Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices.

As Hurricane Sandy swept north and toward landfall, data centers from Florida to Boston and further north did their things to prepare. Verizon’s Terremark unit went on high alert last week as Sandy approached Terremark’s Miami-area sites. Then it replicated the process for its major facilities in Culpepper, Va., and the New York area, said spokesman Xavier Gonzalez…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Rackspace is busy building a Hadoop service, giving the company one more avenue to compete with cloud kingpin Amazon Web Services. However, the two services — along with several others on the market — highlight just how different seemingly similar cloud services can be.

Rackspace has been on a tear over the past few months releasing new features that map closely to the core features of the Amazon Web Services platform, only with a Rackspace flavor that favors service over scale. Its next target is Amazon Elastic MapReduce, which Rackspace will be countering with its own Hadoop service in 2013. If AWS and Rackspace are, indeed, the No. 1 and No. 2 cloud computing providers around, it might be easy enough to make a decision between the two platforms. In the cloud, however, the choices are never as simple as black or white…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Samplify, the leading intellectual property company for accelerating memory, I/O, and storage in computing, consumer electronics and mobile devices, announced the availability of its APAX hardware IP core that boosts the performance of multi-core CPUs, GPUs, application processors, and systems-on-chip. The APAX IP accelerates throughput of memory, I/O, and storage by 2X to 8X for high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud computing, as well as consumer electronics and mobile devices performing applications such as image acquisition, video processing, and 3D graphics.

"Multi-core CPUs are hitting the memory wall," said Al Wegener, CTO and founder of Samplify. "With each new process node, the number of processor cores on a die can double with Moore’s Law, but the throughput of memory, I/O, and storage fails to keep up with this growth. Hence, the performance of multi-core applications is increasingly memory, I/O, and storage bound. APAX is the only solution that shatters the memory wall by accelerating the throughput of DDRx, SAS/SATA, SSD, PCIe, Ethernet, and Infiniband, by as much as eight times."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware recently reported revenue growth of 20% in its third quarter ended Sept. 30. It projects revenue growth for the year of around 21% to 22%. That means it will close out the year with total revenues close to $4.5 or $4.6 billion, compared to $3.8 billion last year. Pretty good for an enterprise software company facing "tough macroeconomic conditions," as co-president Carl Eschenbach phrased it. Or is it?

Net income is up only 3%, to $540 million from $524 million, for the first nine months of 2012 compared to 2011, which means gaining that 20% revenue growth is costing VMware something. It’s possible the spread of server consolidation around the world is still the main fuel behind VMware’s revenues. That trend is so widespread that VMware’s international revenues now exceed those produced in the U.S., $580 million in the third quarter versus $554 million…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Today for the 12th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop, sponsored by the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF), a consortium of researchers demonstrated a 100 Gbps optical network testbed established to develop advanced services and technologies for next generation data-intensive “petascale science.” The testbed is a contiguous facility from the Washington DC area to the StarLight International/National Communications Exchange Facility in Chicago.

In contrast to more general implementations of 100 Gbps services, which aggregate many millions of small traffic flows, this facility supports extremely large-capacity data flows, including a 98 Gbps data transfer between a single pair of high performance servers with zero packet drops from the East Coast to Chicago and back (approximately 2,000 miles)The research consortium was established to investigate new networking techniques, technologies, and services for petascale science, with a focus on 100 Gbps end-to-end data flows, including disk-to-disk and memory-to-memory. These innovations were showcased during the demonstrations; for example, transporting extremely large-volume individual data flows over long distances with high performance and low latency. Members of the consortium include the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR), and the Laboratory for Advanced Computing at the University of Chicago (LAC)…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Cloud computing and data storage specialist GreenQloud and database software developer Xeround announced a partnership to run their zero-management cloud database solution for MySQL applications on GreenQloud’s 100 percent renewable energy-powered infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). GreenQloud offers scalable high performance servers and on-demand storage with Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible applications program interfaces (APIs) and a user-friendly management console.

The company, based in Iceland, claims it is the only cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider powered completely by renewable energy and GreenQloud also provides its customers with a feature allowing them to monitor energy metrics and carbon emissions savings. GreenQloud is targeting customers who have requirements for for web storage, backups, key-value databases and scaling web apps and want to make an investment in green IT…

Grazed from PCB Design. Author: PR Announcement.

Iron Atom announced today that it has certified Amazon Web Services ‘GovCloud’ for use with its fully automated PCB DFM web offering. Iron Atom uses on-demand instances of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform to process its customer’s data. Iron Atom’s president Iain Wilson stated “The ability to properly handle ITAR data is critical for us in the North American market. Although our standard service has been live for several months now, integration to the AWS GovCloud required a separate interface. We took our time to ensure everything was working correctly”. Adding “With ITAR processing in place, I’m very pleased to announce full operational status for ‘DFM On-Demand’.

Iron Atom’s ‘DFM On-Demand’ service uses Ucamco’s ‘Integr8tor’ product to perform the PCB data processing. Wilson notes “Integr8tors level of automation is very impressive. In addition to the DFM analysis, layer recognition/ordering and ‘CAM Ready Data’ outputs provide fast processing and productivity benefits beyond quoting…

Grazed from PC Advisor. Author: Ellen Messmer.

Many CIOs and chief information security officers are struggling to adapt security practices to a changing environment that includes cloud computing, social media and tablets , according to a survey of 1,850 such IT pros. The Ernst & Young 2012 Global Information Security Survey published today found cloud computing to be one of the main drivers of business model innovation and IT service delivery, with 59% of respondents saying they use or plan to use cloud services. But 38% admitted they have not taken any measures to mitigate risks.

Use of social media in business is prevalent, but 38% of the CIOs and CISOs surveyed say they don’t have a coordinated approach to address risks, such as defending the organization’s brand or determining how employees use work time to engage in social media. The Ernst & Young survey indicated that 31% of respondents said they saw an increase in the number of security incidents compared to the previous year…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google. Google Compute Engine may have launched less than six months ago but it’s seen as a serious competitor to Amazon Web Services. At least Amazon appears to think so. It just lodged a lawsuit against a former AWS sales executive who is joining Google, according Geekwire which first reported the news.

Daniel Powers, an IBM veteran, joined AWS as VP of sales in 2010, learned the business “from top to bottom” and was privy to company trade secrets, according to the suit. In June, 2012 Amazon offered him a severance package in return for a signed non-compete agreement. This suit, filed in Washington State Superior Court, charged that Powers’ decision to join Google violates the terms of that pact, which required him to stay clear of directly competitive work for 18 months…

Grazed from ChinaBusiness Daily. Author: Chen Limin.

Microsoft Corp could be excused for being somewhat ambivalent in its attitude toward the Chinese market. The country is the world’s biggest personal computer market but the US software giant has failed to collect due revenues in the past two decades because of piracy. The company, however, has been trying to take another approach – cloud computing – hoping to improve its performance in the Middle Kingdom.

Last month marked the China launch of its Windows Server 2012, an operating system used for cloud-based services. The move came after it announced an increase in staff by 1,000 to its approximately existing 4,500 employees in China in the current fiscal year and boosted its research and development spending by an additional $500 million, with a considerable part of it going to cloud computing…