Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon Web Services will be updating a substantial number of its cloud servers, and customers are recommended to re-launch their instances in the coming days, according to AWS consultants. Amazon has not said why the reboot is happening, but AWS watchers believe it is to patch a security issue. The company will be updating many of its servers between Thursday, Sept. 25 at 10 PM ET and Tuesday Sept. 30 at 7:59 PM ET, according to Amazon partner and cloud consultancy RightScale.

On Wednesday evening AWS sent out a notice to at least a portion of its customers notifying them of “required host maintenance,” according to an email an AWS user sent to Network World. The notice to customers does not explain why the reboot is necessary, but speculation is swirling that it is to patch a security bug in the Xen hypervisor…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Kenneth Corbin.

Within the federal government, the shift toward virtualization and cloud computing is already well underway, but agency and industry officials warn that those migrations invite new security considerations, particularly in the form of insider threats. Eric Chiu, president of the cloud and virtualization security firm HyTrust, notes the familiar list of arguments in favor of virtualizing servers and systems – lower costs and increased agility and efficiency chief among them – but points out that there are dangers associated with that transition.

"Virtualization also concentrates risk … You’re taking what used to be lots of separate physical systems that had their own configurations, their own separate management consoles, their own separate group of experts that managed them, and you’re collapsing all that functionality onto a single software layer," Chiu said during a panel discussion hosted by Federal News Radio. "Any virtualization admin can access any VM, could copy any VM, could delete or destroy any VM," he adds. "If you look at today’s threat, it’s really coming from the inside."…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

The cloud computing marketplace is continuing to evolve and the heavyweights are not sitting on the sidelines. As DCK noted this week, Digital Realty is partnering with Carpathia to provide hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions, and 365 Data Centers entered the cloud storage business. This is just the latest among many moves, including IBM’s purchase of SoftLayer, in the cloud infrastructure space.

Cloud computing definitely has an influence on data center operators and owners, said Jack Story of the AFCOM Data Center Institute (DCI) Board of Directors and HP Distinguished Technologist. Story, with 24-plus years of experience in outsourcing and the service provider industry, will lead a panel titled, “Data Centers and Cloud: A Perfect Storm” at the Orlando Data Center World Conference next month…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Those who implement cloud computing in general, and AWS in particular, are often confused by the role that managed services providers play. Cost and simplicity are driving the movement to leverage AWS through managed services providers as enterprises look for more ways to consume AWS services. These services are easier to mix and match with existing applications, and provide a better and more effective way to leverage AWS.

Managed services providers can place a well-defined layer of infrastructure, management, and governance between the cloud provider, in this case, AWS, and those who consume AWS as a managed service. Managed service providers get enterprises on-boarded quickly to AWS, and avoid initial issues that many enterprises encounter when going directly to AWS…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Numerify on Wednesday said it has raised $15 million in funding to continue building out its cloud-based business analytics product portfolio. Sequoia Capital led the Series B financing round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners; Amit Singh, president of Google for Work; Deep Nishar, senior vice president of products and user experience at LinkedIn; and Lane Bess, former CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

The Cupertino, California-based company provides IT business analytics through Numerify360, its cloud-native platform that assists organizations with gaining visibility into IT assets through each stage of their productive use. Numerify said it will use the additional funds to expand its marketing sales and efforts, as it seeks to double the size of the company in the next year. It also plans to fill out its suite of cloud analytics applications…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/numerify-raises-15m-venture-capital-cloud-based-business-analyti

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has topped the list of industry sectors in which venture capitalists feel most confident about investing, for the second year in a row, according to the 2014 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey, from Deloitte and the US based National Venture Capital.

The tenth annual survey, conducted in May and June of 2014, questioned more than 300 venture capital, private equity and growth equity investors in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. It sought to assess investor confidence in the global venture capital environment and understand market factors shaping industries and investments in specific geographies and industry sectors…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

While the cloud is a "very viable scenario," there are some things that do not belong in the cloud, such as nuclear command and control, says David Bennett, CIO of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), a Department of Defense cloud computing broker. Sure, midsize companies may not have the power to level nations and scorch the earth, but there is solid advice here — the cloud is ideal for many things, but not for everything.

Shields Up

According to a recent CIO article, Bennett has a message for the leaders of other agencies: "carefully consider which data sources and applications are suitable for a remotely hosted and managed environment." His feeling is that certain assets must stay behind local perimeters. Determining what is suitable for the cloud means taking a hard look at existing data sources and applications to identify "crown jewels" that are better safe than as-a-service. He also calls out the need for continuous monitoring that goes beyond watching data to cover an entire business network, everything from application behavior to bandwidth use to employee activity. And of course, it is critical to have access to this monitoring data in real-time…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: Damon Poeter.

Broadcom on Wednesday introduced a new line of high-density, 25/100 gigabit Ethernet switches for cloud-scale data centers. The new StrataXGS Tomahawk Series is currently sampling to equipment makers, software developers, network operators and OS vendors, and interconnect solution providers, the company said.

StrataXGS Tomahawk Ethernet switches are the "first to deliver 32 ports of 100GE, 64 ports of 40GE/50GE, or 128 ports of 25GE on a single chip," helping cloud service operators scale out quicker and more affordably, according to Broadcom. The additional bandwidth and support for the new 25GE and 50GE protocol standards provided by the new Tomahawk switches should appeal to builders of high performance computing (HPC) environments as well as "mega data center" operators building out leaf-spine networking architectures, the company said…

Read more from the source @ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2469102,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03069TX1K0001121&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fpcmag%2Fbreakingnews+(PCMag.com+Breaking+News)

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Oracle has officially released its Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux, its distribution of the OpenStack cloud framework that integrates with Oracle Linux and the Oracle VM Server virtualisation platform, providing customers with increased choice and interoperability when building cloud infrastructure, the firm said.

Available as a free download from Oracle’s Public Yum Server and the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN), Oracle’s OpenStack build installs on top of Oracle Linux and allows users to operate virtual machines using any guest operating system supported by Oracle VM Server, including Microsoft Windows, Oracle Solaris and other versions of Linux…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Roland Moore-Colyer.

Cloud is one of the biggest trends in the IT industry, driving revenues for major technology brands and changing the way organisations manage their IT infrastructures and processes. As such, virtually every major technology firm has its approach to adopting the cloud, and Dell recently outlined its cloud strategy at the company’s 2014 Solutions Summit attended by V3.

However, unlike other tech giants, Dell’s approach, according to Nick Hyner, EMEA director of Cloud Services at Dell, is to act as a facilitator of cloud adoption for enterprises, rather than provide its own cloud services. This might come as a surprise as Dell – a manufacturer of servers and a provider of cloud-ready tools, with vast resources at its disposal – might be expected to set up its own service similar to that of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Cloud…