Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

For Rackspace, there’s no turning back from OpenStack now. As of Wednesday, all new customer workloads will deploy on the company’s open source cloud computing platform, leaving the company’s legacy platform for existing customers that want to take their time transitioning to the new cloud. Now, the competition to dethrone cloud king Amazon Web Services really begins. Or does it?

I recently spoke with Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, who shared his vision for how OpenStack is changing his company from the inside out and how he doesn’t necessarily view Amazon as direct competitor…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Analytics startup Birst wants to plant a cloud seed in your data warehouse to make it accessible to the business users who actually need it. No, it’s not trying to move any data to the cloud, but rather is implementing tried-and-true cloud product architecture to rethink how users interact with their companies’ centralized and valuable data.

The problem, according to Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters, is that using data warehouses has traditionally been a cumbersome process. Only a limited amount of data — perceived to be the most valuable data — goes in, and doing any work on that data within the warehouse usually requires the assistance of the IT department. As a result, data warehouses have essentially become staging grounds from which data is shuttled via feeds to various departments that analyze it against data on their own systems…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

SUSE® is now helping more than twenty top global cloud service providers accelerate the growth of their businesses by delivering the platform that over 15,000 enterprises worldwide rely on for their mission-critical computing needs. Unique in the industry, the SUSE Cloud Provider Program offers the flexibility to tailor solutions that fit a wide variety of emerging cloud business models. Included as part of the program are tiered pricing – ideal for on-demand computing delivery, cloud-enabling tools that simplify deployment and management of workloads to the cloud, and a variety of enterprise support alternatives.

Since its inception in 2010, the SUSE Cloud Provider Program has helped companies such as Amazon Web Services, 1&1, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Tencent, SHI, SGI, Verizon and Vodacom Business offer customers of all sizes the ability to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Server via a seamless, pay-as-you-go purchase experience with the widest range of support options…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Sonja Cheung.

For angel investor Innovation Works, heaven would likely be filled with a load of Chinese companies using cloud storage as enabling systems–this sector being the firm’s latest investment target as it looks to complete a final close of its second fund later this year.

Mickey Du, part of Innovation Work’s investment team, highlighted U.S.-based company Asana, which uses cloud, as the type of portfolio company the Beijing-based firm is eyeing, although at the seed and angel stages. Co-founded by Facebook alumnus Dustin Moskovitz, Asana has developed task-management software for workplace tasks, and recently received a $28 million Series B round from investors such as Benchmark Capital, Dow Jones VentureWire reported in July…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Google’s Nexus Q, the futuristic-looking, globe-shaped media streaming device that the company introduced June 27 along with the Nexus 7 tablet, is not shipping on the schedule the company originally planned.

In fact, the ship schedule has been postponed indefinitely. Nexus Q units were supposed to start moving to customers two weeks ago.

The giant search, Web services and media device provider alerted via email customers who had pre-ordered the $299 device that it is holding off shipments "while we work on making it even better.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author Mike Gault.

The traditional "protect the perimeter" model of enterprise data security, one where layers of security are added around enterprise data, access to which is limited to trusted insiders, clearly has challenges in a cloud computing model when outsiders (the folks running the cloud) have access to all your data and can monitor everything that you do in their environment.

The solution is not, as some would tell you in the security profession, better certification of cloud providers and external vetting of the human operators. Certification has a role but the ultimate answer will be the invention of technologies that completely remove the need for trusting the human operators.

There is a historical precedent for this. In a previous era longshoremen who handled cargo at ports (outsourced storage and compute) had a series of certifications on their security that were manually audited by government officials. Eventually, containerization and automation of ports made those certifications irrelevant, solving the problem using technology and dramatically increasing the amount and speed of international trade…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

As SaaS, cloud computing, collaboration tools and other technologies continue to take root in the enterprise, so has the need for IT administrators to take control of the network’s inbound quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities.

"Inbound QoS is a part of the toolkit you need … increasingly, we’re seeing traffic from multiple locations terminating in something other than the data center," said Joe Skorupa, a vice president and distinguished analyst, data center convergence at Gartner Inc. "The receiving end needs to be able to manage the multiple endpoints that are sending to it.

"This many-to-many traffic model frankly is pretty new. It’s around unified communications and multipoint videoconferencing; it’s about new forms of collaboration software."…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Carolyn Duffy Marsan.

DeepField Networks, an Ann Arbor, Mich., startup, is coming out of stealth mode Tuesday to announce an analytics tool that maps the traffic patterns, application performance and cost structure of networks for cloud computing companies, content providers and carriers.

The venture-funded firm was created by veteran entrepreneurs including Craig Labovitz, a founder of Arbor Networks, which provides distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection services to carriers and enterprises.

Founded in fall 2011, DeepField Networks has 19 employees and a handful of initial customers. The company received $1.5 million in early-stage financing from DFJ Mercury and RPM Ventures. Asked where the startup gets its name, Labovitz explains: "Studying the insanely complex and expanding structure of the cloud/Internet across millions of sites and tens of thousands of data centers around the world often felt similar to the incredible exploration and discoveries coming from the Hubble Telescope [and its DeepField images]."…

Grazed from CFO. Author: Rob Livingstone.

As the cloud carnival slowly makes its way through town, organizations (fortunately) are becoming increasingly aware of many of the pitfalls associated with the adoption of non-trivial, enterprise cloud computing solutions. Oft-cited risks include data privacy, uptime reliability, security, total cost of ownership, vendor lock-in, and jurisdictional jeopardy (the potential violation of rules and regulations that apply when your data, especially customer data, crosses borders).

Well, there’s another risk.

Under cover of darkness, and most likely already thriving in your organization, are Shadow IT departments. These arise when users and department heads go it alone, provisioning and deploying IT systems (most often cloud services) that are sourced externally and funded from local discretionary budgets without the involvement of the IT department or even the knowledge of the CFO…