Author: David

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

Adrian Lonel, Mirantis CEO and President, stopped by to chat about how organizations are adopting cloud computing and how, in his vision, OpenStack is positioned to win over the others. Although it is impossible for me to really do justice to our rapidly moving conversation, I’ll try to summarize what was touched upon.

Trends in developing Cloud-based applications

There are a number of groups seeking to define the stack of software everyone will use to develop cloud-based workloads. Amazon Web Services and its frenemy Eucalyptus Systems hope that the stack of software defined by Amazon will win. Microsoft hopes that Microsoft’s Windows Azure will become the standard. Two different open source communities, Apache CloudStack and the OpenStack believe that their approach to building cloud-based applications will win. Lonel believes that OpenStack is likely to win because of the following reasons:…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtustream, Inc., the leading enterprise class cloud software and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, today announced they have fully integrated Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) into both the xStream 2.2 cloud management software and Virtustream’s IaaS cloud. These enterprise class cloud solutions provide companies with highly secure and compliant cloud computing, whether in private, public or hybrid clouds. Intel TXT provides strong hardware authentication and enables a range of advanced high security features including malware/virus prevention, BIOS authentication, hypervisor authentication, geotagging and geofencing.

“Virtustream’s partnership with Intel has been built on our common belief that enterprise class clouds must closely integrate software and hardware to give our clients the most advanced security features and compliance capabilities which reduce risk and costs,” said Kevin Reid, CEO and CTO of Virtustream. “By integrating Intel TXT, Virtustream’s xStream moves several steps ahead of any other hybrid cloud solution. The combination of application-level SLAs and security compliance gives our customers a tremendous advantage and new options for how they can deploy business-critical applications in the cloud.” …

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: John Leonard.

Shadow IT – the bypassing of the IT department by employees who set up their own systems – is the inevitable consequence of the ease of use and quick deployment enabled by the cloud. Given the choice between waiting for days or weeks for the IT department to configure the CRM system to suit their needs, or ordering something over the web with a credit card (or even for free) that can be used immediately and turned off again afterwards, it is obvious which will win. And the consequences be damned.

But the consequences of shadow IT can be serious. As with other trends driven by consumerisation, such as bring your own device (BYOD), shadow IT leaves the IT department between a rock and a hard place: it does not want to be seen as a progress-denying jobs-worth, but neither can it afford to preside over the sort of free-for-all that is the logical conclusion of the boom in self-service IT, an outcome that could have seriously negative repercussions for the company – and the IT leader’s job…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

PaaS is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has been evolving very rapidly in the past five years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Enterprises should get ready to anticipate and take advantage of new PaaS developments. To do so, they should ask vendors some hard questions about strategy plans and product roadmaps. For more information, see the Ovum report PaaS: Two More Years of Confusion Ahead.

PaaS has quickly evolved in the past few years

Today’s PaaS is quite different from that of yesterday, and this can cause confusion. Its rapid evolution has so far partly reflected the evolution of the overall cloud computing market. PaaS has, for example, evolved from a focus on public clouds to private and hybrid clouds, from green-field to legacy applications, and from being packaged with its own infrastructure services to supporting third-party (mostly IaaS) services…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Don Clark.

Many businesses no longer buy servers–they just turn to Amazon’s cloud computing service to run their operations. Some now may apply the same tactic to personal computers. The Seattle-based company’s Web services unit on Wednesday announced what it calls Amazon WorkSpaces, which amounts to deploying virtual Windows PCs on Amazon servers. Such a service opens up several different possibilities.

In theory, for example, a user could access Windows-based applications from many kinds of devices, including Apple Macs or iPads, Android or Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, Google Chromebooks or conventional laptops. Assuming a decent Internet connection, they also should be able to get pretty much the same experience in using those applications when they are on the move as when they are in the office…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Chinese IT giant Huawei is embracing the open source OpenStack cloud platform. During the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong last week, Huawei officially became a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. In an exclusive video interview with Enterprise Networking Planet, Haiying Wan, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Huawei, explained why his company plans to play a key role in pushing OpenStack forward in China and around the world.

Becoming a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation isn’t just a matter of paying a membership fee. The OpenStack Foundation only votes in Gold corporate members that have demonstrated that they will contribute code and technical expertise into the OpenStack development process. Wan is keen to help OpenStack improve and mature…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

IBM on Wednesday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Fiberlink Communications, a provider of cloud-based mobile-device management and mobile security services. IBM said the acquisition will advance its ability to support organizations adopting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobile programs.

Fiberlink’s MaaS360 cloud services are used by financial services firms, healthcare organizations, and manufacturers worldwide, reportedly offering fast, self-service enrollment of BYOD in less than five minutes. IBM said the technologies will enable it to offer cloud-based or on-premise mobile device management, mobile content management, and mobile application management capabilities. The software can also separate personal from enterprise data and content on mobile devices…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: John Rath.

At the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week Red Hat (RHT) announced an expansion of its OpenShift Online public Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and services for its partner ecosystem. Red Hat is now expanding OpenShift Online’s global availability, and introducing new pricing and memory options.

Red Hat is expanding Silver tier commercial availability of OpenShift Online to 14 new Eurozone countries, including Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Cyprus and Malta. With this expansion, Red Hat’s technical support and additional platform resources is available for developers and application providers in more than 30 countries…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

At Amazon Web Services re:Invent, Riverbed Technology (RVBD) introduced Stingray 9.5 on AWS GovCloud, bringing the traffic manager software to the government sector on the popular cloud platform. Riverbed has made a lot of inroads into the public sector space and currently serves hundreds of government organizations around the world. The introduction of Stingray on GovCloud will open up additional opportunities and provide AWS channel partners serving government departments and agencies with the ability to optimize, scale, secure and improve the performance of mission-critical apps in the AWS cloud.

Designed as a virtual, software-based Layer 7 application delivery controller with integrated web content optimization, Stingray was optimized for cloud environments and is meant to be easily integrated into an application stack. For GovCloud, what it provides is a way for U.S. federal, state and local government agencies and departments to gain agility and cost savings while also improving their performance and scale of application workloads and services…

Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Brian Deagon.

Founded in 1992, NetApp (NTAP) is the second-largest provider of external data storage systems and software, behind EMC. Besides its data storage hardware, NetApp’s core software offering is Data OnTap, an operating system that helps users manage companywide data operations, including cloud-computing environments. Software now plays a larger role in data management, a trend called software defined storage.

NetApp says Data OnTap is the leading storage operating system worldwide. The emergence of cloud computing — where data is stored and apps reside in the Internet cloud — presents both challenges and opportunities for NetApp. It created a boom in new storage startups that might challenge the company. But it’s also advanced the rapid expansion in data creation in an increasingly digital world. The emergence of flash storage also altered the playing field. Flash is chip-based storage, instead of disk drives…