Grazed from BitCoinMagazine.  Author: Cameron Gray.

The future of cloud storage is decentralization. Imagine being able to rent out your extra hard drive space through an autonomous network and getting paid for it in a cryptocurrency. This is being made possible thanks to Satoshi Nakamoto and platforms such as Storj, Maidsafe, Ethereum and others.  Now that we have the ability to tie P2P currency to resources such as storage space, bandwidth usage, and CPU power, services like Dropbox and Google Drive will be getting a run for their money.

Unlike other 2.0 platforms, Storj has decided to take a “baby steps” approach for developing their software. They want to build their system out in small, modular pieces first so that they can be used as working prototypes. The first of these pieces is a drag-and-drop file hosting web app called Metadisk, which recently had its whitepaper and video tutorial released…

Grazed from Jurist.org.  Author: Jason Kellam.

In a recent proceeding before the US Court, Microsoft was ordered to turn-over email belonging to a user of its hosted mail service. That email belonged to a user outside the US. The email itself was located on a server in a data center in Ireland—outside the US, which should be out of the reach of US authorities and subject to the requirements of the EU privacy laws. Microsoft challenged the order and lost.

They argued that the court lacked jurisdiction over this particular data as it was stored outside the US, and therefore it was not subject to disclosure. They were wrong.  On April 25, 2014, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis of the Southern District of New York issued a memorandum and order upholding a subpoena ordering Microsoft to turn-over information held on a server in a datacenter in Ireland…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

Measuring ROI for cloud usage is no doubt a difficult task, and when prospective clients are considering potential cloud-based MSPs, it may still be something they want to hear about. However each company is different and MSPs need to be able to modify their approaches accordingly. As this article from InformationWeek explains, there are big differences between a new, fast growing company like Airbnb and a monolithic, experienced company like GE, and how they use cloud services such as cloud-based file sharing.

You Merely Adopted the Cloud, We Were Born in It

The perception of the cloud is clearly very different to a company such as Airbnb versus a company like GE. Airbnb, a company that provides a platform where people can rent their apartments or vacation homes directly to strangers via the internet, has never even had its own data center. Six years ago the company launched via cloud services, and subsequently built all of their applications in the cloud…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

Treading lightly, Apple acknowledged that it has started to store the personal data Relevant Products/Services of some Chinese users on servers in China. Reuters initially reported that Apple’s success in China led to the first iCloud data center Relevant Products/Services to be located on mainland China. The center was built by Apple and a state-owned telecommunications company, China Telecom, the country’s third-largest wireless carrier.

Apple told Reuters in a statement that China Telecom was added to its list of data center providers in order to improve its iCloud service, which lets users store and access photos and other personal files from multiple devices. Apple said storing the data closer to the iCloud users gives them quicker and more reliable access to it…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Matt Asay.

Despite early marketing hype, public cloud computing has never been popular because it’s cheap. Ultimately, the real driver of public cloud computing services — like Amazon Web Services (AWS) — is convenience, but undergirding that convenience is profound, relentless innovation. While AWS has competition from Microsoft and Google now, no one yet has managed its ability to drive innovation at a frenetic pace.

Not so cheap after all?

Lately, AWS has come under attack from competitors like Google and Microsoft, who are willing to offer significant price discounts, and also from startups and others who believe that they can more cost efficiently run their own infrastructure. Leading this latter pack is investor Brad Feld, who argues:…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lou D’Adamo.

Can using the Cloud really save you money? According to the Huffington Post, Parallels, a software company that enables companies like GoDaddy and Sprint to offer cloud services to small and medium businesses, reported that the cloud services industry grew to $45 billion worldwide last year. Helping to drive that were 6 million small and medium businesses purchasing their first cloud service last year alone. And, the report projects that the market is expected to grow annually at a rate of 28 percent through 2015 to be a $95 billion industry.

A Cloud storage application that you might consider is Google Drive. Google Drive gives you the ability to securely save your important documents to the cloud. This means that your document isn’t physically stored on any one device, but rather, it’s stored on a secure internet server and is accessible from any Internet or data-enabled device…

Grazed from FedTechMagazine. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

The Defense Department is seriously considering how it can move certain classifications of sensitive data into secure cloud environments operated by private companies. DoD’s acting CIO, Terry Halvorsen, said the department will announce five pilots within the next 20 days. “I won’t give you the exact timeline, but it could be the first of September,” Halvorsen told attendees Wednesday at the Federal Forum conference in Washington, D.C.

Halvorsen’s team received approval to begin testing how DoD can migrate level 3 and level 4 military data to the cloud. These classification levels are for controlled unclassified information (CUI), which includes data that are For Official Use Only (FOUO), Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) or DoD Unclassified Controlled Nuclear Information…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

SUSE has launched an updated version of its private cloud solution. This latest version, dubbed SUSE Cloud 4, was designed based on OpenStack Icehouse, the latest version of the open source cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. In addition to being based on Icehouse, SUSE Cloud 4 also supports the Ceph distributed storage system, but it also includes new VMware (VMW) capabilities and enhanced scalability, automation and availability features for easing enterprise adoption of OpenStack, the company stated.

"SUSE Cloud makes it easy and cost-effective to implement a highly available, mixed-hypervisor private cloud infrastructure. And the addition of Ceph distributed storage capabilities increases the value and flexibility of SUSE Cloud in almost any enterprise," said Michael Miller, SUSE vice president of Global Alliances and Marketing, in a prepared statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-and-open-source/081514/suse-unveils-icehouse-openstack-private-cloud

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: Jordan Tigani and Siddartha Naidu.

When you run your queries via BigQuery, you put a giant cluster of machines to work for you. Although the BigQuery clusters represent only a small fraction of Google’s global fleet, each query cluster is measured in the thousands of cores. When BigQuery needs to grow, there are plenty of resources that can be harnessed to meet the demand.

If you want to, you could probably figure out the size of one of BigQuery’s compute clusters by carefully controlling the size of data being scanned in your queries. The number of processor cores involved is in the thousands, the number of disks in the hundreds of thousands. Most organizations don’t have the budget to build at that kind of scale just to run some queries over their data. The benefits of the Google cloud go beyond the amount of hardware that is used, however. A massive datacenter is useless unless you can keep it running…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Brendan Gregg.

How do cloud-hosted workloads affect data center systems differently than virtualized and physical infrastructures? Are there steps that admins can take to prepare themselves for performance diagnostics and improvement once their infrastructure moves to cloud? Start by getting up to speed with different Web server and database architectures because scalability is more horizontal than vertical across new instances. You can scale further with cloud computing vs. virtualization, and more closely match your IT spend with the workload. That’s great, but you now have many more distributed systems to analyze.

On a cloud infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of server instances, you can’t solve performance issues until you identify the right instances to target. This requires skills in distributed system monitoring. Often the performance issue subsides naturally or from auto-scaling of the cloud infrastructure, so the administrator must identify the problem instances after the event. At the very least, enable the Linux tool sar to track historical data…