Grazed from CNBC. Ari Levy.

In the cloud-computing market, Google and Amazon.com have been embroiled in a brutal pricing war. So when news broke in May that smaller rival Rackspace had hired Morgan Stanley to explore strategic options amid such stiff competition, Rackspace’s president, Taylor Rhodes, expected a six-month parade of discussions with customers concerned about his company’s future.

Instead, Rackspace has been signing up clients at an accelerated pace even as its status remains unresolved, Rhodes said. The company’s pitch has long been that the raw computing power and storage in the cloud is becoming commoditized and that there’s money to be made selling services and support on top of it to the many businesses that need the help…

Increasing numbers of corporate IT and service provider organizations are deploying open source KVM and Xen. Despite this adoption, there are few concrete examples of large scale, mission critical deployments of open source virtualization.

The biggest obstacle we see is a lack of scalable management tools and processes. In this webinar, we will demonstrate three key steps to implement a scalable management approach that will allow you to manage thousands of hosts and virtual machines. Specifically:

1. Centralize and Automate Your Management – Move to a single point of visibility and control, allowing you to provision, configure, administer, monitor, and automate your entire virtualized infrastructure from a centralized, web-based console… 

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Hannah Breeze.

The U.S. government must clean up the act of its National Security Agency (NSA) if trust in cloud providers is to be restored, according to a think tank. In its Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom and Cybersecurity report, the New America Foundation (NAF) claims U.S. cloud firms have borne the brunt of the NSA scandal.

“Trust in American businesses has decreased since the initial reports on the PRISM programme suggested that the NSA was directly tapping into the servers of nine U.S. companies to obtain customer data for national security investigations,” the report said. “Given heightened concern about the NSA’s ability to access data stored by U.S. companies, American companies that offer cloud computing and web-hosting services are experiencing the most acute economic fallout.”…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Massoud Marzban.

There have been a number of stories recently in the press about some big happenings in the cloud space. IBM recently reported double-digit profits from its cloud products division, and over in the US, the state of California just announced that they are moving much of their infrastructure to a cloud-based approach.

In the past, I’ve been asked to comment on a number of these stories and I’ve been more than happy to add my two cents. But then I thought, "I’ve got much more than a few one-line quotes to share", and so I’ve decided to take off my Business Development hat for a while and try on a tech reporter’s hat for a change…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Alan Ho.

Earlier in July, one of the biggest cloud computing trends to make headlines in recent years celebrated another milestone when it reached its fourth birthday. OpenStack has grown and developed over the past four years, to the point where it is now garnering serious attention from IT executives and developers around the world. One region that is picking up its rate of OpenStack interest is the Asia-Pacific, which hosted the region’s first OpenStack Summit two years ago to much success.

At that event, China OpenStack User Group (COSUG) manager Hui Cheng estimated that the growing group had more than 2,500 members, making it possibly the largest user group outside of the U.S. COSUG’s China micro-blogging site, Weibo, also shows more than 2,000 members currently following the group’s foray into OpenStack…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

There’s no operating system more ubiquitous than Linux. It’s everywhere. It’s even running in devices and computers you may not suspect—our cars, our cell phones, even our refrigerators. Linux supports businesses and organizations everywhere, and because it underpins open-source innovation, it is the platform of choice for new applications.

Companies such as IBM and their work with organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation are creating such new innovations as Big Blue’s new scale-out servers running Linux and putting them in places all around us. In fact, eWEEK recently ran a slide show depicting how prevalent the operating system is in the supercomputing space…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

A network testbed being constructed just south of San Francisco will help carriers and vendors develop standards for better cloud services, the CloudEthernet Forum says. The group’s OpenCloud Project, announced on Monday, will combine commonly used networking and computing equipment with live traffic from service providers’ commercial networks. It’s the first place researchers will be able to test new technologies designed to make cloud services more reliable and easier to set up and manage.

As enterprises put cloud-based services to work in conjunction with their own assets, it’s become hard to set up fast, reliable connections among all the components being used, according to CloudEthernet Forum President James Walker. Cloud providers may try to deliver a certain level of performance, but they don’t own the networks that link them to their customers, said Walker, who is also an executive at carrier Tata Communications…

Grazed from HDS. Author: Editorial Staff.

The world includes hundreds of millions of interconnected devices or things. These things range from handheld mobile platforms to systems that will observe the universe. At a coarse level this is what the Internet of Things (IoT) is all about: devices that are connected either directly or through a proxy to either an Intranet or the Internet.

However is there a more robust or even a formally authored standard definition? Unfortunately the state of the standards work is more immature than Cloud Computing. As recently as 2013 the European Union’s Internet of Things Architecture team states, “…after many years of heavy discussion, there is still no clear and common definition of the concept [21].” For the purposes of this paper the definition from the International Telecommunications Union is referenced…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Scientists from AT&T, IBM and Applied Communication Sciences (ACS) announced a proof-of-concept technology that reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity from days to seconds. This advance is a major step forward that could one day lead to sub-second provisioning time with IP and next-generation optical networking equipment and enables elastic bandwidth between clouds at high connection request rates using intelligent cloud data center orchestrators, instead of requiring static provisioning for peak demand.

The prototype was built with contributions and expertise from AT&T, IBM and ACS, and the work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Government’s DARPA CORONET program, which focuses on rapid reconfiguration of terabit networks. "The program was visionary in anticipating the convergence of cloud computing and networking, and in setting aggressive requirements for network performance in support of cloud services" said Ann Von Lehmen, the ACS program lead…

Grazed from SkyHigh Networks.  Author: PR Announcement.

SkyHigh Networks has moved to collaborate with SafeNet in an attempt to deliver flexible and secure key management solutions for the enterprise data in the cloud.  The partnership will help businesses retain full control of their encryption keys whilst leveraging on-premise or cloud-based models, in turn meeting the compliance needs of their corporate and regulatory requirements.

Chris Cesio, VP of business development and alliances, Skyhigh Networks, said: "More and more organisations are asking to encrypt their data in business-critical SaaS applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365 with customer-managed keys…