Author: David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Slowly but surely, open source projects are gaining significant momentum in the world of cloud computing. While a proprietary cloud — Amazon Web Services — looms large as the universally acknowledged 800-pound gorilla in the cloud market, other big vendors are throwing their weight behind open source cloud orchestration tools like OpenStack and Citrix CloudPlatform, as well as open-source infrastructure automation tools that come in handy for clouds, such as Puppet and Chef.

Take, for example, Verizon Terremark’s April announcement that it will invest in the open source Xen Project for server virtualization and Apache CloudStack for cloud orchestration. Or Cisco’s founding of the Open Daylight Project, an open-source project based around software-defined networking…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Sam Varghese.

Dell’s decision to back off from using OpenStack as the basis for its public cloud offering will not affect the company’s commitment to the open source cloud computing platform, according to Alan Clark, chairman of the OpenStack Foundation. "I talked to them, in fact they talked to me before they made that announcement, and wanted to assure us that that would not decrease their commitment to OpenStack," Clark (pictured) told iTWire on the sidelines of the Novell Brainshare Forum on Wednesday.

"Putting my SUSE hat on, they are a great partner to SUSE to deliver private cloud solutions. They are changing and modifying their business direction a little bit so that they are in a better position to compete in the public space but that’s not changing their commitment to OpenStack."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: John Riberio.

Salesforce.com has hired a key former Oracle executive Keith Block as its president and vice chairman. He will lead the enterprise cloud computing company’s global sales, customer support, and consulting services businesses, and has also been appointed to the company’s board.

Block, who was executive vice president of Oracle’s North America sales and consulting, decided to quit the company to pursue other opportunities, Oracle said in a regulatory filing in June last year. There was speculation that he had been axed because of critical remarks he made about his superior, co-president Mark Hurd, and other aspects of Oracle’s business…

Grazed from ReadWriteCloud. Author: Seth Payne.

Big Data, just like Cloud Computing, has become a popular phrase to describe technology and practices that have been in use for many years. Ever-increasing storage capacity and falling storage costs – along with vast improvements in data analysis, however, have made Big Data available to a variety of new firms and industries. Scientific researchers, financial analysts and pharmaceutical firms have long used incredibly large datasets to answer incredibly complex questions. Large datasets, especially when analyzed in tandem with other information, can reveal patterns and relationships that would otherwise remain hidden.

Extracting Simplicity From The Complex

As a product manager within the Global Market Data group at NYSE Technologies, I was consistently impressed with the how customers and partners analyzed the vast sets of market trade, quote and order-book data produced each day…

Graze from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure team has typically held its momentum and sales numbers fairly close to the vest. But this week at the TechEd conference, execs did share a couple of interesting data points. First things, first. There’s a new Windows Azure General Manager (GM) at Microsoft as of a couple of weeks ago. Steven Martin is the new GM on the business, Microsoft officials told me this week.

Bill Hilf, the former GM for Azure Product Management — who also served previously as the GM of Technical Computing, Windows Server and Open Source and Platform Strategy — left Microsoft rather abruptly to join HP’s Cloud Product Management Group, I’ve heard from several of my sources. Microsoft isn’t commenting about where Hilf went or reasons for his departure…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Ellen Nessmer.

IBM is conducting research that involves making use of the open Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a cloud-based setting as a way to provide dynamic services, especially to mobile devices. If the research project works out, it might be considered “the operating system of the future for both embedded systems and the cloud,” said Jan Rellermeyer, IBM research staff member at IBM Research in Austin, Texas, who explained the intent behind the research at this week’s Design Automation Conference.

JVM is the well-known open software created at Sun that facilitates write-once, run-anywhere applications. The idea behind trying to establish JVM as a software stack in the cloud is to facilitate a “continuous platform experience” between JVM-based applications running in the cloud and mobile devices, Rellermeyer noted…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Organizations that have chosen true Platform as a Service have done so because it can deliver production applications for a small fraction of the cost and manpower of doing it themselves — on-premises or on IaaS, they say. But a PaaS cloud architecture is still encountering enterprise hesitance.

Choose Digital in Miami offers a digital marketplace platform that customers white-label as part of loyalty and affinity programs. When the company was founded three years ago, it evaluated some early PaaS options, and found that CloudBees integrated tightly with its continuous integration tools, including Jenkins test and the GitHub source repository, and enabled the firm to get its products up and running very quickly…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

The rise of mobile applications and BYOD schemes has caused a number of headaches for IT professionals in the corporate world. 10gen works with IBM to provide MongoDB cloud images for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, an enterprise-ready infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The firms have announced a new collaboration to establish a standard for the Global 2000 to more easily embrace mobile computing.

There is a disconnect between rapid scalability of databases used to handle mobile data and the often rigid structures of legacy databases used within the enterprise — the gap that 10gen and IBM hope to bridge. If successful, then businesses will be able to harness new, mobile technology without negative impact on databases which already handle corporate data…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Microsoft has been bitten by the cloud computing bug in a major way. You only have to look at its latest announcements from the TechEd conference in New Orleans this week to see that the firm is pushing cloud as the way forward for delivering enterprise IT services.

Of course, the tech giant isn’t the only vendor to see the advantages of cloud and to start positioning itself to be the provider of choice. Amazon has been delivering its public infrastructure as a service (Iaas) to anyone willing to pay for the best part of a decade, while VMware has evolved its server virtualisation software into a private cloud platform used in many enterprise data centres…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Shawn McCarthy.

Today’s accepted wisdom is that the federal government is steadily expanding its use of cloud-based computing. But the reality is a bit different. Although the long-term growth potential for government cloud solutions remains high, we are currently experiencing a significant lull. Many federal agencies will spend less money on cloud solutions during fiscal 2013 than they did in 2012.

The for the slowdown range from sequestration to challenges relating to closing large data centers, to the complexity of standardizing and merging similar applications — especially when it turns out those seemingly similar applications have dissimilar data structures and business rules. According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal spending on software as a service (SaaS) will drop from $764.8 million in fiscal 2012 to $739.8 million in fiscal 2013. Platform as a service (PaaS) spending will drop from $317.3 million to $315.1 million…