesses the chance to benefit from a combined Infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] and Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] solution. The company also announced its new Helion Content Depot that is designed to handle the growth in unstructured data, images and media, and the releases are the first since HP made it clear that it was supporting the OpenStack project in June.

Organisations that choose the Helion OpenStack IaaS get a solution that has predictable scalability, high availability and durability, and low operating costs. The Helion Development PaaS, meanwhile, allows users to develop and implement cloud-native apps using various programming languages and app services…

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

When people think about Ubuntu, they generally think about the desktop. The new release of Ubuntu 14.10 — while it certainly does include a new and improved desktop — saves its biggest improvements for its cloud and server versions. This new release, Utopic Unicorn, features what parent company Canonical calls "the fastest, most secure hypervisors on bare metal, as well as the latest in container technologies with Docker v1.2."

The company also claims that "Ubuntu offers user-level container control, the ability for any user to spin up containers without the need for superuser privileges, providing higher security, privilege separation and greater system robustness." This is a feature that’s being explored in the just released Docker 1.3…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Chicago-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider SingleHop has launched a private cloud solution that leverages tools from EMC (EMC), Veeam, VMware (VMW) and other technology giants. SingleHop’s new release, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), is a cloud-enabled managed IaaS offering that "provides a groundbreaking way for businesses of any size to benefit from a private, yet scalable cloud strategy," SingleHop said.

"Our customers can take advantage of our enterprise-driven network and managed services," Jordan Jacobs, SingleHop’s vice president of products, told Talkin’ Cloud. "Our flagship offering gives customers the ability to granularly choose the level of management they need. We can fully manage our customers’ entire VPC environment, [or] they can manage it themselves and everywhere in between."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/iaas/102314/singlehop-launches-virtual-private-cloud-iaas-solution-enterprises