Author: David

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

Twenty-five years ago, Sam Haffar and his brother Jason started out building white-box PCs for customers in Houston who were looking for a better value. The two brothers built the business one system after another, investing every year in top-flight engineering talent to provide customers with more innovative IT products and solutions. All of it was backed up by a super-high level of local touch and a corporate credo of "Customers For Life and Employees For Life."

From day one, Computex has always been out in front of big technology changes and was a virtualization expert long before it was fashionable. It’s those kinds of deep investments that have made the company, a member of the CRN Tech Elite 250, one of the most widely respected solution providers in the country. Top vendor executives and solution provider peers have sought out Sam and Jason time and time again for advice on how to cross the next big technology chasm…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Admire Moyo.

Though there are many trends percolating through the local IT space, enterprise mobility, cloud computing and big data are presenting CIOs with the biggest challenges. So says Michael Vincent, director for innovation and strategy at Deloitte Consulting, who is also a keynote speaker at the upcoming CSSA President’s Awards. Vincent believes each of these trends will receive critical importance on the CIO’s radar in the coming 12 to 18 months.

Mobile strategy

Regarding enterprise mobility, Vincent says large enterprises have moved rapidly in adopting the revolutionary potential of mobile apps to both enable and transform business processes. He explains that as CIOs gain experience in the design and engineering of good mobile apps, there tends to be an explosive growth in the number of apps in and around the enterprise…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Yesterday’s release of Ubuntu 12.10 was met with the usual fanfare as the Canonical and Ubuntu folks, who pretty much grab any chance to party they can get (Jono gets a haircut! Wooo!) celebrated the semi-annual release of one of the more popular Linux distributions.

Much as been said about the desktop side of the distribution. Steven Vaughan-Nichols says the whole thing works fine, albeit pokey; *El Reg* hates the integration of Amazon searching (though somehow they manage to avoid the gratuitous use of the term "boffins"). That’s all well and good, but frankly the bit that caught my eye in the press material coming out was on the server side, where cloud computing is the big news and Unity is background noise…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has ratified the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), a set of protocols defining how companies can safely move data between private and public clouds. The Storage Networking Industry Association’s (SNIA) Cloud Storage Initiative Group submitted the standard for approval by the ISO last spring. CDMI is the first industry-developed open standard specifically for data storage as a service.

"There is strong demand for cloud computing standards and to see one of our most active consortia partners contribute this specification in such a timely fashion is very gratifying," Karen Higginbottom, chairwoman of the ISO committee, said in a statement. "The standard will improve cloud interoperability."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babbcock.

OpenStack is the main initiative contesting VMware’s growing dominance in running the enterprise cloud. OpenStack has both the momentum as an expanding open source project, and the right governance with the new OpenStack Foundation. It should be able to pose as a long-range alternative.

OpenStack provides the building blocks of cloud computing: compute, network, and storage management, with virtual machine provisioning built in. It has a monitoring/reporting system through its Horizon dashboard, plus image management in Glance. But it must compete with Amazon-compatible open source code from Eucalyptus Systems, and a more polished, OpenStack-like package in Apache’s CloudStack, contributed by Citrix Systems…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

The partnership will address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery Server, desktop virtualisation, networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing technology firm Citrix has extended its partnership with storage, data management applications provider NetApp to accelerate the adoption of enterprise cloud deployments.

Under the expanded collaboration, the companies will provide an integrated cloud orchestration and storage application that claimed to address storage automation, resource allocation, and virtual machine backup and recovery…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

When it comes to realtime JavaScript frameworks, developers love Meteor. But they want better security features and user controls. With Meteor 0.5.0, it looks like they’re getting what they asked for. Meteor Development is adding important new security features to its fledgling real-time JavaScript framework, according to a company blog post.

The new Meteor 0.5.0 version — released Thursday– adds server-side authentication APIs and user account controls which should make it easier for developers to write more secure applications…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. announced Wednesday a $250 million partnership designed to simplify technology operations for businesses and promote cloud-computing technologies. The high-tech giants said they plan to partner in all aspects of business technology, including servers, storage, software and networking, during the three-year agreement.

H-P and Microsoft said the partnership would be based on an "infrastructure to application" business model, including collaboration on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform and offering prepackaged technology offerings for data management and online transactions…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tomio Geron.

Workday is the latest cloud technology company to go public this year and has drawn strong investor interest. It’s five times more expensive than Salesforce.com on a revenue basis, my colleague Eric Savitz notes. With Workday, the larger trend of software moving to the cloud has come in to focus. We caught up with early Workday investor Scott Sandell, a partner at New Enterprise Associates, to talk about Workday and trends in cloud computing.

What did Workday do that was so different?

Dave (Duffield) and Aneel (Bhusri) (cofounders of Workday) said: server technology has changed a lot. The main memory of servers has grown so large. It could be lightning fast. If we do a couple things right and have really good integration with the server for other applications in the enterprise–and then have a presentation layer that’s sophisticated so developers don’t have to care what kind of device it’s used on: tablet, laptop, etc.–then we could really do something. Their audacious goal was to build the entire ERM (human resources, finance) suite–core systems of record which companies use. These are systems of record because they contain all the important data…