Author: David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jessica Scarpati.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers love to crow about how many development languages they support or how feature-rich their platforms are, yet customers have other priorities in mind when deciding which PaaS provider to use. Businesses select their current PaaS providers primarily for their various ecosystems of partners, developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) that build commercial applications on top of their platforms, according to a new TechTarget survey.

"Customers are saying now, ‘I’m not just looking at Salesforce as an app provider, but I’m also looking at them as a platform provider, and I want to use their whole ecosystem.," said Adam Selligman, vice president of developer and partner relations at Salesforce.com, whose PaaS portfolio includes Force.com and Heroku…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

There has been a shift in technology where cloud computing and the emphasis around WAN technologies has skyrocketed. There are more users, more devices and a lot more data for organization to utilize and try to manage. Now, many companies are moving towards some type of cloud computing model to help them achieve their business goals. Why is this important? According to HP’s whitepaper on the CloudSystem, cloud computing is a key component of an organization’s ability to gain unencumbered access to information technology—to access “Infrastructure Anywhere, Applications Anywhere, Information Anywhere, or better said: Services Anywhere.”

In order to deliver on the “Services Anywhere” promise, organizations will have to think differently about IT and how cloud computing plays a direct role. The key will be understanding the unique requirements of each service, such as availability, cost, performance, and regulatory needs, then address them in the most efficient and cost-effective way…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Combining computing power is not really a new idea, but it is one that has gained traction in recent years as enterprises have sought out the most efficient and cost-saving way to manage data. Chances are, your IT team has considered or implemented cloud solutions from competitors such as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. There is a new player in town, however, called Nebula One. A computer rather than a service, it allows you to link up many servers and control all of them as if they were a single machine. You can essentially have your own cloud computer, as powerful as the virtual infrastructure provided by many top services on the market.

In addition, the system uses OpenStack, a popular software tool for centralized control of data centers. The software is configured on Nebula One such that companies can configure and manage their own private clouds. If your business has not found comfort in paying another company to manage your infrastructure, then this solution is just the thing. Plus, just one person is needed to control the network, using a mouse and a software console…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

The U.S. National Security Agency has been “transformed” since implementing OpenStack, and now the agency plans to open its experiences to all 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the next few months we’ll work with the larger intelligence community to roll out systems across the community,” said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist with NSA, during a keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. “Hopefully we’ll be giving access to our OpenStack system to the rest of the [intelligence community] so they can leverage the same efficiencies.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if other agencies have committed to building their own OpenStack clouds or if they plan to use the NSA’s. But government organizations are notoriously difficult to crack so the NSA’s successful implementation could open the door to broad usage of the cloud technology in the U.S. federal government. It’s also good news for OpenStack users. Since the NSA has very strong security requirements, it developed a number of systems for securing APIs and guest OSes and putting SSL “everywhere,” Burton said. “I hope in the future to take what we learned from securing OpenStack and release that back to the community,” he said…

Grazed from Motley Fool. Author: Steve Heller.

By now, you should be well aware that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC ) has arrived late to the mobile computing party. In an effort to justify its tardiness, Intel has hinted that it still benefits from the rise of smartphone and tablet computing. Intel believes that 122 tablets or 600 smartphones creates enough Web traffic to occupy one server. In other words, Intel’s server sales should theoretically be correlated to smartphone and tablet sales, which remain heavily reliant on cloud computing.

Breaking it down

During the fourth quarter of 2012, worldwide smartphone shipments increased by 67 million devices year over year, and tablet sales increased by and 22.6 million units. Based on Intel’s estimations and its roughly 90% share in the server market, it would imply that an additional 267,000 servers would have shipped during the quarter. However, during the fourth quarter, Intel’s server unit volume actually declined by 1% year over year, suggesting that either Intel grossly overestimated the impact of mobile computing devices on its server business, the data center is evolving away from the monolith, or perhaps none of the above…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

According to TechTarget.com, it is “a way to rent hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the internet…(it) allows the customer to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications or developing and testing new ones.”

The last part is what has most likely attributed to PaaS’s success. Because the service is delivered over the internet, this freedom from hardware worry allows developers to focus on developing and launching an app. No concerns over storage and back up, they can quickly breeze through the app development. PaaS is commonly confused with two things, one is it’s distant cousin middleware and the other one its family member, Infrastructure as a Service. Here’s the difference:…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Patrick Kerpan.

Infrastructure is the most basic level of cloud computing. A cloud provider offers you, as a cloud application owner or user, the ability to run your business application without managing the underlying physical resources of CPU, storage, network and memory. Public/private cloud IaaS is multi-tenant access to the physical resources ) where you can launch virtual machines (VMs) as needed in the cloud.

Cloud commoditizes the infrastructure — hence Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or the difficult to pronounce, “IaaS”. Regardless of deployment model or provider, you should have access to infrastructure and the ability to purchase VMs. So now that you’re shopping for infrastructure, what should you look for in a cloud provider?…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Mellanox(R) Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) (TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced ConnectX-3 Pro, the industry’s first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. With hardware offload support for VXLAN and NVGRE, ConnectX-3 Pro enables cloud providers to build large-scale infrastructures with industry-leading performance and dramatically lower CPU overhead, thus reducing cloud application cost and increasing cloud ROI.

ConnectX-3 Pro, the industry’s first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. (Photo: Business Wire)…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

The how-to of cloud implementations has gotten infinitely easier as cloud service brokers have begun to dominate the market. As many trends have shaped technology fluxes over time, this one is proving to be a game-changer for enterprises. There are many examples in the current climate. One that stands out is the partnership of Gravitant with Amazon Web Services, a well-established cloud entity. The former has created the cloudMatrix service, which is designed to simplify hybrid cloud deployments for enterprises.

This service is proving to be so inclusive that even government agencies have implemented it. Corporate IT leaders have numerous options, including human resources, procurement, financial, sales, and marketing, and other standard business functions and industry-specific options. Companies have sought to outsource various departmental functions over the past several years. When it comes to cloud computing, third-party cloud service brokerages have found their niche, and bring the best of service in a single package…