September 5, 2015
5 Channel Ops: Dell, Oracle Surveys Show Security, Cloud Good for Your Bottom Line
Grazed from ChannelPartners. Author: Lorna Garey.
As back-to-school shopping levels off, your retailer customers’ thoughts inevitably turn to the holiday season. If your base includes local chains or specialty shops, check out this article by Evan Schuman on the best way for bricks-and-mortar stores to take on Amazon. TL;DR version: Exploit its two weak spots, delivery and live customer experience.
Security is also on consumers’ minds, and retail is one of the verticals we’re discussing in our Cloud Partners session titled “The Cloud Specialists Are In." Verizon’s chief security evangelist, Mark Rasch, will join a panel of your peers, moderated by me, to discuss the challenges around PCI and much more…
To create a quantum computer that processes data at tremendous speeds–trillions of times quicker than the world’s fastest computer, China’s supercomputer Tianhe-2–is the target of a prospective game-changing scheme introduced by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
The topics of debate at the OpenStack Silicon Valley conference at the end of August were not restricted to new features and capabilities under development for the cloud computing framework, but extended to discussions about what direction the project should take in the future, often with diametrically opposing views.
The word quantum often portends New Age mumbo-jumbo, in spite of the fact that quantum mechanics underlies many of today’s most important technologies, including lasers and the semiconductors found in every computer chip. Nevertheless, today quantum computing is becoming a reality.
Moving to essentially provide a higher level of abstraction through which it can deliver cloud computing services, CenturyLink this week announced that the distribution of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service environment from Pivotal, a unit of EMC, is now available in the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace. That offering is the second PaaS environment that CenturyLink offers after acquiring AppFog, another provider of a PaaS based on Cloud Foundry, in 2013.
Amazon Web Services has agreed to acquire Elemental Technologies as it looks to boost its cloud-computing services. Oregon-based Elemental Technologies, founded in 2006, has developed a technology which uses software-based video processing to distribute video over IP networks.
Nigerian operator MainOne’s data centre subsidiary MDX-i announced the launch of its new cloud-based service offering with Microsoft. The service is built on Microsoft Azure infrastructure for secure private computing to companies on a pay-as-you-go basis. Benefits of the Infrastructure as a Service include access to a wide range of computing resources, such as storage, CPU, memory, security firewalls and network bandwidth, provisioned on a subscription basis.
Google Compute Engine, the company’s IaaS cloud computing offering, got a facelift today with the announcement that new autoscaling features and 32-core VMs would be available to the general public. Autoscaler, according to an official blog post, is the same system that Google itself uses to dynamically scale the number of VMs being used by a given application based on load – users set utilization targets, and the autoscaling system spins up or shuts down VMs in order to keep, say, RAM utilization at 50%. The idea is to remove the need for extensive capacity planning and management, Google said.