Author: David

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Just as enterprises have achieved flexibility and innovation from implementing heterogeneous environments on-premises, they now seek to extend these benefits into the cloud. Today, WSO2 debuted its answer to this growing demand with the launch of WSO2 Stratos 2.0, the industry’s most complete, open enterprise-grade platform as a service (PaaS). WSO2 Stratos 2.0 features an all-new cartridge-based architecture, which combines support for heterogeneous applications and service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform runtimes with native, secure multi-tenancy.

WSO2 unveiled the latest release of WSO2 Stratos at GigaOm Structure, which runs June 19-20 in San Francisco. WSO2 Stratos 2.0 is now available and includes the WSO2 Stratos PaaS Foundation; all pre-integrated, cloud-ready, and fully multi-tenant WSO2 Carbon middleware products; and cartridges for PHP and MySQL. Developers and third-party vendors also can develop their own cartridges for WSO2 Stratos 2.0. Through the use of jclouds—an Apache incubator project—WSO2 Stratos 2.0 offers the ability to run on almost any infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud, including SUSE Cloud and other OpenStack-based offerings, VMware, Eucalyptus, and Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack™ company, today announced a technology partnership with Cumulus Networks™. Cumulus Linux™ was introduced today as the first true, full-featured Linux operating system for datacenter networking, and validated to run Piston Enterprise OpenStack™, a turnkey, bare-metal cloud operating system for deploying and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud environment. Piston Cloud and Cumulus Networks deliver innovation in cloud infrastructure and networking to help businesses realize the full potential of the software-defined datacenter.

"We share an open approach to the virtual datacenter," said Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud. "Cumulus Networks and Piston Cloud were founded on the fundamental belief that specialized software can run on a wide range of hardware to avoid vendor lock-in, decrease complexity, increase agility and reduce cost. By transforming the economics of infrastructure and networking, Cumulus Networks and Piston Cloud are removing the barriers to enterprise clouds, and making the software-defined datacenter a reality."…

Grazed from NIRIX. Author: PR Announcement.

NIRIX Inc., a Canadian cloud computing service provider, responds to customer feedback and market research to introduce oneBackup SMB, a cloud backup solution for small and medium business. Small business is agile business. Market research sources show that small business customers are statistically more likely to adopt cloud services, but few cloud services are designed with the small business in mind. While enterprise services are over-featured and out of the budget for many SMBs, consumer-quality services can’t offer the security or reliability they need. Even fewer services are available that are located entirely in Canada.

"Some of our competitors for the SMB backup market are trying to work upwards, and to engineer a compelling business product out of an existing consumer grade service," says Cameron Bayly, NIRIX Marketing Manager. "NIRIX’s small business service is hosted on the same infrastructure we use for big business, and we bring that quality and security to oneBackup SMB." Located in our fully Canadian, PIA, PCI-DSS and CSAE 3416 Type II compliant datacenter; NIRIX services are trusted by highly-regulated Canadian enterprises to comply with requirements common to healthcare operations, publicly traded companies, and the financial industry…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Alistair Blair.

Concerns about security in the cloud are flaring anew after recent revelations about government data-mining, likely spurring new technology to protect corporate and consumer information, according to a panel of cloud experts. Reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly gathers user data from nine big Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Google Inc (GOOG.O), have dented confidence in cloud computing, especially among customers outside the United States.

The reports have triggered debate over how far the government can go in its quest to enhance national security, and also provoked outrage from many non-U.S. users depending on large American Internet corporations for everything from email to Internet storage to social networking, industry executives told the Reuters Global Technology Summit on Wednesday…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Tier 3, an enterprise cloud hosting and management provider that works closely with channel partners, has introduced an object-storage service to protect data in the cloud. At the core of the service is a feature that copies cloud data on a per-file — or "object" — basis to a secondary data center. By backing up data at the object level, the company says, Tier 3 can provide a degree of redundancy that is both scalable and highly automatic, since no additional engineering work is required to back up or restore the objects in case of failure. Meanwhile, beyond the relative novelty of the object-based approach to cloud storage, Tier 3’s new service is notable for two other key reasons:

Geo-location: The service backs up data to secondary servers located in the same country as those hosting the primary cloud. Although the whole point of cloud computing, in one sense, is to nullify the significance of the physical location of data, that issue can actually matter a whole lot when it comes to auditory compliance or legal constraints. Ensuring that information is automatically backed up in the same jurisdiction may therefore simplify operations for some enterprises…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: James Niccolai.

Despite the promise of portability from service providers, the reality of the cloud for big customers is a similar type of lock-in as they experience with on-premise apps vendors such as Oracle and SAP, two CIOs said Tuesday. "You’re kind of locked in — it’s out with the old boss and in with the new," said Ralph Loura, CIO of The Clorox Company, in a discussion about "what keeps CIOs up at night" at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Companies that buy storage and compute services in small increments might not be tied to one provider, but most big companies sign big, multi-year contracts with cloud suppliers that effectively tie them to one platform, he said. They also train workers for that platform and build applications and interfaces in a "semi-bespoke model" that further ties them down. "I think we’re all trying not to get fooled again with this model, and that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night," he said…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jim Shepherd.

In enterprises across the globe, CIOs are looking cautiously in one direction: up – to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud changes not only the operations of the data center but also the roles of the CIO and IT staff. As a result, management must carefully weigh the pros and cons of shifting to cloud-based computing so that they can prepare their organizations and themselves for change that cascades across budgets, vendor relations, job descriptions and career paths, as well as infrastructure and processes.

The benefits of moving from an on-premises model to subscription-based, cloud-hosted computing are substantial. With cloud computing, CIOs have the opportunity to capitalize on a variable-cost structure. Until recently, data centers have needed to load up with hardware, software and networking devices to prepare for peak periods, even though these investments may lie underused or dormant for significant periods. Traditionally, IT costs only go up…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Alexis Cleary.

IT is currently facing two dilemmas. The first is many want their private cloud architecture to work with their existing data center. Secondly, IT professionals are looking to build private clouds that are open to other clouds but also equipped to run existing in-house systems and applications. So you may be asking yourself, “Why should I build a private cloud?”

Under a private cloud, an agency effectively acts as a service provider for their internal customers. IT professionals that move to a private cloud would deliver the same kind of flexible computing as public clouds from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but behind a firewall and without the security worries that come with sending data outside the agency. This scenario appeals to organizations that want more control over their infrastructure…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger is comfortable with the fact that Amazon got a major head start in running Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). But in that game, he doesn’t believe one size fits all. “It’s hard for Amazon to reach into the enterprise,” he told GigaOM Founder and Senior Writer Om Malik during a talk at our Structure conference on Wednesday. By comparison, Gelsinger said his company “has an extraordinary leadership position already.”

He expects VMware’s recently revealed public cloud, known as vCloud Hybrid Service, to get plenty of business from large companies that are deep into the VMware world but see value in being able to call on scaled-out shared infrastructure whenever that’s necessary…

Grazed from The Server Side. Author: Cameron McKenzie.

As a software architect attending a developer conference like the 2013 Red Hat Summit, one of the least interesting vendors on the docket has to be Intel. They are always there, set up with a big booth in the exhibitors pavilion at the Oracle OpenWorld and IBM Innovate conferences, and while it all seems interesting to the low-level hardware guys, chips and processors simply aren’t the bailiwick of coders. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that processors aren’t important to the wellbeing of developers, but they’re important in the same way that air is important for sustaining life – things fall apart if it disappears, but so long as it’s there, it’s boring as hell.

Interestingly though, Dirk Hohndel , Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel, in the most entertaining of the array of morning keynotes at the 2013 Red Hat Summit made some pretty compelling arguments about why Intel should be taken more seriously as a player in the open-source software development world…