Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Natalie Lerner.

Here is what we know so far. Alibaba, the largest ecommerce company in China has a cloud computing component, called Aliyun (or AliCloud). It was established in the later part of 2009, with R&D centers and operators in Hangzhou, Beijing and Silicon Valley. Aliyun has steadily been growing its cloud offering, and in earlier last month, Aliyun entered into a partnership deal with Inspur, the largest high-end cloud computing company in China. Thereby enabling them to offer a complete package of cloud computing services within China. Their clientele are mainly either local businesses operating locally or local businesses operating in other countries.

It is reported that last year, Alibaba had revenue of $102 million just from cloud and infrastructure sales, this is a 26% increase from the year before. Also, back in May of this year, Alibaba made a clear statement on their cloud-focused intentions, “We have made, and intend to continue to make, strategic investments and acquisitions to expand our user base, enhance our cloud computing business, add complementary products and technologies and further strengthen our ecosystem…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Path. Author: Pravin Anchan.

Hewlett Packard has just introduced a low cost virtual private cloud offering in the shape of HP Helion Virtual Private Cloud Lean. This is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) aimed at improving workload performance for mid to large sized enterprises with an emphasis on collaborations and application development.

The Helion VPCL includes some standard sized features such as virtualization, backup, recovery and clustering plus SAP HANA add-ons. HP’s VPCL assures lower latency, higher availability, more security and better compliance in a low priced offering. According to Jim Fanella, VP of workload and cloud for HP Enterprise Services, VPCL offers affordable enterprise class performance…

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: David H. Deans.

What if you could deploy a new IT service shortly after you defined the requirements? And, just imagine the bliss, if your IT spend could directly translate into a competitive advantage. Predicting the ROI would be relatively easy. You would be the envy of your peer group. Unfortunately, as most senior executives already know, it’s never that simple.

Typically, you perform the technology assessment due diligence up-front, you place your bets based upon the most compelling guidance, and then you closely monitor the results. It’s an iterative process, where confidence builds over time. Maybe that’s why new business technology spending tends to be aligned with a past success…

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Signe Brewster.

IBM’s pursuit of a chip far more powerful, small and light than the existing options takes its inspiration from a familiar source: the human brain. The company revealed the second generation of its SyNAPSE chip today that lead researcher Dharmendra Modha described as “a supercomputer the size of a stamp, the weight of a feather.” And it consumes the same amount of power as a hearing aid.

“I’m holding in my hand a new machine for a new era,” Modha said in an interview. “When we started the SyNAPSE project many people thought it was impossible. As we look to the future, possible can become real. This could open up a whole new frontier of scientific exploration and commercial exploitation.”…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

It appears that Rackspace (RAX) is ceding the growing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market to its competitors, instead preferring to focus on supporting customers that are planning to build their own clouds. According to a Network World article, the OpenStack company plans to discontinue its IaaS offering while shifting its focus entirely to its existing managed cloud business.

One could look at this as Lady Luck not being on Rackspace’s side, but it looks more like the company is finally recognizing where its strengths-and weaknesses-lie. Instead of competing against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (MSFT), Google Cloud (GOOG) and others making up the growing IaaS market, which Rackspace has been doing for the last few years, it makes a lot of sense for the cloud company to bow out…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A federal District Court judge’s ruling last week that stated Microsoft must comply with a U.S. warrant for customer data stored in a data center in Ireland could impede progress for American cloud companies hoping to continue growing their European Union accounts. The ruling, which Microsoft will be fighting, came from U.S. District Court Judge Loretta A. Preska and has to do with a narcotics investigation in which the feds are demanding access to some Microsoft customer emails stored in Ireland.

Cloud security solutionas provider CloudPassage commented on the ruling, noting it could inhibit the adoption of cloud within the European Union. "As the result of the District Court ruling last week in the Microsoft case, coupled with the NSA PRISM program, U.S. policy is having a serious negative impact on the ability of U.S. technology companies to compete in the global market for cloud-based services and infrastructure," wrote Carson Sweet, founder and CEO of CloudPassage, in a statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/public-cloud/080714cloudpassage-microsoft-ruling-impact-us-cloud-providers

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Fay Humphries.

A successful shift to cloud computing involves, among other considerations, identifying the current business and IT issues that need to be addressed, understanding the risks and making the right infrastructure decisions for the business. Moving to the cloud can reduce costs, while meeting the need for the improved computing resources required to drive business, says Jon Tullett, senior editor: news analysis at ITWeb.

"Among the primary reasons CIOs implement cloud computing strategies, which has been borne out by several research houses, is to improve their business agility," he says. "And, while there are companies who haven’t seen any significant advantages and who may in fact have disrupted their business operations by adopting the cloud, there is an increasing number who have increased their competitive edge and seen real benefits."…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: David Linthicum.

Private cloud was popular in the early days of cloud computing when enterprises struggled with security and control issues. These days, public cloud dominates, as revealed in the recent “State of the Cloud Study” from RightScale. The reasons for the growth of public clouds are pretty clear, including low operating costs, instant scalability, and the ability to better support changing businesses. However, the private cloud still has a place in IT, and understanding what’s about to emerge in the private cloud space will give you a better focus on this pattern of cloud architecture.

Private clouds are being leveraged as points-of-control or interfaces into public clouds. These emerging hybrid clouds or multi-cloud architectures use a tiered approach where the private cloud (tier 1) links to public cloud services (tier 2), and those looking to access cloud services do so using the private cloud services as the primary interface. Then, as needed, the private cloud leverages the public cloud services…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Rick Delgato.

We are in a new technological phase spurring innovation and job creation. One job, the big data architect, offers IT pros great prospects in the growing field of big data analytics. In 2013, 65 percent of IT buyers indicated cloud computing as a top area of investment for 2013. In addition, it’s predicted that by 2015, 60 percent of information workers will access their content via mobile devices.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud-computing company Box, described the rapid adoption of mobile and cloud computing as the next phase in technology. For those in the IT space or just the business world in general, technological phases are nothing new. As first mainframes and then PCs were adopted, companies learned to adapt. They adapt their IT infrastructure they run their business off of. They change the way they interact with the consumer, and of course, new technology requires new skills and expertise introducing new job positions in the IT industry…

To view infographic and read more from the source, visit: http://smartdatacollective.com/rick-delgado/223076/latest-technological-phase-and-what-it-pros-should-do-about-it

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ram Lakshminarayanan.

As far as open source pedigree goes, OpenStack is of a pretty high calibre. Born out of a joint initiative between NASA and Rackspace in July 2010, its main goal was to simplify the management of both private and public cloud computing services deployed on traditional computer hardware. Since then it has attracted the support of many high-profile corporate partners such as Intel, IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC and Red Hat. Under the guidance of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity formed in September 2012, the platform has steadily matured into a fully-featured cloud-building platform. OpenStack’s current stable version (codenamed "Icehouse") is the ninth release to date.

Integrating OpenStack into a corporate IT strategy can provide several key benefits. By removing the complexity behind managing and deploying on-demand infrastructure, the platform can dramatically reduce the time required to build applications and bring new products to market…