Author: David

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

It took Microsoft a while to launch its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service offering, but I’m seeing signs that it’s one to watch among enterprise service providers. Today Microsoft announced it is now offering per-minute billing. Most providers charge by the hour, although Google Compute Engine recently also began offering per-minute billing. Amazon is still offering billing by the hour. I’ve asked the company if it wants to comment on Azure’s move and will update this post if I hear a response.

In a blog post, Microsoft noted that 65 minutes of use could cost more than double on a competitive cloud service, now that it’s offering per-minute billing. It’s literally the difference of only pennies but “multiply that by the thousands of virtual machines that you may ultimately run, [and] the difference adds up quickly,” Scott Woodgate and Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Windows Azure product marketing, wrote in the blog post. “Suddenly you may find your cloud economics are not what you thought they would be.”…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

ActiveState, a platform-as-a-service provider, has acquired New Zealand-based Appsecute, a company with social monitoring tools for developers and IT professionals to monitor cloud environments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Appsecute’s three employees will join ActiveState, based in Vancouver, Canada. They will remain in New Zealand developing the service. The Appsecute technology will get integrated into Stackato, ActiveState’s private PaaS, used for internal developer environments.

Appsecute launched as a PaaS las year, offering a universal user interface for a variety of different vendor PaaS platforms. Earlier this year, the company decided to take a different tack by offering what it calls a “social timeline for DevOps.” It essentially allows developer and operations teams to get a real-time, “single-pane-of-glass” view across multiple application management services…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Steve Lohr.

I.B.M. announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to buy SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud computing company, in an effort to strengthen I.B.M.’s position in the fast-growing market for computing sold to businesses as a service delivered over the Internet. The purchase price was not disclosed. But it was about $2 billion, according to a person told of the negotiations, who has asked not to be named because he had not been authorized to speak publicly about the terms.

SoftLayer, a private company based in Dallas, has a network of 13 data centers in the United States, Singapore and Amsterdam, and revenue of about $400 million a year. GI Partners, a private equity fund based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the majority owner of SoftLayer. The acquisition is the largest made under the leadership of Virginia M. Rometty, who became chief executive in January 2012. The move, analysts say, also gives I.B.M. a broader presence in the business of cloud computing services…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review. Author: Stacy Griggs.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) marketplace is rapidly evolving to be a clash of four titans plus a number of other companies trying to differentiate themselves based on price, service, compliance or sales models. Let’s take a quick look at the major competitors and some recent news they have announced.

• Amazon AWS – Recently passed $2 billion in revenue and Morgan Stanley is predicting that AWS will hit $24 billion in revenue in the next 10 years. With their dual devotion to engineering and price reductions, they are the most formidable (by far) competitor in the cloud…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Transparency is the biggest challenge in moving to cloud computing, not security, according to Gavan Egan, vice-president of sales at Verizon Terremark Europe. “Most big organisations do not see security as a challenge because serious cloud providers understand security and security infrastructure,” he told Computer Weekly. Verizon, which has a long-established security tradition, encrypts all data in its cloud environment and ensures that none of its employees have access to the data. All staff are also screened.

Egan, who formerly headed Verizon’s security services business in Europe, sees transparency as a far bigger issue for organisations making the transition to cloud. “IT departments not only have to ensure that cloud deployments comply with external and internal regulations, but they need to be able to prove that compliance to auditors and regulators,” he said…

Grazed from WallStreetCheatSheet. Author: Eric Schaal.

How far can Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) go in the cloud computing game? Though Amazon Web Services is already believed to be clocking around $2 billion a year, a report indicates that number could grow to an imposing $24 billion in the next decade, which would make Amazon a terror to all competitors and possibly give the tech giant a monopoly in the industry.

A report by Morgan Stanley analysts sees Amazon in the top five and gaining fast in cloud computing, which they believe will have a TAM of $152 billion ten years from now. As for the inevitability of a world turning entirely to cloud services by 2022, that’s considered a given, and bad news for companies like NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) and EMC (NYSE:EMC). Of course, someone will need to be the host, so the market for servers won’t entirely disappear, Morgan Stanley’s analysts noted…

Grazed from BenchMarkReviews. Author: Editorial Staff.

With rapid growth and strong competition in the Cloud Computing sector, cloud service providers are looking for ways to increase efficiency to remain competitive. Learn more at this year’s Cloud Computing Expo in New York, where Innodisk, a DRAM and Flash Storage manufacturer, will be sharing their thoughts on cloud storage solutions in a special session. With more efficient hardware, cloud service providers can increase profit margins, cut costs, and boost scalability and performance of their systems.

This year’s Cloud Computing Expo is at the Javits Center in New York City from June 10-13, 2013. Please join Innodisk Senior Engineer, Edwin Lam, for a special session, "Maximizing the Small Things: Efficiencies for Cloud Hardware", on June 11th, 8:15am-9:00am, in Room 1A10. This session will focus on SATADOM, a very small form factor boot device for the cloud, and how it contributes to performance and scalability of cloud servers, as well as the requirements for tomorrow’s cloud hardware…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

The network may be one of the less glamorous elements of the enterprise technology infrastructure, but it’s an essential one — and it’s getting an overhaul. New initiatives such as cloud computing and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) are imposing new burdens on the corporate network, which means CIOs are looking at upgrades, new technologies and new techniques to ensure that it can deliver the required services.

Cloud computing, for example, means that networks have to be reliable for staff to be able to access core business applications, while BYOD support allows staff to use their own devices on the corporate network, which may create additional demand — for example by increasing the amount of video traffic…