Does location matter when it comes to cloud infrastructure?
Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.
You might think that in cyberspace, the servers might as well be anywhere. But even in the era of cloud computing, physical location matters. So where are your IT services truly safe? Cloud computing has taken the world by storm in recent years. More and more companies are transferring their data and applications to external providers, saving infrastructure costs and freeing up IT staff for strategic tasks. And the Internet is making geographical distances irrelevant – opening up a global market for cloud solutions. So as long as the service is attractively priced and available when required, does it really matter where the servers are located?
Offshore can be unsure
Well, yes, it does. There’s a firm consensus among experts that mission-critical enterprise data needs to be stored in a secure data centre, where it is safe from cybercrime and industrial espionage. But the site of the data centre is important too. When it comes to weighing up the risks, the old real-estate adage – location, location, location – is a good rule of thumb…
Red Hat is offering companies with a big stake in Linux an alternative to building their private clouds with either VMware or Windows Server. It’s combined its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the open source code modules of OpenStack to produce its own cloud computing platform.
While plenty of enterprises have now stored their information in the cloud, data silos still loom as a major problem. According to a recent Oracle survey, 54 percent of IT executives have experienced downtime in the past six months after being forced to stop working when cloud applications were not properly integrated with other apps across the enterprise.
IBM officials are looking to accelerate the adoption of Linux in the data center and are taking a number of new steps to push along the effort. At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, IBM officials said the company will support the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization hypervisor technology in the Power servers that run Linux. In addition, IBM in July will open two Power Systems Linux Centers in the United States, which will help software developers to more easily build applications that leverage Linux and IBM’s Power 7+ chip technology.
Samplify, the leading intellectual property company for accelerating memory, storage, and I/O bottlenecks in computing, consumer electronics and mobile devices, announces the availability of its APAX HDF (Hierarchical Data Format ) Storage Library for high-performance computing (HPC), Big Data, and cloud computing applications. With APAX HDF, HPC users can accelerate disk throughput by 3-8X and reduce the storage requirements of their HDF-enabled applications without having to modify their application software. The APAX HDF Storage Library works with Samplify’s APAX Profiler tool to analyze the inherent accuracy in each dataset being stored, and applies the recommended encoding rate to maximize acceleration of algorithms with no effect on results.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Heroku has introduced a new aspect to its status monitoring service, which allows users to review the cloud platform’s performance over the past year. Previously, the Heroku Status dashboard had focused on the present health of the platform.
According to a source within the company, CenturyLink is acquiring AppFog, a platform-as-a-service company. Terms of the deal were not revealed. AppFog will become part of Savvis, a Century Link company that offers cloud infrastructure and hosted IT services. Savvis did not reply to requests for comment about the acquisition. AppFog Co-Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson would also not comment about the deal.