Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Hyperconverged IT systems (or hyper-converged networks if you prefer a hyphen and a rather less generic term than ‘systems’) are the new darlings of the software management community. Well, they will be if the major vendors behind these products and methodologies have their way.

Often spoken of in the same breath as the (dreaded) so-called ‘business and technology transformation process’, hyperconvergence is a logical bedfellow for the cloud computing, dashboard (and console-view) management and software-defined worlds that it emanates from. But what is it?…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today at VMworld(R) 2014, VMware, NVIDIA and Google announced a collaborative effort to deliver high-performance virtual desktops and workstation-class graphics to Google Chromebooks. Showcased as a technology preview, the solution demonstrates the next generation of VMware Blast Performance and NVIDIA GRID(TM) vGPU(TM) technology to satisfy customers’ most demanding visual computing needs. The joint effort is expected to expand the hardware options for high-performance virtual desktops, enabling customers to select their system of choice without compromise.

"We are breaking down traditional barriers to adopting virtual desktops and offering new economics for the delivery of graphics-intensive applications through the power of the cloud," said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. "Organizations of all industries and requirements will soon be able to embrace the mobile-cloud using a solution that offers a new way to work from three proven industry leaders."…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ – Analyst Report) and VMware, Inc. (VMW – Snapshot Report) recently joined forces to deploy software-defined networking (SDN) aided infrastructure to deliver enhanced performance for networking customers. Through this collaboration, Hewlett-Packard will combine its Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller with the VMware NSX network virtualization platform that provides a private cloud-based service.

This would make the cloud-computing environment more secure, simple, flexible and efficient. The announcement also stated that VMware’s enterprise-class virtualization technologies will be supported by HP’s Helion OpenStack services. The partnership will enable Hewlett-Packard to offer an efficient and improved hybrid IT environment to drive performance…

Grazed from LightReading. Author: Mitch Wagner.

Hot Interconnects — Google relies on its Andromeda networking platform to deliver a global cloud infrastructure that gives customers the security and performance benefits of local private networks. "We want bare-metal performance and low latency for the services we deliver," said Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Distinguished Engineer Amin Vahdat, delivering a keynote at the conference here today.

SDN is key to delivering the needed performance and security, he said. SDN at its most fundamental involves separating the control plane from the data plane, Vahdat noted. "A logically centralized hierarchical control plane beats peer-to-peer every time," he said. The data plane can run at network speed, while the control plane can run on commodity hardware, scaling as needed. The control plane requires 1% of the overhead of the entire network, Vahdat said…

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Steve Brooks.

VMWare announced EVO:RAIL on the first day of VMWorld in San Francisco and Fujitsu immediately announced their first VMWare specific hardware appliance. There were a total of six vendors named by VMWare who will produce the SDDC appliance (Software Defined Data Centre): Fujitsu, Dell, Supermicro, EMC, Inspur and Net One

Of the six vendors, Fujitsu are the only one to have their appliance available immediately. Dell is due in September while Supermicro, EMC, Inspur and Net One have no ship date yet. The latter two vendors are also only focused on the Asia Pacfic market while Fujitsu, Dell, Supermicro and EMC will ship worldwide. the big four vendors are no stranger to the appliance market and have worked with other vendors such as SAP to deliver solution specific appliances…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudForms is Red Hat’s cloud management platform, built from the open source ManageIQ acquired in December 2012 and part of the company’s new open hybrid cloud program that aims to converge private, public and hybrid clouds.

Yesterday Red Hat announced version 3.1 of CloudForms, that will be generally available in September also as a part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, this new release will introduces the following new capabilities:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

There has been much discussion over the past year or two as to just how committed Google is to executing upon its chance to be one of the big cloud infrastructure vendors. Sure they have the technical know-how and scale, but do they have all the cultural and organizational components that are required to deliver a real enterprise business?

Increasingly the answer to that question is yes, Google understands that it needs to develop an ecosystem, embrace partnership, reach out to press and analysts and talk about its road-map in order to build faith within large businesses. I had breakfast this morning with Greg Demichillie, head of product management for the Google Cloud Platform product group (disclosure: I had an omelette, Google paid). We discussed the challenges and opportunities that Google faces…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Jive Software has pushed out updates for the cloud versions of both its enterprise social networking (ESN) suite and its JiveX software for building external online communities. The main enhancement for the Jive ESN suite is what the company is touting as native integration with Cisco’s WebEx and Jabber, following a partnership the vendors announced in May.

Back then, Cisco said it was axing its WebEx Social ESN suite, formerly called Quad, and that it would resell the Jive suite instead. The bundle includes WebEx Meetings and Jabber for online meetings, Web conferencing, IM and audio/video communications, and Jive’s ESN software…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Kymm McCabe.

For acquisition professionals, buying cloud computing is a bit like stepping from a 21st-century city into the Wild West. Federal buyers must move from the known, predictable, more or less standard procurement world into one that is unknown, unfamiliar and as yet untamed. It’s no wonder that in ASI Government’s polls of acquisition professionals at 110 federal organizations, 64 percent of respondents believe they lack the necessary technical expertise in cloud computing and thus are challenged in structuring contracts for it.

"There’s no exact fit for commercial cloud in the [Federal Acquisition Regulation]," Mark Day, deputy assistant commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Office of Integrated Technology Services, told attendees at a March conference on cloud acquisition. Agencies that have acquired cloud services have done so in different ways, and only with time will it become clear which approaches work best, said Michael McFarland, director of GSA’s Office of Acquisition Operations…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

Over the last two years, due to career changes, I’ve made the transition from datacenter consolidation specialist to a cloud architect. It could be argued that very little has actually changed in terms of the tools of the trade and the methodologies that I work with, as both make heavy use of virtualization and systems automation, but the reality is that I haven’t done a lot of work in the datacenter itself since shifting the focus of what I do.

In my professional life, I help hosters, service providers and ISVs build new cloud offerings, whether they are deployed as IaaS, desktops as a service or hosted/subscriber applications via SaaS. If it’s cloud in the public or in the private space, I’m all over it. Until recently though, I didn’t practice what I preached. Vestiges of my former life still existed, in the form of my own private server lab, which I used for software testing and storing files and for multitudes of other things…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/why-i-ditched-my-servers-for-the-cloud-7000032959/