Author: David

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft has platform-as-a-service. VMware has PaaS. Savvis has PaaS. Why shouldn’t Progress Software have PaaS too?  The other parties offer PaaS as part of their cloud service offerings. Progress, until now, hasn’t been viewed as either a cloud service or cloud software provider. That’s why it needs PaaS. Earlier this month, Progress announced its Progress Pacific PaaS system for cloud application and mobile developers. The system won’t become available until July.

Progress already has a presence in on-premises development. The company name springs from what was originally the Progress 4GL language, which it changed in 2006 to OpenEdge Advanced Business Language (ABL) to escape the limitations of being classified as a fourth-generation language. However, ABL maintains an English-like syntax and access to a built-in relational database, like its 4GL predecessor…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Starting Tuesday, Joyent is offering a new type of storage combined with compute services. Joyent Manta Storage Service will keep data stored close to the servers that will analyze and work with it. That description might be applied to Hadoop, which runs big data batch jobs on a single cluster. Joyent Manta will use MapReduce to bring data and compute together on one or several clusters. The clusters may be located in one or several data centers. And unlike Hadoop, the data will remain close to the compute resources on a persistent basis, eliminating the long extract, transform and load (ETL) processes that often accompany the execution of a big data job.

Thus, Manta Storage Service will be able to do a single job or a series of jobs, some of them batch, some of them near real-time analytics. Manta, in fact, could fit a Hadoop job into its compute and object storage system, and run a wide variety of other applications as well, depending on what its users want to do. As a service from Joyent, customers will be charged — by the second — for the Manta services they use…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

Puppet Labs, a provider of IT automation software for system administrators, has made Puppet Enterprise 3.0 available. It delivers a complete cloud automation solution for enterprise customers, providing scalability and orchestration capabilities and a unified, software-defined approach to automation of compute, network and storage layers. This enterprise edition enables customers to reap the full benefits of cloud computing.

“Some of today’s largest and most successful SaaS clouds use our solutions to automate their infrastructure,” said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. “With Puppet Enterprise 3.0, we’re making the scalability, orchestration and software-defined capabilities that power those SaaS clouds accessible to any IT organization, enabling customers to take full advantage of their dynamic infrastructure.”…

Grazed from Centrify. Author: PR Announcement.

Centrify Corporation, a leader in Unified Identity Services across data center, cloud and mobile, today announced the availability of Centrify for Dropbox for Business, an easy-to-deploy cloud service that offers the industry’s most comprehensive solution for Active Directory-based single sign-on (SSO), access control and mobile management. Centrify eliminates password sprawl with Active Directory-based SSO for Dropbox for Business across users’ various choices of computing and mobile devices, while giving IT centralized control over access to hosted applications and resources. Centrify is a preferred SSO and identity management partner for Dropbox.

"We’re excited to partner with Centrify to offer single sign-on and integration to Dropbox for business customers of all sizes across the world," said Ari Friedland, head of business development for Dropbox for Business. "We’re leveraging the SSO industry standard, SAML, and working with Centrify to let our customers leverage their Active Directory identities for Seamless access to Dropbox, with one less password to remember and maintain."…

Grazed from Logility. Author: PR Announcement.

Logility Inc., a leading supplier of collaborative solutions to optimize the supply chain, today announced Logility Cloud Services, a comprehensive deployment portfolio that provides a flexible menu of services to accelerate the benefits of supply chain initiatives. Building on more than 10 years of cloud deployment experience, customers are able to tap into the industry-leading and award-winning capabilities of Logility Voyager Solutions either as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Hosted or On-Premise deployment.

Today’s enterprise environment is growing more complex and each company is unique in their market, challenges and opportunities. Logility Cloud Services provides companies a choice in deployment methodology and services that best suit their individual needs and allows them to evolve as their business changes; moving between SaaS, on-premise, and managed services as their IT strategies transform…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

eXo, the Enterprise Social Platform company, today opened access to eXo Cloud. Built on the experience acquired with its previous SaaS offering, Cloud Workspaces, eXo Cloud offers online, instant access to all the features of eXo Platform 4. It integrates social and enterprise collaboration features in a single on-demand offering. This release of eXo Cloud is offered free of charge, and users can sign up for accounts at http://cloud.exoplatform.com.

A year and a half after launching Cloud Workspaces in beta, eXo launches its production-ready social intranet SaaS: eXo Cloud. The beta campaign of Cloud Workspaces enabled eXo to acquire valuable feedback on both its product and its cloud service, leading to visible improvements on eXo Platform 4 and its SaaS counterpart, eXo Cloud. These improvements include a design overhaul, an easier user experience and a more robust and flexible multi-tenant platform…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Ed Tittel and Earl Follis.

Once you’ve bet your IT strategy on virtual desktops, availability and performance of those desktops become a priority. If users cannot access their virtual desktop or performance is too slow to get their work done, the villagers will no doubt come after you with torches, demanding their local desktops back. To help you avoid getting burned, let’s look at the top five factors that affect virtual desktop and application downtime, plus how to avoid — or at least mitigate — these risks.

1. Lack of end-user monitoring

Have you ever received a flurry of help desk complaints about poor performance for specific applications? Your infrastructure team checks the network, servers, databases and applications, only to indicate that all infrastructure components are up and running as expected. This situation illustrates the difference between IT services being up and IT services being available from an end-user’s perspective. If users perceive a performance issue, then you have a performance issue, whether your monitoring tools reflect that perception or not. You can avoid this problem by having an end-user performance monitoring tool in your overall monitoring toolkit. These tools can give you performance statistics and alerts based on availability and response time for your virtual desktops, from an end-user perspective…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is an increasingly commoditized service dominated by vendors — most notably Amazon and Rackspace — that have the size and scale to compete on price. For competing cloud service providers to survive against these large players, they must offer more customized, unique and comprehensive business services to enterprises looking for flexible IT options.

In order to build and operate differentiated solution sets that are modular, flexible and cost-efficient, providers need more than just IaaS — they need an extensible platform that can enable a range of services. Differentiation can come in the form of:…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtustream, Inc., the leading enterprise class cloud software and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, and SafeNet, Inc., a global leader in information security, today announced they have expanded their existing relationship to offer customers across high-risk industries, and all organizations that need to protect sensitive data, the ability to migrate to virtual and cloud environments securely.

"Virtustream has made strong security a core part of their enterprise class cloud. We’ve worked closely over the last year to ensure our solutions are well integrated so organizations can easily reap the benefits of the cloud, without losing control over their data," said Chen Arbel, director of business development, SafeNet. "We provide that protection regardless of where the data resides, affording separate security administration duties, enforcing granular controls, and establishing clear accountability with audit trails and compliance reporting. And we make it possible to easily scale the use of encryption in very large, dynamic cloud environments."…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Brian Wallace.

There is a vast multitude of web hosting options, so when users decide on which kind of host to use, it’s always best to know all the kinds out there. Web hosting, a service that allows people to create websites for themselves or their businesses, emerged during the dot-com era.

The first type of public hosting available was Shared Web Hosting in 1995, which is still available today. It didn’t offer infrastructure on demand or flexibility, but it was easy to use. Then in 1998 came VPS Hosting, which was a little more flexible and offered root access—a step up from Shared Web Hosting. Public Cloud Computing 1.0, which has been available since 2006, offered billing by the hour, a compute and storage infrastructure, and, eventually, scalability…