Month: October 2010

October 31, 2010 Off

Oracle buys 10% of tech firm Mellanox

By David
Grazed from YNet News dot com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp bought 10.2% of Mellanox as it seeks to strengthen its presence in the hardware side of data centers, where the Israeli firm is a player.

 

Oracle already uses Mellanox’s InfiniBand switch technology to build products like the Exadata database appliance and Exalogic, which helps companies manage cloud computing.

 

But Oracle, which bought the shares in the open market, has no plans to make an unsolicited offer to take over Mellanox, the companies said on Thursday.

 

October 29, 2010 Off

Amazon Offers One Year of Free Cloud Services

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Paul Mah.

Amazon earlier this week unveiled a new "free usage tier," available Monday, that opens the door to a year’s free use of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.  New customers will be able to access a micro instance server, which includes 5 gigabytes (GB) of S3 storage, up to 30GB of data transfer per month and Elastic Load Balancing.

 

October 29, 2010 Off

Virtual Infrastructure Shifts Toward the Cloud

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Virtualization is not absolutely necessary for cloud computing, but it does provide the kind of resource efficiencies and dynamic infrastructure that make the cloud worthwhile.

To date, though, most virtual platforms have been deployed to meet more immediate concerns, mainly server consolidation, rather than longer-term strategies involving the structural underpinnings of the IT industry.

But that may be changing as the tech community begins to filter just about everything it does through a cloudy lens. And it would seem that the most crucial area for fostering cloud environments is the virtual layer.

October 29, 2010 Off

Microsoft: Customer service to be cloud differentiator

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Liau Yun Qing.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Ker Wing-Dar, Microsoft’s general manager of customer service and support in Asia-Pacific and greater China region, said his department plays a key role as "strategic differentiator" for the push.

Support is critical and can make or break a deal, said Ker, noting that enterprises feel more confident choosing a cloud service provider that is able to provide someone they can talk to when they have questions.

October 29, 2010 Off

Data quality efforts ‘should be proactive’

By David
Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: James Glass.

Companies have been advised to take a proactive approach to ensuring high data quality levels.

David Loshin, president of consultancy Knowledge Integrity, explained to the B-Eye Network website that there is a tendency for data quality efforts to be focused on dealing with previously-identified problem areas.

But he stated that this may not be the best approach and that the real challenge for data quality initiatives is to identify where future issues may crop up.

October 29, 2010 Off

Scrapers Target Online Forums

By David
Grazed from Internet Evolution.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

Your average Internet user leaves pieces of his or her life scattered all over the Web. Posts to social networks, comments on discussion boards, and reviews of products on Amazon are just a few ways that we leave our fingerprints on the Web as we use sites, fingerprints that could be used to collect a significant dossier on our habits as consumers, voters, parents, and — as an article in The Wall Street Journal recently revealed — patients.