Author: David

Grazed from Daily Finance. Author: Sara E. Wright.

Recent power outages across the East Coast, some lasting more than a week during the height of a debilitating heat wave, have exposed the soft underbelly of the North American electrical grid. Old Gray Mare, she ain’t what she used to be, and it’s going to take oodles of money to give her a much-needed facelift and get her back in fighting shape. Follow that money, and you should find some compelling investment opportunities. One of these is "the cloud," nerd-speak for cloud computing technology.

Harsh reality
The Electricity Advisory Committee for the U.S. Department of Energy warned in 2009 that "…the current electric power infrastructure … will be unable to ensure a reliable, cost-effective, secure, and environmentally sustainable supply of electricity for the next two decades … much of the electricity supply and delivery infrastructure is nearing the end of its useful life." Say what? That’s alarming!…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Phil LeClare – Forrester Research.

Our latest survey on IT budgets and priorities shows that 35 percent of enterprises have a big focus on cloud computing (calling it a high or critical priority), but do we really know how best to apply that investment?

We continue to see a large disconnect between what the business wants from cloud services and what the IT department wants to offer and support. The short story is the business wants public cloud services (or something very, very close to this value proposition) for delivering new services and capabilities to market. Yet IT wants to offer private cloud solutions that improve operational efficiency and drive down overall IT costs. IT doesn’t have its head in the sand about business’ demands, they just have to balance these desires against what IT is measured on – the cost and security of services provided. And frankly they don’t trust the public cloud…

CSC today announced BizCloud for Government — the industry’s first and only on-premise private cloud that is billed as a service and ready for application workloads in 10 weeks. As federal agencies strive to improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, meet federal mandates and embrace cloud services, CSC’s BizCloud for Government provides the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the agility, convenience and elasticity of a public cloud.

“Our customers want greater efficiency and cost-effective alternatives to meet both mission and IT requirements, and BizCloud for Government can provide these benefits immediately,” said Leif Ulstrup, president of CSC’s Federal Consulting Practice. “Many government agencies are already taking advantage of our more than 50 years of government experience combined with our deep commercial cloud expertise to modernize their enterprise without losing focus on the mission.”

6fusion, the leading provider of utility metered public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure management solutions, today announced that Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere has achieved general availability and the latest version of the product is now available for download. You can see a demo of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere at 1PM ET on Wednesday, August 1st – register here.

Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere allows users to meter resource consumption in any VMware vSphere 4.1 or 5.0 environment providing unparalleled insight into resource consumption – all for free and all right from the VMware console. In addition, new functionality was added to the latest version of Cloud Resource Meter for VMware vSphere based on feedback from beta customers, including:

Advances in VPS hosting technology and the decreasing cost of solid-state hard drives are set to allow Australian businesses to increase the speed and reliability of their websites without blowing their budgets.

Allowing disk access up to 100 times faster, with failover redundancy and cloud-based infrastructure, VPSBlocks new offering of VPS (Virtual Private Server) Cloud Hosting with SSD (solid-state-drives) is surprisingly affordable.

“For comparable prices to regular Australian VPS hosting, we can provide a solution to Australian businesses that provides vastly increased speed and reliability” –Will Kruss, CEO of VPSBlocks – the Australian web host offering the new technology.

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Managed hosting provider Datapipe this week said it has deployed the industry’s first global Apache CloudStack platform. Datapipe’s Stratosphere Elastic Cloud Computing Platform is available in Silicon Valley, the New York Metro area, Northern Virginia, London, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Datapipe’s Stratosphere leverages Citrix CloudPlatform, an open source platform based on Apache CloudStack for building scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud offerings. The platform is interoperable with Amazon Web Services, enabling customers to build and deploy cloud applications across both Datapipe Stratosphere and Amazon’s public cloud using EC2-compatible tools…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Saroj Kar.

Storing of data in the cloud is convenient, there is no need to buy any equipment and in most cases it helps companies address challenges related to the growth of protecting and managing of business application data. Now users can quickly recover lost data when stored in a system based on cloud computing. TwinStrata, the cloud storage provider, revealed the stats in a study at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York.

According to the report, three out of four respondents say they could recover data in the cloud within 24 hours, should they experience any problems with the data. By contrast, one in eight organizations that do not use the method of cloud computing for data storage, the recovery of data could be delayed over a week…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Yahoo’s going with another plainspoken blonde.

After the market closed Monday Yahoo’s board named Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s first employees and long-time protector of the stripped-down look of Google’s homepage, CEO replacing interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

The Yahoo board is taking another flyer on Mayer, 37, considering she’s coming out of Google’s product side, responsible for the look and feel of such things as Google Mail, Google News and since 2010 Google Maps and other Google location and local services. She has no CEO or turnaround experience. She did sit on Google’s operating committee and is on the board of Wal-Mart…

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

A handful of vendors have created a trial version for ARM-based servers of the OpenStack cloud computing software now available for testing online. The open source offering fills in another small piece of software puzzle for the low power architecture working its way into the data center.

ARM server SoC designer Calxeda worked with open software specialist Canonical and Hewlett-Packard to create a version of the TryStack for ARM hosted by Core NAP. Dell, Equinix, NTT and Rackspace Hosting also supported the work which is based on the Essex release of OpenStack…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

RightScale has made its very first acquisition.

It’s bought the free Scottish cloud cost forecasting web site ShopForCloud and renamed it PlanForCloud, fleshing out its management portfolio to help those struggling with cloud costs, which are always, as anyone will attest, complex. Terms were not disclosed.

The widgetry will help companies budget their cloud costs by giving them tools to model various architectures and usage patterns, access up-to-date pricing from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, and produce detailed cost reports in just a few minutes…