Author: David

Grazed from CloudSpectator. Author: Editorial Staff.

As the market quickly saturates with IaaS providers, the decision-making complexity of choosing the right provider evolves as well. Cloud Spectator monitors IaaS performance of over 20 of the world’s most well-known cloud providers to guide businesses in the selection process to maximize performance efficiency and minimize cost.

This report highlights and analyzes the performance of 5 of the largest cloud providers in the market today: Amazon EC2, Rackspace OpenStack Cloud, HP Cloud, SoftLayer CloudLayer Compute, and Windows Azure. Results from the 5-day experiment prominently display the performance differences in providers, with Windows Azure, the highest-performing provider, scoring 3 times better than Amazon EC2, the lowest-performing provider, on average…

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Ben Cherian.

Network virtualization delivers network services in a more scalable, manageable, and fault-tolerant manner than traditional networking can deliver. For this reason it is gaining traction among cloud architects, rapidly becoming a “must have” component of IaaS clouds. So, what is network virtualization? When cloud architects speak of network virtualization they are typically referring to overlay-based network virtualization. With OBNV, network functionality is abstracted away from the underlying physical network and into the software.

What this means is that network services like virtual switching, routing, and firewalling can happen in software at the “edge” of the network rather than relying on the physical core of the network to have this functionality available. What this means in practice is that a cloud architect can design the network with basic low-cost hardware, while providing higher layer functions in the software, where advanced switching, routing and firewalling can be be managed with greater ease and precision. Why wouldn’t I just use traditional networking in the cloud? When building an IaaS cloud, traditional networking faces two serious limitations: scalability, and management and automation…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Stacey Carter.

As their market matures, many companies are contemplating about using a private cloud for their operation, keeping in mind the convenience, better security and control that they can exercise with their internal technology platforms. The use of a private cloud allows a company’s IT department to exercise more flexibility in terms of controlling the internal environment of their servers. However, there are some skeptical views regarding the use of private cloud by companies and whether it is indeed a viable technology that will deliver the results they expect from using the same in their business.

Private cloud overview

A cloud storage service is a viable tool that companies can use in storing data in their system and making it accessible within their network. Using a private cloud storage will help companies to actively use the data that they need some degree of control from. The data is stored within an infrastructure in their data center which optimizes the company’s employees to access and exchange information with enhanced performance and security. This works like an in-house private cloud that is available within a company’s IT data system. A private cloud computing service is one that deploys an on-premises cloud service through a virtual data center within the company’s IT infrastructure that works with a self service portal…

Grazed from RightScale.  Author: Lee Schlesinger.

"IaaS is the most appropriate infrastructure solution for social games, web-based games, mobile applications — any applications or products that can have a short lifespan — because you don’t need to worry about the upfront infrastructure costs of hosting applications or back-end infrastructure. You’re able to use what’s appropriate for you at the time, iterate quickly, and if your game isn’t a success, you can easily scrap what’s been done."

So says Ronnie Regev, an enterprise product manager at RightScale. Before he joined RightScale, Regev spent nine years at Ubisoft, where he was senior manager of online game operations and architecture at the prominent gaming company. He shared some of the lessons he learned about using the cloud for mobile, social, and games at the recent RightScale Compute conference…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications.  Author: Fred Donovan.

The enterprise collaboration software and services market will reach a "tipping point" in two years as cloud-based collaboration software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue surpasses on-premise software revenue, predicts research firm Strategy Analytics.  The market–which includes email and calendaring, instant messaging and presence, Web conference and social collaboration software and services–generated $7.4 billion in revenue last year, up 12 percent year-over-year, according to Strategy Analytics.

Firms vying for market share include Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Citrix (Nasdaq: CTXS), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intralinks and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), the research firm noted…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: Maxwell Cooter.

One of the most-quoted fears about moving to cloud is that the data is not secure. For many companies, the idea that vital customer data is held in an unspecified place, available for access by unknown people is a big inhibitor to the idea of cloud computing.

Cloud service providers have always been aware of that fear and have made reassuring noises about the safety of their data and that no unwelcome visitors could help themselves to their customers’ own data. What they didn’t say is that when it came to the US government, they’d roll out a welcome mat and make them a cuppa while the spooks sifted through what they wanted…

Grazed from Baseline Magazine.  Author: Bob Violino.

Business continuity has become a high priority for companies, and one of the most significant recent trends in BC planning and practices is the emergence of cloud computing as a key component.  "The cloud has fundamentally changed business continuity," says Rich Cocchiara, distinguished engineer and CTO for Business Continuity & Resilience Services at IBM. "Capabilities previously only available to larger companies, such as remote failover, are now within reach of many small and medium size businesses."

The on-demand nature and geographic diversity afforded by the cloud lets organizations put backup operations far away from their primary operations at an affordable price. "This affordability—combined with increased testing capabilities and future improvements in network bandwidth and server and storage  capacity—will force companies to re-evaluate the need for self-recovery," Cocchiara adds…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Concerns surrounding security and governance are prompting some Platform as a Service players to offer their wares on private infrastructure, not just the public cloud.   "Whether it’s for data sovereignty or governance reasons, some of our customers tell us PaaS must be behind their firewall," said ActiveState’s Copeland. "They say, ‘There’s no way we’re putting our data on the public cloud,’" he said.

Implementing Platform as a Service (PaaS) in-house can also lay the groundwork for future use of public PaaS, he said. Hewlett-Packard used ActiveState Stackato in-house, and decided to license it as part of its HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service running on top of OpenStack, currently in beta. "That provides us with a common infrastructure stack that we can deploy on both public and private platforms," said Dan Baigent, HP Cloud Services senior director for business development…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Leena Rao.

Salesforce is on a bit of an acquisition spree this week. After purchasing marketing software company ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, the sales SaaS giant has announced the purchase of EdgeSpring, an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup.

Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, this is likely a smaller acquisition for Salesforce. EdgeSpring just came out of stealth last month, raising $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The EdgeSpring platform accelerates the building of analytics applications that parse business intelligence data like sales, financials and more…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Saroj Kar.

Consumers are adopting technology faster than ever. We witnessed the rapid mainstreaming of devices such as Apple’s iOS devices, Microsoft Kinect, and Android devices etc. Wearable devices will be next, but right now they are far from the mainstream. Wearable devices or wearable computing have enormous potential for uses in social networking, commerce, health and fitness, navigation, entertainment and media.

Right now, the most desired in wearable computing is Google Glasses, a research project in a fairly advanced technology that incorporates augmented reality. But will Google become the undisputed leader in the wave of wearable technology or will it in serious competition with other players such as Apple? Rackspace Hosting announced the results of a comprehensive study on the use of ready-to-wear and its impact on consumers and technology companies…