Month: October 2012

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

A quarter of CIOs view cloud infrastructure and virtualisation as their current top investment priorities, research suggests. The investigation, carried out by Research in Action on behalf of software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Compuware, also found that CIOs believe end-to-end performance visibility and robust service level agreements (SLAs) as key to achieving good return on investment from cloud computing.

Over the next five years, full integration of public, hybrid and private cloud will be the single most important priority for CIOs, with 34 per cent of the 200-plus respondents surveyed saying it was their primary focus between now and 2017…

Grazed from WorldCrunch. Author: Daniel Bastien.

The new tablets and smartphones have blurred the boundaries between businesses and their employees, partners and customers. The danger of computer piracy has never been so great. The threat is invisible but incessant, as the recent large-scale attack on British bank HSBC shows. In information technology, we live in a time of fantastic new breakthroughs, but it is also a time of cold sweats for businesses. Their fears are well founded.

During a recent Paris workshop on "Security: Info Systems and the Challenge of Mobility," a young research engineer calmly took control over another person’s iPad from his own laptop via Wi-Fi. To make his demonstration more spectacular, he even made the microphone work remotely. To the mesmerized audience, it looked like a spy movie…

Grazed from Talkin’Cloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The cloud computing skeptics may still think keeping data locked away within the four walls of a business is the best way to protect data, but as Hurricane Sandy continues up the Eastern Seaboard, the best place to store data may very well be the cloud. In fact, it’s fairly likely — at least if you still want access to it as Sandy starts to take its toll on IT infrastructure.

A team of engineers at Johns Hopkins University led by Seth Guikema is predicting up to 10 million people on the U.S. East Coast could lose power because of Hurricane Sandy. Imagine how many businesses will be affected, suffering downtime. And it’s not just those on the East Coast that have to worry — customers with remote and branch offices to the west that won’t be directly affected could still suffer access outages if proper measures aren’t taken…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices.

As Hurricane Sandy swept north and toward landfall, data centers from Florida to Boston and further north did their things to prepare. Verizon’s Terremark unit went on high alert last week as Sandy approached Terremark’s Miami-area sites. Then it replicated the process for its major facilities in Culpepper, Va., and the New York area, said spokesman Xavier Gonzalez…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be.

Rackspace has been on a tear over the past few months releasing new features that map closely to the core features of the Amazon Web Services platform, only with a Rackspace flavor that favors service over scale. Its next target is Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which Rackspace will be countering with its own Hadoop service in 2013. If AWS and Rackspace are, indeed, the No. 1 and No. 2 cloud computing providers around, it might be easy enough to make a decision between the two platforms. In the cloud, however, the choices are never as simple as black or white…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Samplify, the leading intellectual property company for accelerating memory, I/O, and storage in computing, consumer electronics and mobile devices, announced the availability of its APAX hardware IP core that boosts the performance of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, application processors, and systems-on-chip. The APAX IP accelerates throughput of memory, I/O, and storage by 2X to 8X for high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing, as well as consumer electronics and mobile devices performing applications such as image acquisition, video processing, and 3D graphics.

"Multi-core CPUs are hitting the memory wall," said Al Wegener, CTO and founder of Samplify. "With each new process node, the number of processor cores on a die can double with Moore’s Law, but the throughput of memory, I/O, and storage fails to keep up with this growth. Hence, the performance of multi-core applications is increasingly memory, I/O, and storage bound. APAX is the only solution that shatters the memory wall by accelerating the throughput of DDRx, SAS/SATA, SSD, PCIe, Ethernet, and Infiniband, by as much as eight times."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware recently reported revenue growth of 20% in its third quarter ended Sept. 30. It projects revenue growth for the year of around 21% to 22%. That means it will close out the year with total revenues close to $4.5 or $4.6 billion, compared to $3.8 billion last year. Pretty good for an enterprise software company facing "tough macroeconomic conditions," as co-president Carl Eschenbach phrased it. Or is it?

Net income is up only 3%, to $540 million from $524 million, for the first nine months of 2012 compared to 2011, which means gaining that 20% revenue growth is costing VMware something. It’s possible the spread of server consolidation around the world is still the main fuel behind VMware’s revenues. That trend is so widespread that VMware’s international revenues now exceed those produced in the U.S., $580 million in the third quarter versus $554 million…