Author: David

Grazed from ABA. Author: John Ginovsky.

With 90% of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to new research from CompTIA, the nonprofit association for the information technology industry.

As cloud computing becomes a default part of the IT landscape, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59%), business continuity and disaster recovery (48%), and security (44%), CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study reveals…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudius Systems today announced a breakthrough open source approach to application deployment. The new open source project, OSV, is designed to run efficiently on top of hypervisors, allowing operating systems to better optimize CPU consumption and overhead memory. By running on a single application, resulting in unparalleled throughput and latency, OSV minimizes operating costs by reducing the need for administration, template management, patching and tuning of applications. OSV has been developed by a team of OS veterans including Avi Kivity, Dor Laor, Benny Schnaider—creators of the KVM hypervisor.

The Need for a New OS

Unlike new infrastructure such as hypervisors, NoSQL, PaaS, etc., the operating system has been virtually unchanged since the introduction of cloud computing. Typical cloud workloads run application servers using Java, Ruby, Python and JavaScript (node.js). This historical evolution is not ideal – the run time (JVM), the OS and the hypervisor implement parallel/duplicated mechanisms for protection and abstraction. Together, these mechanisms are redundant and impose a large overhead in terms of CPU and memory…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

In December 2012, Cary Landis and I made 10 predictions about how cloud computing was likely to evolve this year and how those changes were likely to impact enterprise computing. But things are moving fast in the world of cloud computing, reaffirming some of those predictions and altering others. Here’s a recap of what I predicted then and an update of how I see those trends unfolding now.

1. Cloud technologies will converge.

The cloud will continue to forge a massive convergence of technologies — similar to the evolution of the cellphone to the smartphone. The lines between platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud services brokerages will blur into a conceptual operating system for the "Web as a platform" — providing tools to allow users to take advantage of multiple cloud solutions at once, and bringing the cloud closer to the end user in more meaningful ways…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

IBM and automated server migration software developer Racemi have partnered to provide customers with a free automated migration path to any IBM cloud offering for a limited time. Racemi’s Cloud Path software automates migration of existing Microsoft (MSFT) Windows and Linux servers to public cloud services. Infrastructure to deploy or manage is not needed on a customer’s site with this software as a service (SaaS).

Customer data is secured and compressed using AES/RSA SSL encryption over firewall. Racemi Product Management Vice President James Strayer said in a prepared statement that the partnership "ensures there is a fast, easy way to move existing workloads to IBM’s cloud computing platforms."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

On September 17, IBM will announce at LinuxCon 2013 that it will invest $1 billion in new Linux and open-source technologies for its Power Systems servers. This announcement comes 12 years after IBM famously announced that it was backing the then unproven Linux with a billion-dollar investment.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said, "The last time IBM committed $1 billion to Linux, it helped start a flurry of innovation that has never slowed. We look forward to seeing how the Power platform can bring about further innovation on Linux, and how companies and developers can work together to get the most out of this open architecture."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Foley.

The market for government clouds is rapidly advancing. I recently highlighted 10 game-changing developments in government clouds, and now there’s another: Oracle ORCL +1.57% has unveiled Oracle Government Cloud, a new offering for federal, state, and local government agencies.

Oracle Government Cloud is an enterprise-class cloud environment and family of cloud services designed specifically for the needs and requirements of government organizations. It gives CIOs in federal government a new and better way to meet Uncle Sam’s Cloud First policy, which requires agencies to use cloud computing where it makes sense in lieu of dedicated, do-it-yourself systems. “A quick look at what Oracle is offering shows that it dovetails nicely with the US federal government’s 2010 Cloud First policy,” writes CMSWire…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthor Cole.

A cloud of many faces is taking shape before our eyes. It is common knowledge by now that the cloud is not merely an extension of the data center but an entirely new data ecosystem that can grow, change, and yes, evolve into a wide range of configurations, just as any organic creature is able to adapt to changing environments. In many ways, this change can be anticipated and planned for, but as the market matures, you can bet there will be a fair number of unexpected developments as well.

But to get the kind of flexibility to handle both the expected and the unexpected, enterprises will have to shed much of the thinking that has governed cloud deployments so far. This is not merely an extension of current data infrastructure but an entirely new way to doing things. Much of the attention in the cloud is turning away from simple applications and infrastructure to fully cloud-based development platforms because of this new way of thinking…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Dan Conde.

Cloud computing has been on minds of many people, but there are many definitions depending on who you ask. For some people, it means services or apps that are run off-premises as Software as a Service (files stored in the cloud, or music that is stored and played from the cloud instead of your own disks). For others, it is defined as servers or other resources are spun up on-demand from a data center somewhere in the cloud.

Let’s look at the second definition since we’re talking about how networking needs to be re-invented, and because the performance of cloud servers rely heavily on the networking. On top of that, many providers of Software as a Service use an on-demand model in their data center, so ultimately, the network underpins cloud computing in general. When people designed the datacenter systems with traditional servers, storage and networking gear, it was carefully designed with a particular workload in mind…

Grazed from Infosec-Magazine. Author: Bill Hackenberger.

When organizations move their data to the cloud, traditional security measures may not be effective. With some basic knowledge, Bill Hackenberger of HighCloud Security says companies can take advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service, while keeping their data private. If your organization is considering use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) from a cloud service provider (CSP), be aware that traditional security measures, such as full drive encryption, may not translate.

Most IaaS rely heavily on server virtualization to achieve the elasticity and rapid deployment we expect from the cloud. But virtualization introduces new technologies and attack surfaces that must be considered from a security perspective. If you are concerned about the privacy of data running in virtual machines (VMs) in the public cloud, there are some basics you need to know…