Grazed from SNAI. Author: PR Announcement.

In case you missed it, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) recently released their version 1.1 of its Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) specification. Highlights of CDMI version 1.1 include:

• New functionality to ease CDMI implementation with other cloud API’s (e.g. AWS S3, OpenStack Swift, etc.)
• Expanded cloud data services along with backwards compatible to earlier versions among other enhancements.

Check out the full specification here.

Speaking of SNIA and CDMI, check out this pod cast post of CDMI in a conversation with Wayne Adams and David Dale of SNIA.

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Barb Darrow.

News this week that Larry Ellison was stepping down as CEO of Oracle rocked the industry. That juicy tidbit came out Thursday afternoon as Oracle disclosed first quarter earnings but as the earnings call unfolded, the story evolved into a Larry-stepping-up-and-over to become executive chairman and CTO.

The new co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd report to that board which he oversees. Soooo, what does that mean?  Talking to a raft of Oracle watchers since Thursday a couple theories have arisen. And, just to make this crystal clear, this is entirely, 100 percent speculation…

Grazed from WhaTech.  Author: Jennifer Germano.

ElasticBox, the company that enables IT as a Service along with real-time collaboration on the delivery of applications, announces the launch of the ElasticBox Virtual Appliance and the ElasticBox MyServer Edition. Now, in addition to supporting public clouds such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, customers can install ElasticBox in their own datacenter and deploy applications on physical or virtual machines.

These features will enable any enterprise–regardless of their adoption of the cloud–to achieve faster time-to-market by adopting DevOps best practices like real-time collaboration between developers and IT operations…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Michael Bushong.

It’s been a busy week here at Plexxi. On Tuesday, we announced our partnership with Cari.net, a high-performance, scalable and flexible hosting platform based on Microsoft Cloud OS.

CARI.net’s newly released CARIcloud service is powered by Plexxi and uses software-defined networking to allow companies to automatically adjust to conditions on their networks and make sure that the most important applications are never starved for performance. The platform enables customers to manage organizations and scale their data centers without being restricted to a single cloud service provider…

Grazed from Morpheus.  Author: 

Following several high-profile development disasters, government IT departments have received a mandate to change their default app-development approach from the traditional top-down model to the agile, iterative, test-centric methodology favored by leading tech companies.

While previous efforts to dynamite the entrenched, moribund IT-contracting process have crashed in flames, analysts hold out hope for the new 18F and U.S. Digital Service initiatives. Given the public’s complete lack of faith in the government’s ability to provide digital services, failure is simply not an option…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Tal Klein.

When Henry Ford started churning out Model Ts on his assembly line in 1908, there hadn’t been an automobile fatality in nearly 40 years — not since Mary Ward was run over by a steam-powered car in Ireland in 1869. But with modern production, engineering improvements, better roads and more cars on them, automobile safety became a growing concern.

One of the car’s most recognizable safety features, the seatbelt, became standard equipment by the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1984 that seatbelt use was made mandatory — over the protestations of the public and industry. Why? After decades of education and awareness, a majority of the public finally came to realize that seatbelts save lives…

Grazed from ISC Events.  Author: PR Announcement.

For the first time, the ISC Cloud Conference is offering attendees an Amazon Web Services tutorial on launching high performance computing clusters in the AWS Cloud. The presenter, Dougal Ballantyne, is a HPC solutions architect at Amazon Web Services. This workshop is free-of-charge for attendees.

This AWS-sponsored workshop will held from 9am to 12pm on September 29, 2014, giving attendees a good introduction to cfncluster, a framework for launching HPC clusters on AWS…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Joseph F. Kovar.

The allure of the cloud is irresistible. Businesses are drawn to the cloud for the promise of flexible compute and storage resources, little or no up-front capital expenses, and the far-from-certain idea that using the cloud costs less than on-premise IT.

However, there is also a large segment of the business market for which the cloud is not the final answer to their IT requirements. And for those looking to get off the cloud and back down to earth, they have as allies their local solution providers who can help find the right balance of cloud and non-cloud technology.  There is no doubt businesses are moving part or all of their IT workloads to some sort of cloud…

Grazed from TechNews.  Author: Shirley Siluk.

Up until now, banking Web sites and other high-security Relevant Products/Services online services looking to prevent hacking attacks have had to make sure their in-house IT infrastructure Relevant Products/Services was up to the task. But CloudFlare, which provides speeded-up access to Web sites through the cloud Relevant Products/Services, has come out with an alternative solution: Keyless SSL that keeps sites secure Relevant Products/Services without the need for organizations to share their private SSL keys with third-party service providers.

"Private clouds are an oxymoron," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post on his company’s site Thursday. With Keyless SSL, however, he said organizations can take advantage of the cloud’s flexibility "without having to turn over their most guarded secrets: their private SSL keys."…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Alpha CEO, tech visionary, philanthropist, America’s Cup champion, owner of his own Hawaiian island — Larry Ellison is a singular personality. He is also among the best sources in Silicon Valley for head-turning quotes.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I retire,” the billionaire Oracle ORCL -4.21% founder once said. “I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.” Ellison stepped down as CEO on Thursday, but he remains chairman of the board and Oracle’s tech chief. That leaves more time for Ellison to generate more wit and wisdom…