Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Dan Sullivan.

Application monitoring tools give cloud admins insight into application performance and other crucial issues. These tools help admins understand complex distributed systems, which can often behave in unexpected ways. As more developers move from programming for single servers to writing distributed applications, they will come to depend on monitoring tools.

Most cloud providers, as well as third parties, offer deployment management and monitoring tools. Google is expanding the range of services and tools that are available to developers and system administrators with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace and Cloud Debugger. Google’s Cloud Monitoring tool is generally available today, and Cloud Trace and Cloud Debugger are in private beta release…

Grazed from Investors.com  Author: Juan Carlos Arancibia.

OpenText doesn’t fit neatly into any one business category. Rather, it’s a collection of businesses ranging from document management to e-mail management.  But it all boils down to what is known as enterprise information management. That’s the technology that helps companies organize, secure and maximize use of their information warehouses.

OpenText is aiming much of its growth at cloud computing, where companies can access and manage data over the Internet. In January, it closed the $1.17 billion acquisition of GXS Group, a business-to-business cloud integration services provider…

Grazed from Press Enterprise.  Author:  Courtney Kaufman.

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of hype and excitement over the potential value of cloud computing, or the “cloud,” for the business environment.  The biggest problem has been that most people really don’t understand what cloud computing is or how it works. If you’re still not 100 percent sure what it is, you’re not alone. Even television shows and commercials commonly make fun of the term by mentioning it and then quickly reacting with, “What is the cloud?” or “Where is the cloud?”

Simply put, cloud computing is using the Internet to access your files, emails, data, applications and more. Instead of storing your files, applications and other data on a computer or server at your office, you’re storing them on high-speed, high-security servers that you can access anytime, anywhere via the Internet with nearly any device…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

File sharing and data security provider CertainSafe launched its new partner program this month as the company looks to garner more interest among U.S. resellers and VARs for its cloud-based file sharing and storage solution. With the new SecurePlus Partner Program, CertainSafe said its reseller partners could get easier access to its solutions and benefit from exclusive reseller sales and marketing opportunities.

The SecurePlus program will have a standard three-tier structure, with partner placement depending on combined quarterly purchases from the company’s solutions. As is standard with other partner programs, each tier will come with its own partner discounts, marketing programs and services, as well as other benefits, including a dedicated sales team for Gold and Platinum partners…

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Editorial Staff.

The Shenzhen datacentre will house approximately 10,000 servers and will provide a number of cloud services including infrastructure as a service, load balancing, relational database service, open storage service and open caching service among others. “As part of our ongoing commitment to enhance our services to better serve the cloud computing needs of users, we have chosen to open a datacentre in Shenzhen to provide customers with more options for network nodes and further enhance the reliability of user application services and response speed,” said Ben Wang, president of AliCloud.

“For users in Southern China and the Pearl River Delta region, using Shenzhen nodes will lower network latency, reduce data transmission time, and greatly enhance the user experience,” Wang added. The datacentre in Shenzhen comes just a few months after the company announced its first foray outside of mainland China with the construction of a Hong Kong cloud facility. The company has three other cloud computing datacentres in Hangzhou, Qingdao, and Beijing…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Microsoft Azure took an unexpected dirt nap last week. This is not good news for Microsoft, which identified the Azure IaaS and PaaS cloud as key to its success. Azure competes against Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, and others, with AWS and Google as the main rivals. Among such contenders, Azure can’t afford many missteps.

I don’t take outages seriously unless they start to form a pattern. All public cloud providers, Microsoft included, are learning how to operate a public cloud service in real time. Outages are a fact of life, at least occasionally. Notice that the other cloud providers did not chime in with criticism? They know they could be next, and nearly all have experienced their own outages…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dirk-Peter Van Leeuwen.

If there was any lingering doubt, it appears the cloud is truly here. Many organizations around the world have adopted or are taking steps to adopt cloud computing, with Gartner predicting that nearly half of all large companies will be using hybrid cloud within the next three years.

With benefits such as efficiency, cost-effectiveness and scalability well advertised, this rise in uptake is hardly surprising. As with any other major organization-wide implementation projects, however, adopting the cloud is no walk in the park – and enterprises need to take steps to enjoy a smooth and seamless migration…

Grazed from BRW. Author: Mark Randall.

Many studies have shown that Australian businesses are increasingly adopting cloud computing, with a large proportion of the systems and applications that we use day-to-day migrating to the cloud. As IT becomes an integral part of each business function, it’s increasingly important for non-IT professionals to gain a top-level understanding of technical terms, in order to better execute their own responsibilities.

If your business is considering moving to the cloud, one of the biggest challenges that you will face is your ability to understand all the terms that cloud vendors and “techies” throw around. Below are some of the most commonly used cloud terms, starting with Amazon’s most popular Compute, Storage and Database offerings in the Cloud, followed by some other generic, but seemingly confusing terms…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

As organizations look to take advantage of the emergence of cloud, analytics and mobile technologies, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that this trend is driving interest in IBM systems in geographies around the world. In fact, a recent IBM study illustrates that four technologies – Big Data and Analytics, Cloud, Mobile and Social – are no longer just buzzwords but have become key ingredients of enterprise software development and IT infrastructures. Seventy percent of enterprises are now using Big Data and Analytics, Cloud, Mobile and Social and 75 percent of enterprise decision makers now consider these technologies as strategically important to their organizations, up from 66 percent in 2012. [1]

"IT infrastructure is crucial to meet the demands of clients in this new era of computing," said Stephen Leonard, General Manager, Sales, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "A new generation of IBM systems is helping clients modernize their IT environments for emerging big data, cloud computing, mobile and social technologies. Clients are migrating from non-IBM systems to infrastructures based on these IBM systems and the results they are seeing demonstrate that the right infrastructure does matter."…

Grazed from NetApp. Author: PR Announcement.

NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced it is extending its more than a decade-long alliance with VMware to help customers transition to an IT future that is increasingly software defined and embraces cloud computing. As a leader in software-defined storage (SDS), NetApp is forging a deeper technology relationship with VMware to accelerate modern software-defined data center deployments as a foundational step to the hybrid cloud.

At VMworld® 2014, NetApp was announced as a key design partner for VMware Virtual Volumes, the new storage architecture for software-defined data center approaches. Additionally, NetApp and VMware continue their commitment to working together on application deployment and accelerating cloud desktop deployment. The companies are partnering on development with VMware Horizon® to help enterprises move applications and desktops to the cloud, and by doing so delivering them as a managed service to customers, enabling total cost reduction of desktop ownership…