Author: David

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced a new embedded OEM agreement with VMware to further scale customers’ IT infrastructures and accelerate their cloud deployments. With the expanded partnership, Hitachi Data Systems will bundle VMware cloud infrastructure software and sell individual software licenses to provide organizations with complete, converged infrastructure solutions, services and support. These offerings will help organizations to effectively and easily build and manage their physical and virtual data center initiatives. HDS will spotlight its virtualization and cloud technologies in VMware environments and feature demonstrations and breakout sessions at VMworld 2012, August 26-30, at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

“Customers want a fully virtualized IT infrastructure that helps them scale and be agile while lowering costs,” said Mike Walkey, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Hitachi Data Systems. “This agreement is significant because it allows Hitachi Data Systems to manage support of the HDS and VMware components, and provide customers with the reliability and expertise they’ve come to know from both HDS and VMware. This integrated foundation for customers’ growing VMware environments helps them realize their data center or cloud investments.”

Grazed from BusinessCloud9. Author: Thomas Boue.

Cloud Computing is the fastest-growing and most exciting major technology trend in the software and computing industries. It is also a market that holds tremendous opportunity, as Tom Loosemore, deputy director of the UK Government Digital Service, said in a speech earlier this year given at the Digital London Conference , where he heralded Cloud Computing as one of the main drivers of the UK economy over the next few years.

Indeed, by 2015, revenue from public IT Cloud services will reach nearly 55 billion euros, according to IDC . Roughly a quarter of that will likely be in Western Europe — and private Cloud solutions could add another 10 to 20 percent. Even more significant to the economy will be the knock-on benefits that come from accelerating digital commerce and making robust technology solutions available to more users with greater cost efficiencies than ever before…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Victor Juri.

In an earlier blog I discussed how more and more digital marketing organizations are depending on Big Data analyses of billions (trillions etc) of pieces of data to generate business intelligence and drive research-based decision making (see Big Data and the New Marketing Paradigm). Computing on the scale required to handle Big Data comes with a number of challenges. To handle all the challenges Big Data systems usually perform a variety of actions which are individually scalable:

• Collect
• Store
• Analyze
• Share

Big Data and Cloud ServicesAmazon recently conducted a Big Data event in Boston where its web services division (AWS) shared with the community how customers are leveraging its cloud platform to process large data and calculation sets…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

Customers are embracing recurring revenue cloud computing services at a breakneck pace.

That was the word from hundreds of partners and vendor executives attending the three-day XChange 2012 conference billed as “Channel Without Limits” at the Gaylord Texan this week in Dallas, Texas.

“Cloud services’ demand is exploding,” said Andrew Pryfogle, senior vice president and general manager of cloud services for Intelisys, a master agency distributor of cloud and telecom services working with solution providers. “Customers are sick of writing checks and continuing to invest in on-premise boxes and professional services under the old IT [information technology] model.”…

An international study on cloud computing infrastructure announced today by NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the global cloud services provider and wholly owned subsidiary of NTT, revealed a high level of interest in cloud computing services that include a virtual network.

The results of the study will be presented by IDG Enterprise jointly with NTT America tomorrow at the 2012 CIO 100 Symposium & Awards Ceremony at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA. NTT Communications is a corporate sponsor of the event, which draws hundreds of CIOs and senior IT executives from around the globe to share their IT strategies for driving business growth, as well as honor the top 100 innovative IT organizations.

Dell today announced an expansion to its cloud client computing offerings with an array of enhanced end points, storage solutions and reference architectures validated by VMware, enabling more organizations to embrace the flexibility, productivity and cost advantages of desktop virtualization.

As organizations offer tailored work style options to enhance worker productivity, attract and retain employees, and increase competitiveness, they increasingly consider desktop virtualization to enable their mobile workforce and embrace social media and BYOD (bring your own device) programs. With Dell’s announcements today, the company extends its position in delivering end-to-end virtual solutions that drive increased flexibility and performance and support organizations’ high performance application environments.

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

VMware is discontinuing an unpopular server virtualization-licensing program and will focus on marketing vSphere and its other cloud computing products as a unified stack, CRN has learned.

In its upcoming release of vSphere 5.1, VMware is getting rid of vRAM entitlements, which debuted with vSphere 5 and determine how much memory customers are permitted to allocate to virtual machines on the host, according to sources familiar with VMware’s plans.

VMware will return to its previous CPU-based licensing model and will announce the move at VMworld when it unveils vSphere 5.1, sources told CRN…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

With OpenStack almost finished, Rackspace has taken its own initiative to rebrand itself in order to put emphasis on open cloud. Although it is keeping its Rackspace Hosting name, there’s going to be a new logo as it moves to offer open cloud computing. The announcement is made in time for the release of its 2nd quarter earnings. With the introduction of OpenStack, Rackspace is set to directly compete with Amazon together with its partners, VMware and Microsoft, which also have plans of providing cloud computing services. Internap and Hewlett-Packard are also part of the OpenStack administrators.

According to Rackspace’s CMO Suaad Sait, the rebranding move is just an extension of its “fanatical support” mantra. The company will continue to be committed in the provision of deployment choice like public, hybrid, private and on-premise cloud alternatives…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Cloud computing, business analytics, social computing, mobility and "smarter planet" represent major growth opportunities for solution providers, IBM channel executive Bill Donohue told attendees at UBM Channel’s XChange 2012 conference in Dallas Monday. And, IBM is taking steps to help its channel partners transition to these new technology markets.

"This is a big, big, big opportunity in these new, higher-value solution areas," said Donohue, an IBM veteran who was named vice president of IBM North American business partner and mid-market sales several months ago. But, he noted the opportunities mean changes for many partners, in terms of both partner business models and the types of customers with which they engage.

Donohue opened by sharing the results of surveys IBM has conducted with both CEOs and CIOs. Most surprising from the CEO survey was the fact that more chief executives now identify evolving technologies as the most important external force impacting their organizations, ahead of other external market factors and macroeconomic trends…