Author: David

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Sue Poremba.

For as much as cloud computing has become part of the technology landscape, there are still a lot of people who either haven’t gotten around to migrating data into the cloud or who have purposely avoided the move.

But have we reached a point where using the cloud has become almost mandatory for today’s business environment?

“There is nothing that dictates the need to go to the cloud,” says David W. B. Parker, owner of PTC Computer Solutions. “The cloud is really a medium whereby companies can interact by and between themselves and share with others within or without the company. If this is not something that is necessitated by the business or businesses your company serves or services, then the cloud is not a functional option.”…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

In Tuesday’s article on Amazon Web Services, I wrote about lots of different data-crunching companies, mostly in the developed world.

In the long term, however, as companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft sell computing everywhere, the most dramatic changes may be in places most of us do not now see. Already, places without clean water, decent sanitation or steady electricity are using supercomputers.

Cheki is a used car classifieds business that serves up about a billion page views a month, mostly in Kenya and Nigeria. Most of the one million people using the site are looking at it with Android-based smartphones that cost about $70, according to Thomas Shaw, the company’s information technology manager. Imagine things in a few years, when Huawei, which makes most of the devices, gets those phone prices even lower…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Tim Brugger.

If questions remained regarding Cisco’s (NAS: CSCO) ability to outperform analyst and shareholder expectations, its earnings announcement from a couple of weeks ago silenced them in a big way. Cisco’s year-over-year operating income, net income, revenue, and cash from operations are all through the roof. To top things off, CEO John Chambers and the team finally dug into the $48 billion in reserves and increased the dividend yield to an impressive 2.89%.

Rather than congratulate itself on a stellar quarter, Cisco is continuing its push for significant growth in key business areas. In conjunction with previously announced cost-saving initiatives, the moves will keep investors cheering well into 2013…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

VMware on Aug. 28 at its VMworld 2012 event launched a new management package for data centers called VMware vCloud Suite.

The world’s largest virtualization software provider also introduced a new community group, the Cloud Ops Forum, whose purpose will be to promote cloud-based IT from VMware’s point of view.

The announcements were augmented by the additional news Aug. 28 that VMware also is joining the open-source OpenStack Foundation. The Cloud Ops Forum and OpenStack Foundation are parallel in purpose in that they aim to provide tools for IT departments to virtualize their data centers and move services into public, private or hybrid cloud deployments…

Grazed from PingZine. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud Advisory Council, an innovative not-for-profit organization dedicated to develop and enable the next-generation cloud architecture, today announced the organization’s formation and directive to provide cloud designers and IT managers with the tools needed to enable computing in the cloud, to strengthen the qualification and integration of cloud solutions and to provide best practices.

The Cloud Advisory Council is an industry collaboration of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), strategic technology suppliers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and end-users across the entire range of the Cloud market segment. Founding members include: AMAX, AMD, Atlantic.Net, Check Point Software, Colfax, DDN, Eucalyptus, Mellanox Technologies, Nanjing Standard Communication, ProfitBricks, SGI, Sugon, Supermicro, and Xeround…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

As cloud computing continues its rapid growth in the public consciousness, industry leaders know they must be consistently fast and innovative with ideas, products, and services. A company that is slow to react to the ever-emerging changes and challenges will find itself quickly playing a dangerous game of catch-up. Three of the biggest names in setting the industry pace, EMC, Amazon, and Cisco have all made headlines in recent months for their newest contributions to the cloud sector.

Earlier this summer, EMC made a splash with their acquisition of Syncplicity, a cloud storage company. Syncplicity, originally founded by three ex-Microsoft employees, offers a service similar to Dropbox. What sets Syncplicity apart from its competition is a greater emphasis on security. This focus makes it a more attractive option for businesses, as employees who wish to use personal devices to access their office files can do so with less risk of compromising the company’s data. EMC’s purchase of Syncplicity, coupled with their announcement of forty-plus other cloud-based product improvements, highlight the tech giant’s commitment to being a thought leader in cloud innovation…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

The EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) suite helps organizations monitor and organize cloud-based applications.

Cloud computing and IT services provider EMC Corp. announced the release of the Storage Resource Management suite, which includes the company’s ProSphere, Storage Configuration Advisor and Watch4net platforms.

SRM is designed to deliver application and storage management for cloud-based environments. The suite provides performance, capacity and configuration management for a wide variety of EMC arrays, including VMAX, VNX, VPLEX, Isilon and DataDomain, as well as select third-party storage arrays for both file and block…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced the release of the new Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) specification. The new specification standardizes interactions between cloud environments to achieve interoperable cloud infrastructure management between service providers and their consumers and developers, enabling users to manage their cloud infrastructure use easily and without complexity.

Cloud computing allows customers to improve the efficiency, availability and flexibility of their IT systems over time. As companies have adopted cloud computing, vendors have embraced the need to provide interoperability between enterprise computing and cloud services. DMTF developed CIMI as a self-service interface for infrastructure clouds, allowing users to dynamically provision, configure and administer their cloud usage with a high-level interface that greatly simplifies cloud systems management…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Arsalan Farooq.

Virtualization is now a well-established technology in enterprise computing. And in virtualization, VMware is the established leader. But virtualization has begat cloud computing and now the field of play in cloud computing is far more open thanks to open source technologies.

Looking around the cloud computing landscape, it is impossible to not find an explicit example of open source technology in use. In every layer of the cloud, there is open source to be found, from Linux at the operating system level to a panoply of open source cloud management tools that are very much the forward edge of the cloud ecosystem…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Steve Phillips.

In the past, IT buying decisions were pretty straightforward. At least everyone understood the drill.

With the help of consultants, most companies selected technology under the premise that the system would be hosted internally. The thought was the IT department would eventually figure out how to install and support the new system. With the rise of cloud computing, including Software as a Service (SaaS), this philosophy is quickly becoming outdated. In some cases, cloud-based deployment and maintenance requires more analysis than the on-premises alternatives. That’s certainly the case with cloud procurement software…