Author: David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

You’re sitting around. You have some computing to do. Ten years ago, you would ask your boss to buy a rack or two of computers to churn through the data. Today, you just call up the cloud and rent the systems by the minute. This is the market that Google is now chasing by packaging up time on its racks of machines and calling it the Google Compute Engine.

Google took its sweet time [1] entering this corner of the cloud. While Amazon, Rackspace, and others started off with pay-as-you-go Linux boxes and other "infrastructure" services, Google began with the Google App Engine [2], a nice stack of Python that held your hand and did much of the work for you. Now Google is heading in the more general direction and renting raw machines too. The standard distro is Ubuntu 12.04, but CentOS instances are also available. And you can store away your own custom image once you configure it…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

OpenStack is currently riding high on a momentum built up by Rackspace’s recent decision to rebrand themselves around the open source cloud project, along with long-running auction site eBay coming out and admitting that they are using the technology, but it’s not completely smooth sailing for Openstack, as there are still a number of skepticism in the industry over their governance and development models.

Openstack itself is an odd technology. It is well-received by the majority as it provides IT vendors and end users with an open cloud ecosystem that is robust enough to compete with closed source and commercial offerings, yet it still generates a lot of criticisms from people who question their governance model, and from people who pan its lack of maturity when compared to industry leaders such as Amazon’s AWS and VMWare. So, what’s the reason for Openstack’s ability to be so divisive and polarizing?…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Workday is expanding its cloud-based human resources and financial applications’ footprint with a new employee time-tracking module, the company announced Tuesday.

The new capabilities come as part of the SaaS (software as a service) vendor’s 17th release. Dubbed Workday Time Tracking, the module gives enterprises the ability to use "a single application to collect, process, and manage time and labor for their global workforce," Workday said in a statement.

It incorporates a calendar-style interface through which employees can submit information about their hours, as well as a "real-time calculation engine" that targets "critical data," such as overtime hours, Workday said…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Beverley Head.

Established in the 1960s, ISACA (formerly known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) has released a guide to help organisations work out what the true return on investment will be from investments in the cloud.

According to the organisation there are hidden costs associated with cloud computing which need to be considered when assessing the benefits of cloud.

The guide which is available as a free download details a 12-step process that attempts to tackle the complexity of cloud computing and provide better insights regarding long-term costs and payback. It also makes the point that return on investment is not the only financial measure of success (or failure) and recommends organisations also consider calculating total cost of ownership, net present value and internal rate of return data before committing to a cloud investment…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higgenbotham.

Amazon has added a new cloud offering dubbed Glacier, where for less than a penny per gigabyte per month users can store files that aren’t accessed very often. The new product could put the hurt on backup and recovery offerings from other vendors.
glacier

In its never-ending quest to deliver new features to the Amazon Web Services product portfolio, the online retailer has added a new storage service designed for archival and backup storage. AWS Glacier is cheap, slow and Amazon hopes startups find it the prefect place to put files that aren’t accessed very often. And if it takes off it could become a problem for the existing backup and recovery business (which is often the first offering many smaller telco cloud providers launch to customers)…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Seth Bernstein.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the companies’ infrastructures. More and more companies are spending their outsourcing budget on purchasing cloud services. This helps them avoid hiring more people and save a fair amount of funds from their budgets. Research firms (including Gartner Inc.) have published figures that demonstrate the trend of cloud computing services in the IT outsourcing market.

On August 7th, 2012, Gartner Inc. said that out of $251.7 billion of total market of IT outsourcing, cloud computing services are the fastest-growing segment, having increased from $3.4 (2011) to $5 (2012). Currently, this is still insignificant when compared with the $251.7 billion market, but we can hope to see them as the leading area of IT outsourcing because of their high growth rate. Let’s take a look at some of the factors that have made cloud computing services so popular in the IT outsourcing sector…

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Doug Barney.

The cloud is getting more and more worthy of your applications every day. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect and that doesn’t mean you should necessarily trust it. I guess the question is, which network is less perfect, the cloud provider’s or yours?

These are issues Margaret Dawson tackled in Cloud Computing: Panacea or Power Monger on Enterprise Systems Journal. Dawson is a vice president with cloud provider Symform.

You should already understand your network’s weaknesses. Now let’s look at your provider’s presumed shortcomings…

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

Despite headwinds in its core business, Dell is trying hard to move into the new world of corporate computing.

On Tuesday, the company said that Marius Haas, a well-regarded executive with a noted history at Hewlett-Packard, would take over Dell’s Enterprise Solutions business, which sells the servers, network, and storage equipment for big corporate data centers and cloud computing systems.

It is a future that can’t come fast enough: Mr. Haas’s position was announced along with Dell’s second-fiscal-quarter earnings. Dell had net income of $732 million, or 42 cents a share, on revenue of $14.5 billion…

The BIM9 lab consisted of four of their private BIM cloud servers driving 21 rented MacBook Pros. Each BIM9 private BIM cloud server hosted five virtual machines with each virtual machine running its own session of Revit. The MacBooks were connected to these virtual machines with a standard RDP client. The result was a student experience of running Revit on high-powered workstations even though they were actually sitting at old, underpowered MAC laptops.

BIM9 has been developing and deploying private BIM clouds for clients throughout North America and Hawaii for a little over a year. “Although we had previously created private BIM clouds for classrooms this was the first time we did it for a conference lab,” said Lonnie Cumpton Business Development Manager and Co-founder of BIM9.