Author: David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Another cloud-based business continuity and disaster recovery solution is currently in development. This time, VeriStor Systems and Zerto have partnered to develop a new cloud offering that will combine the VeriStor Cloud Continuity service with the hypervisor-based Zerto Virtual Replication solution.

This partnership comes about through VeriStor joining the Zerto Cloud Disaster Recovery Ecosystem. VeriStor plans to integrate Zerto Virtual Replication into its Cloud Continuity offering, which will add the ability to protect virtualized workloads in a fully automated, bi-directional manner with centralized, multitenant management of infrastructure. "Maintaining RPOs for our customers’ data is a key element in how we are measured for the quality and delivery of our Continuity service…

Grazed from Baseline Magazine. Author: Dennis McCafferty.

Business deployment of cloud computing solutions has transitioned from the experimental to the "show me" stage, according to a survey conducted by Research in Action for Compuware. Findings reveal that IT decision-makers—technology and business managers and executives—are scrutinizing cloud deployments in an effort to eliminate poor end-user experiences due to performance bottlenecks. They’re also concerned about the cloud having a negative impact on the enterprise’s revenue and reputation due to these and other cloud-related issues.

"With cloud adoption topping the list of priorities, companies are clearly seeing a benefit to the agility, flexibility and time-to-value that cloud services can deliver," says Bernd Greifeneder, CTO of Compuware’s APM business unit. "But [IT decision-makers] are right to carefully consider the impact cloud and third-party services can have on the end-user experience…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Sevcik and Wetzel.

For mission-critical SaaS applications to displace their locally accessed cousins, SaaS end-user response times must rival those of the on-premises incumbents. Achieving this goal is challenging, and requires continuous end-user experience monitoring. SaaS vendors must use performance information to continuously improve response times to meet the same performance standards as on-premises software.

The performance of SaaS applications is subject to more variables than on-premises solutions. These variables include the performance of:

• the application itself,
• the data center infrastructure on which the application runs,
• all of the network segments along the path between application and user, and,
• the browser/client software on the user’s computer or mobile device.

Grazed from GamingBolt. Author: Editorial Staff.

For all the talk we’ve heard about Cloud computing and how consoles like the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 tout the power of the Cloud and how it will improve the games we’ve played, we’ve yet to see many examples of this. Until now, as Nvidia has showcased CloudLight, a cheap way for developers to be able to imbue their games with real-time lighting using the power of the Cloud.

Nvidia explains just how CloudLight works, stating that it is “a system for computing indirect lighting in the Cloud to support real-time rendering for interactive 3D applications on a user’s local device. CloudLight maps the traditional graphics pipeline onto a distributed system. That differs from a single-machine renderer in three fundamental ways…

Grazed from OpenNebula. Author: PR Announcement.

The OpenNebula Project is excited to announce the first update of the fourth series of its widely deployed OpenNebula cloud management platform, a fully open-source solution for data center management and enterprise cloud computing. With a sysadmin-centric approach, OpenNebula is the open operating system of choice in the converged data centre, combining a powerful virtualization manager that supports traditional IT features such as fault tolerance and failover, with the dynamic provisioning, elasticity and multi-tenancy of the enterprise cloud.

OpenNebula 4.2 gives users and administrators an easy way to create, publish, share, and manage multi-tier cloud applications and define auto-scaling policies based on service level metrics and time schedule. The new service flow functionality converts an infrastructure cloud into a powerful environment for the execution of elastic business applications. OpenNebula 4.2 also includes improved VMware drivers, enhanced support for Xen4, a new simple provisioning tab for Sunstone, and other minor enhancements like datastore monitoring and more hooks…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Sabih Ahmed.

Do you want to carry around your favorite movie collection, your humongous music playlist or your life’s history in photos, all at the same time on your Android phone? Yes! You can do that and more, without even having your phone’s memory all swallowed up. This is what the truest form of portable technology, Cloud storage lets us to do.

A Cloud storage solution is one of the most acclaimed segments of the charismatic Cloud computing technology; in fact it has become an omnipresent feature of the Cloud that promises users limitless resources and computation. What’s the Hype Around Cloud Storage? Cloud Storage involves the storage capacities of some of the most gigantic computing machines, virtualizes them and puts them at the disposal of user…

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: Abby Cessna.

Dell’s new mini computer should be available to customers in coming months. Dell’s Project Ophelia is a thumb-sized computer that has already been shipped out for beta testing.  The new product from Dell looks like a USB stick and can be plugged into any HDMI port, transforming the screen into a gaming device or a computer.

It runs on Android OS and allows the user to access information on the cloud in order to stream media, play games, or access files.  According to PCWorld, in an email a Dell spokesman announced that these mini computers would start shipping sometime in the next fiscal quarter, which runs from August to October…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: James Urquhart.

Many vendors pushing so-called enterprise cloud computing are really targeting those businesses who develop lots of their own software. But there are a whole lot of — maybe too many — companies to whom that description doesn’t apply.  I have been discussing, writing about and working on cloud computing for almost seven years. It takes a lot to shake my basic beliefs about the importance of cloud computing, and how its adoption will radically change — heck, has radically changed — the IT industry.

However, every once in a while something happens to remind me that there are more nuances to cloud adoption than any one person, or even group of people, can fully ascertain.  Most recently, I was reminded that “cloud adoption” isn’t a single path, and we as industry practitioners (vendors, service providers and customers alike) have to be very careful how we generalize the use of cloud computing in business…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Derek Britton.

The demise of mainframe computers has been predicted for decades, but they still thrives as the reliable core processing workhorse for many industries. In fact, IBM was able to report over 50 per cent increase in mainframe revenues in 2013.  But as the technology world evolves, games are changing, and the relevance and apparent suitability of the mainframe world is struggling to keep pace with the expanding demands of today’s information-hungry customers, including trends such as cloud computing.

This is compounded by recent high-profile mainframe outages that have dented not only customer service but also the reputation (and share price) of some major organisations. Can mainframe overcome the core challenges it faces? These include its assumed high cost, the IT skills crisis, and a perceived irrelevance to modern computing…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cloud computing, unified communications and BYOD promise to bring big benefits to organizations, from greater collaboration and productivity to improved efficiency and lower costs.  However, the trends, which are hitting the data center at the same time, also pose some significant challenges, not the least of which is gaining enough visibility into the networks to ensure that the IT staff can properly manage and secure them, according to a survey by Network Instruments.

"The technologies are kind of being forced on them," Brad Reinboldt, senior product manager at Network Instruments, told eWEEK. "They need the technology," but need the tools to manage and monitor them properly…