Author: David

Grazed from The DataCenter Journal. Author: Jason Cowie.

Chief information officers understand the private cloud and the benefits associated with the technology, but they still need to sell the initial investment to other executives – CEOs and chief financial officers. To C-level leaders, the CIO’s ability to explain concrete return on investment and demonstrated value makes all the difference between embracing cloud computing or abandoning cloud initiatives that could have been hugely beneficial. So how can CIOs present the business-friendly benefits of the private cloud to their bosses?
The value of private cloud education

For starters, CIOs need to look at themselves as educators. Some might feel this is less necessary than it once was. Last fall, for example, the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) surveyed a group of 500 IT and business professionals and 400 IT firms. Among its findings were positive indicators about executive understanding of the cloud. The 58 percent of executives and IT staff who said they had significantly increased their knowledge of the cloud suggests that the CIO’s role as educator should actually be shrinking…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Yahoo Japan subsidiary IDC Frontier has invested $6.1 million in Basho Technologies, a U.S. distributed-data and cloud-storage technology firm, and will use Basho’s technology in its own cloud-computing platform, Basho said.

IDC Frontier will deploy Cambridge, Mass.-based Basho’s riak software in its cloud platform and help Basho roll out its technology throughout Japan. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing and storage capacity that allows users to, for instance, rent servers and software to store data over a network…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

Cloud computing leader Amazon Web Services shed a little more light on its upcoming first-ever user conference, re:Invent, which will be held in Las Vegas at the end of November.

The re:Invent conference, which will run Nov. 27 through 29 at Las Vegas’ Venetian casino and resort, will host AWS customers from around the world in a first-ever gathering of customers, partners, developers and others that make up the AWS ecosystem, Adam Selipsky, vice president of marketing, sales, product management and support at AWS, told eWEEK.

“We’re very excited to be holding our first global user and partner conference at the end of November in Las Vegas,” Selipsky said. “It’s something we’ve talked about for a number of years and had strong demand from customers and partners.”…

Appcelerator, the leading mobile platform company, has released a Virtual Private Cloud edition of Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS). Introduced three months ago, ACS integrates services such as push notifications, user logins, photo uploads, check-ins and status updates easily into apps. Tasks that usually require server programming or tedious integration with multiple SDKs are performed through one simple interface. The newly released ACS Virtual Private Cloud is designed for enterprises that want dedicated, on-demand server resources for all ACS features along with secure connections to their corporate data center without purchasing or administering their own infrastructure.

Asigra Inc., a leading Cloud Backup, Recovery and Restore (BURR) software provider since 1986, announced that it will be showcasing its enterprise level cloud backup and recovery software built specifically for Hosting Providers at HostingCon 2012, the premier conference and trade show for the hosted services industry, held at the John B. Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Centre in Boston, MA, from July 16th to the 18th. Asigra will be at booth #528.

Asigra, a Parallels APS Gold Certified Partner, was recently mentioned in the 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software. Integration with Parallels, the leader in cloud enablement solutions, makes it easier for Parallel partners to integrate Asigra Cloud Backup™ into their services portfolio.

Today, at HostingCon 2012, OnApp announced version 3.0 of its OnApp Cloud software, which includes support for VMware and means that OnApp’s cloud management platform now supports approximately 85 percent of the hypervisor market. With OnApp Cloud v3.0, service providers can run their VMware ESXi hypervisors alongside Xen and KVM hypervisors on the same cloud platform, via the same intuitive OnApp Control Panel. By enabling multiple virtualization environments to be consolidated and managed in a single cloud platform, OnApp Cloud v3.0 further reduces the total cost of ownership for cloud service providers.

The new VMware hypervisor support in OnApp Cloud v3.0 also enables service providers to offer cloud services to the large installed base of VMware users, and grow their customer base, while VMware users can host their applications with hundreds of providers around the world and take advantage of OnApp’s cost-effective, feature-rich cloud platform. VMware is used extensively by telcos, systems integrators and large hosting providers, and is the primary hypervisor for 67 percent of enterprises according to the latest V-Index report from Vanson Bourne.

Apica, a leading load testing and performance monitoring provider for cloud and mobile applications, today announced its performance monitoring resources are now available for data centers utilizing on-premise IaaS from Eucalyptus Systems. Customers can test their web and mobile applications launched in Eucalyptus cloud environments for maximum capacity, daily performance, improved load times, and protection from peak loads. This announcement extends the capability of Apica’s performance monitoring and testing services to Eucalyptus customers, while allowing the company to offer a more comprehensive solution to the market.

“By enabling organizations to leverage pre-existing hardware to create their own on-premise Infrastructure as a Service clouds, Eucalyptus is an appealing partner for organizations looking for flexibility, compatibility and durability to build, test, and launch web and mobile applications,” said Sven Hammar, CEO of Apica. “Eucalyptus customers now have the advantage of Apica’s load testing and monitoring solutions to optimize the performance of their applications and avoid the load delays or other performance issues that could put a damper on their next big release. Our solutions will help customers fully realize the benefits that come with deploying their own on-premise cloud.”

CopperEgg, a cloud monitoring and analytics company, today introduced CopperEgg RevealUptime, a breakthrough free service providing next-generation website and web application monitoring. CopperEgg is the first to offer a free service that allows organizations to maximize website performance visibility with the fastest monitoring checks in the market.  With CopperEgg’s new cross-correlation analytics, business-critical websites can quickly isolate root cause issues in the cloud, correlating RevealUptime end user experience measurements with internal server health from CopperEgg RevealCloud server monitoring.

"I was dumbfounded by how easy the CopperEgg solutions are to implement and use. The visibility and detail the combined solutions provide are worth their weight in… copper," said Andrew Horton, Director of Operations at Aim2Game, which offers Minecraft server hosting for gamers. "Our customers are tech-savvy gamers. You can imagine how our phones would light up if service was disrupted for any amount of time. CopperEgg has allowed us to monitor not only from the inside out, but also from the outside in, so we always know exactly what our customers are experiencing."

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mark Settle.

Just returned from an anniversary party to commemorate ten years of public cloud computing.

I joined several other CIOs who were pioneers in using Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) when large enterprise instances initially became available in 2007. Who would have ever thought that things could have changed so much in ten years?

Even as little as five years ago, large enterprise CIOs thought that public clouds such as EC2 would only be used on a limited basis, primarily for the development of non-business critical applications…