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…

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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…

Grazed from Investors. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Alibaba Group (NYSE:BABA) would face big challenges taking on U.S. cloud computing service giants, which have boosted capital spending to expand data centers globally, says Oppenheimer. A TechCrunch report speculated that Alibaba, which raised $25 billion in its initial public offering on Friday, could use its war chest to challenge Amazon Web Services, part of e-commerce leader Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN); Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan says Alibaba would be playing catch-up. "We believe that the three dominant U.S. cloud providers are years ahead of any potential competition," Horan wrote in a report. "Alibaba would almost certainly need to build out a massive data center infrastructure within the U.S. to gain any sort of traction, since we doubt U.S. enterprises would be willing to store their proprietary data in China regardless of cost…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat Inc. CEO Jim Whitehurst says the IT industry is undergoing a momentous shift from the client-server model to cloud-mobile, and the vendor of enterprise Linux and other open source software is pushing to come out the other end on top. In the blog post, "Only a Matter of Time, Cloud Winners Will Be Chosen Soon," Whitehurst yesterday outlined recent moves and successes of the company while letting everyone know that enterprise cloud vendor supremacy is the next target.

"Right now, we’re in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile," Whitehurst said. "It’s a once-every-20-years kind of change. As history has shown us, in the early days of those changes, winners emerge that set the standards for that era — think Wintel in the client-server arena…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Nigel Beighton, VP Technology, Rackspace, discusses the five most common cloud problems customers face, and how businesses can overcome these.

1. Support

The most common cloud services complaint is the lack of support and management that comes when businesses are embarking on any level of cloud migration. Businesses need to consider their wider approach to cloud operations first and ask themselves if they are going to run it internally, 24×7 or get someone else to do the hard work of scaling, automation controls and data recovery when needed. Businesses that have a trained staff-base can do this internally, but many don’t so an understanding and sympathetic support layer cannot be overvalued…

Grazed from ChinaTechNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Chinese technology company Lenovo announced a new cloud computing program during its enterprise business strategy and ThinkServer Gen5 launch meeting. The company also published its self-developed cloud platform management solution named ThinkCloud.

Gerry Smith, Lenovo Group’s executive vice president, head of enterprise and head of Lenovo’s North America operations, said that apart from PC, enterprise business is another major profit contributor for Lenovo. By acquiring IBM’s X86 server business, Lenovo aims at the top of the global server market…

Grazed from InsuranceNews. Author: PR Announcement.

In conjunction with its flagship event, Forecast 2014, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today announced a new organizational charter, formation of a Cloud Expert Network and new workgroup structure. The new charter provides focus on driving widespread adoption of enterprise cloud computing through best practice sharing and collaboration with the industry on availability of solution choice based on ODCA requirements.

With IT leaders pressured to drive new levels of organizational agility through cloud service delivery and private cloud expected to grow to a $130 billion industry by 2016, the demand for collaboration across enterprises accelerating cloud adoption is acute…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Noelle.

Information Technology’s great advances — mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers and even virtualization — all developed without significant support of standards. Yet standard APIs, operating systems and middleware seem essential today. Networking followed a similar path, with ad hoc TCP/IP defeating formal international standards like OSI, only to be challenged by software-defined and standards-based networking.

The cloud is the fusion of IT and networking, and it’s fair to ask what role standards will play in its evolution. The scope of cloud standards and the variety of cloud models, however, complicate the topic. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published an excellent summary of cloud standards that are particularly applicable for the government sector but also valuable to enterprises…