Author: David

October 24, 2012 Off

SolarWinds and CopperEgg Team Up to Deliver SolarWinds Cloud Performance Monitor

By David
Grazed from CopperEgg.  Author: PR Announcement
 
CopperEgg, Corp., a cloud monitoring and analytics company, today announced that it has joined forces with SolarWinds to offer SolarWinds Cloud Performance Monitor powered by CopperEgg, a new free tool that provides real-time monitoring for up to two servers running in public and private clouds. With SolarWinds Cloud Performance Monitor, IT professionals can troubleshoot cloud-based performance problems through real-time analytics and alerting on server, OS, system, and process issues.
 
Enterprises who are utilizing or testing cloud computing and software-defined datacenter architectures can use SolarWinds Cloud Performance Monitor to automatically detect and alert on server, system, and operating system issues in public cloud environments like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or Microsoft Azure or private cloud environments. SolarWinds Cloud Performance Monitor capabilities include:
 
 
October 24, 2012 Off

Communications Service Providers falling short on SLAs, amid rise of Cloud & 4G services

By David
Grazed from MDS.  Author: PR Announcement
 
Research conducted by MDS has shown that a staggering 93% of CIOs and IT managers are still experiencing problems with Service Level Agreements (SLAs), despite the rise of managed services and cloud-based service models driving the need for robust, reliable and mutually protective agreements.

The report findings suggest that while SLAs for CSP’s business customers remain incredibly important in principle, their deployment and development is still, in practice, in need of significant improvement. Such improvements can provide real competitive differentiation and be business-winning for CSPs – the research found that 76% of respondents would choose one service provider over another if there were a more transparent and enforceable SLA on offer. This highlights a massive opportunity for CSPs who put SLA development higher up the value chain.

 
October 24, 2012 Off

Advantive cuts build and operational costs by 30% with Interoute Virtual Data Centre

By David
Grazed from Interoute.  Author: PR Announcement
 
Advantive, an international provider of Microsoft based ICT solutions, applications, consultancy and maintenance, has reduced the cost of extending its ICT Application development and production platform by 30% using Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC). Advantive is also using Interoute VDC to host its Narrowcasting solution InnovationScreen in a SaaS model.

Advantive provides innovative ICT solutions, specialist consultancy and maintenance for Microsoft technology. It also develops and creates its own pioneering Microsoft-based applications and offers hosted platforms to customers who use SharePoint and other Microsoft products as a managed service. To manage its development needs, Advantive built a scalable ICT development platform, but as its business growth accelerated, Advantive faced a future of spiralling hardware costs to build out its platform and keep pace with customer demand. Hosting its ICT production environment in Interoute’s pan-European private cloud, Advantive can scale its ICT platform to meet customer demand without incurring any of the hardware costs it previously had to cover.

October 24, 2012 Off

Leading ecommerce provider Retail & Sports Systems selects CWCS Managed Hosting for fully integrated, cloud retail systems

By David
Grazed from CWCS.  Author: PR Announcement

Retail & Sports Systems (R&SS), the Leicestershire-based provider of ecommerce and in-store retail systems, has signed a deal with CWCS Managed Hosting for a new cloud computing system, hosted at CWCS’ Nottingham data centres. The partnership will bring a raft of benefits to R&SS clients, including the reassurance that their client’s retail systems will always be online.

R&SS provides fully integrated retail systems giving its clients a full real time view of both online and retail sales. The initial focus was on the sports market, with clients including St. Helens and Saracens rugby clubs and Championship football clubs such as Birmingham City and Hull City. With expansion into the broader retail market and some clients operating 24/7 through international online sales, a fully supported and resilient hosting platform is vital to ensure business is not lost through avoidable downtime.

October 23, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: 10 Certifications Every IT Pro Needs To Have For 2013

By David

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

With a difficult job market continuing in 2013, Certifications are a must for IT employment and here are the Certifications to have this coming year:

1. MCSA: Windows 2012 Server This certification provides the information on how to install, maintain, and manage the Windows 2012 Server Operating System. Windows Server powers many of the worlds’ largest datacenters, enables small businesses around the world, and delivers value to organizations of all sizes in between. Windows Server 2012 redefines the server category, delivering hundreds of new features and enhancements spanning virtualization, networking, storage, user experience, cloud computing, automation, and more. Simply put, Windows Server 2012 helps transform IT operations to reduce costs and deliver a whole new level of business value.

2. MCSE: Private Cloud

Companies are looking for IT professionals who can help them build private cloud solutions to optimize IT service delivery…

October 23, 2012 Off

EMC Results Will Ride Big Data And Cloud Market Growth

By David

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

EMC (NYSE:EMC) is due to release its Q3 earnings on October 24. Last quarter it reported consolidated revenue of $5.31 billion, a 10% increase y-o-y driven by the growth in Big Data and cloud computing with high-end and mid-end storage network revenues growing by 7%. This is also the tenth consecutive quarter of double digit y-o-y revenue growth for EMC.

The company generated operating cash flows of $1.24 billion and free cash flows of $958 million, a y-o-y increase of 16% and 36%, respectively. It has maintained its outlook for FY 2012 at $22 billion in revenues. [1] We highlight some of its key business drivers and what to expect from the company in 2012…

October 23, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Why Amazon customers might think twice about going east

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Why do tech-savvy companies like Heroku, Pinterest, AirBNB, Instagram, Reddit, Flipboard, and FourSquare keep so much of their computing horsepower running on Amazon’s aging US-East infrastructure given its problematic track record? US-East experienced big problems again Monday, impacting those sites and more. The latest snafu comes after other outages in June and earlier.

Why they’re sticking with US-East — especially since Amazon itself preaches distribution of loads across availability zones and geographic regions — is the multimillion dollar question that no one at these companies is addressing publicly. But there are pretty safe bets as to their reasons. For one thing, Ashburn, VA-based US-East came online in 2006 and is Amazon’s oldest and biggest data center (or set of data centers).That’s why lot of big, legacy accounts run there. Moving applications and workloads is complicated and expensive given data transfer fees. Face it, inertia hits us all — take a look at your own closets and you’ll probably agree. Moving is just not easy. Or fun…

October 23, 2012 Off

CGI Moving FTC Websites to Cloud Computing Infrastructure

By David

Grazed from Executive Biz. Author: Ross Wilkers.

CGI Federal will transition the Federal Trade Commission‘s public websites to a cloud computing infrastructure under a five-year, $3.5 million contract. The company said it won the contract through the General Services Administration‘s Infrastructure as a Service blanket purchase agreement, through which the company delivers certified cloud services to the government.

“The demand for cloud continues to grow as agencies seek to implement affordable solutions that have increased security, provide more availability, and have better performance,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president…

October 23, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Amazon Sells Customers On Long-Term Use

By David

Grazed from Information Week. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing customers tend to view it as a vehicle for absorbing their websites’ or other public-facing applications’ heavy traffic periods. But Amazon appears to be increasingly successful at getting more of them to use it for long-term, steady-state purposes.

The data is skimpy, and Amazon Web Services wouldn’t divulge how much of its business is now based on Reserved Instance versus on-demand servers. On-demand servers are ordered up without prior notice; they start and stop whenever the customer wants. Reserved Instances, available since 2009, are lined up through one- or three-year agreements in exchange for an upfront payment. Reserved Instances don’t have to run continuously for that length of time, although one of the options for purchasing them, heavy utilization, assumes that they run most of the time…

October 23, 2012 Off

Small Businesses Going to the Cloud: Three Top Considerations

By David

Grazed from Cisco News Room. Author: Anne Field.

Small businesses, of course, can save a ton of money and gain a lot of efficiencies by going to the cloud. But getting there isn’t necessarily that simple. Fact is, one size does not fit all. " A startup marketing company, for example, may take a very different path from an established medical practice," says Igal Rabinovich, CEO of IT Help Central, a White Plains, NY consulting firm. Here are some key considerations to take into account before making the move.

Create a migration plan.

Best is not to make the change willy-nilly, particularly if you think you’ll be moving many applications to the cloud. That means having a roadmap for how you’ll proceed, introducing applications one at a time and testing each one before deciding to go ahead with it and then moving onto the next. You also need to include a training period for employees to learn how to use each application…