Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

IBM is buying Texas Memory Systems, a privately held flash memory maker. Houston-based TMS is known for its RamSan rack-mount flash storage line.. IBM already offered SSD from third parties in some of its storage systems and servers, although a spokesman said TMS was not one of those sources.

There is no doubt that flash or solid-state memory is a hot commodity with industry giants like IBM and EMC buying up expertise. EMC purchased XTremeIO last spring for a reported $430 million…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: John C. Dvorak.

Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I am not a huge fan of cloud computing and its implications. I’m even less enamored by the idea of paying a monthly fee to use my word processor.

That said, I must admit that Adobe may have found the sweet spot. I actually like what the company is doing with its new Creative Cloud. Less cloud computing than other architectures, it’s designed to fast-track people into the newest products rather than having them spend about the same amount of money to ride the Adobe roller coaster.

Ride the Adobe roller coaster? It’s when you buy Adobe Creative Suite 2, skip CS3, and get CS4. Or, skip CS4 also and spring for CS5. Now, you have so many new features that you wind up behind the curve. With Creative Cloud, for $49.99 a month, you’re always up-to-date. The system was unveiled in April and since then, new components have been added. Everything is included in the $2,599 master collection, plus free websites and other cloud-only services including Muse, a fascinating Web development tool…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Mike Fratto.

Rackspace has released its Private Cloud software distribution as a free, installable ISO file. Enterprises can sign up for commercial support for a starting fee of $2,500 and a monthly charge of $100 per node. Private Cloud includes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server operating system; a KVM hypervisor; Opscode Chef, which automates the installation; and OpenStack Essex’s Compute, Image Service, Identity Service and Dashboard modules. The only thing missing is OpenStack Storage, which Rackspace says will be available in the next release.

Private Cloud is the same software configuration that Rackspace runs in its Open Cloud service, which we analyzed in "Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS." While installing Linux and OpenStack isn’t difficult–there’s a complete set of instructions on OpenStack.org–Rackspace Private Cloud simplifies installation by pre-configuring most common options, reducing some 2,000 variables to 10 installation steps for the controller node and seven steps for the compute node. This allows a company to launch OpenStack faster, and also means Rackspace has a known configuration, which simplifies its commercial support…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Pure Storage netted $40 million in Series D funding and will use it to build out European operations and staff up its sales, marketing and engineering teams. The new round, led by Index Ventures with contributions from current backers Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, brings total capital raised to a healthy $95 million.

Mountain View, CA.-based Pure Storage is one of a handful of companies evangelizing use of solid state storage — which is faster but more expensive than disk storage — nearly everywhere. Many companies, including storage leader EMC, preach a tiered approach, using flash where it makes sense but disks and even tape where that is the more appropriate and cost-effective choice. (EMC itself may be wobbling on this stance, given that it spent a reported $400 million on Israeli flash storage player EXtremeIO.)…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that it won three Stevie® awards in the 2012 International Business Awards (IBAs). CallidusCloud® was awarded Gold in the ‘Computer Software’ category, Silver in the ‘Company of the Year — Computer Software’ category and another Gold for its Sales Effectiveness Suite in the ‘Best New Product or Service of the Year’ category.

"CallidusCloud is thrilled to be named the winner of three Stevie Awards in the International Business Awards," said Leslie Stretch, President and CEO, CallidusCloud. "We are honored to have our suite recognized as the best new product. We are seeing unprecedented momentum with customers of all sizes around the world adopting our technology. The combination of rapid time-to-value, ease of use and a robust, multitenant SaaS infrastructure is extremely compelling. CallidusCloud has a relentless focus on delivering value to our customers, and we will continue to innovate with respect to our state-of-the-art cloud. These awards are a glowing testament to the talent and dedication of our world-class team at a time when our business is growing like never before."…

Grazed from AllAfrica. Author: Editorial Staff.

Vox Telecom’s Cloud Server Dashboard public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud Powered status, a move that will allow the company’s customers to enjoy all the advantages of third party cloud services, while maintaining full control over their IT environments.

"Our cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualisation and cloud tools, vSphere and vCloud Director," says hosting manager Justin Elms. "Cloud Server Dashboard provides a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering application mobility that only VMware can provide…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Fresh on the heels of a $10.7 million venture capital round, startup PLUMgrid is staffing up, naming a long-time networking technologist Lele Nardin as VP of engineering. Nardin most recently was SVP of engineering at Ericsson Silicon Valley and before that spent 15 years at Cisco where, at various times, he led development of Cisco’s popular 7200 router and the Cisco PXF and Quantum Flow processors. Most recently he headed the company’s IOS software organization.

“We’ve completed nearly two years of development and are moving to the next phase — going to market and supporting customers, we’re fortunate to have Lele,” PLUMgrid CEO Awais Nemat, another Cisco veteran, said in an interview Wednesday. He still isn’t talking — much — about PLUMgrid’s product, which Nemat said is already running at select, undisclosed beta customer sites. Very generally, he said PLUMgrid’s software runs on standard hardware moving packets around and will attack what he sees is a $40 billion market opportunity…

Grazed from eChannelLine. Author: Mark Cox.

HP has announced virtualization solutions aimed at enhancing the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in cloud environments. One of them, the HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance (VSA) is an enhanced and rebranded version of an old LeftHand product. The others — HP Ethernet Virtual Interconnect and HP Multitenant Device Context, are important firmware upgrades to HP’s FlexFabric core 12500 data center switch.

"This is a significant announcement reflecting our evolution of our converged infrastructure," said Kate Davis, product marketing manager, HP storage. The HP StoreVirtual virtual storage appliance is an upgrade of the old LeftHand Virtual SAN appliance, which has been on the market since 2007…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., has been Assigned a patent (8,244,559) developed by four co-inventors for a "cloud computing resource broker." The co-inventors are Eric J. Horvitz, Kirkland, Wash., Harold L. Cochrane, Redmond, Wash., Rene A. Vega, Kirkland, Wash., and Angel S. Calvo, Seattle.

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "Embodiments for interacting with cloud computing providers are disclosed. In accordance with at least one embodiment, a resource broker receives a request for a computing task that is to be performed from a customer. The resource broker selects one of the cloud computing providers to perform at least a part of the computing task. In turn, the resource broker may obtain a gain from performance of the at least one part of the computing task by the cloud computing provider."

The patent application was filed on June 26, 2009 (12/492,813). The full-text of the patent can be found at http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,244,559&OS=8,244,559&RS=8,244,559

Grazed from AMEInfo.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

As increasing numbers of organisations across the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region prepare to embrace working without traditional infrastructural limitations, Gitex Technology Week 2012 is set to make its biggest impact in cloud computing to date.

Under the theme "Business Innovation through Cloud Computing – From Hype to a Must-Have Service Model", Cloud Confex is well-established as the largest and most influential conference and exhibition of its kind in the Middle East. It is on course to grow by 25% this year…