Author: David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

EMC is updating its NetWorker backup and recovery software on Tuesday with an eye to greater efficiency, tighter integration with other EMC products, and cloud computing.

NetWorker 8 is the most significant new version of the software since 2003, when NetWorker 7 was released. It updates the product in several major ways, both streamlining it for higher performance and enhancing its usefulness.

In fact, the basic architecture of NetWorker has been changed for improved performance and scalability. In previous versions of NetWorker, the management of backup appliances ran entirely on the central NetWorker server. With Version 8, that work is distributed among NetWorker Storage Nodes, the servers that send data to backup appliances. Adding more backup systems no longer requires more central server capacity…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The concept of unified storage — in which both file and block storage are managed as one — was pioneered by storage hardware giants like EMC and Hitachi Data Systems. Unified storage technology enables one hardware device to handle both SAN and NAS storage protocols and thus supports both file and block storage.

Now, Nasuni, which manages cloud storage for businesses – mostly mid-sized enterprises as well as departments of bigger enterprises, — is following suit with what it’s calling Unified Storage for ROBO (ROBO stands for remote offices and branch offices.) That means Nasuni, which focused up till now on the file storage prevalent in most branch offices, now supports block storage as well…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Kognitio, driving the convergence of Big Data, in-memory analytics and cloud computing, today announced the immediate availability of its in-memory analytical platform via Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In doing so, Kognitio is extending the reach of Kognitio Cloud implementations, giving its clients the industry’s widest range of cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings for companies that need to gain business insights from Big Data. This allows companies to choose how they want to do advanced data analytics on their corporate-critical information, where they want to store the data while doing so, and to control their costs to a greater degree than ever before…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing is quickly bringing revolutionary benefits to just about everyone’s working and personal life, and it offers small businesses an unparalleled opportunity to use information technology to compete effectively with much larger, more powerful rivals.

In an effort to help business decision-makers understand the realities of Cloud computing, Quest(R) is offering, free of charge, a new three- part Executive Brief series, GETTING THE MOST FROM CLOUD COMPUTING. The series explains how Cloud computing’s new architectures have made IT less costly, more accessible, and easier to use than ever before — and includes what businesses need to know to deploy and use Cloud computing effectively…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: JP Morgenthal

There’s been a lot of discussion about what makes cloud computing different than other forms of computing that have come before. Some refer to the set of attributes set forth by NIST, while others rely on less succinct qualifications simply satisfied to identify network accessible services as cloud, and others define cloud by applicable business models. In the past, I have written about scale as a common abstraction based on upon some of these other definitions. However, more recently, I’ve come to the realization that we need to define cloud by where it’s going and not what it is in its infancy.

Cloud computing is following in the vein of the automobile and fast food industries. These industries introduced their first products with little to no customization and then changed and competed on value based upon significant customization. The automobile industry started out offering only a black Ford Model T and today allows buyers to order a completely custom designed car online delivered to their home. Likewise, cloud computing started out as vanilla infrastructure services and is rapidly moving towards greater levels of customization. Ultimately, cloud computing will not be defined by service model monikers, but will be a complete provision, package and deliver (PPD) capability facilitating control over the type of hardware, operating systems, management systems, application platforms and applications…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

Gartner said IT spending is expected to rise 3% to $3.6 trillion in 2012, largely on the strength of increased spending on cloud computing. The outlook for this year was raised from an earlier forecast of 2.5% growth. Nonetheless, the growth for this year will be much slower than the 7.9% gain in 2011, as economic turmoil in Europe, and slowdowns in China and the U.S. put pressure on IT budgets.

Cloud computing, which lets CIOs offload their hardware hosting and maintenance to a vendor, is one of the “bright spots” in IT spending, said Gartner analyst Richard Moore. Spending on the cloud is expected to rise to $109 billion this year from $91 billion last year. Moore said cloud-based business process software accounts for the bulk of cloud spending by enterprises, followed by platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service. Moore said cloud spending could nearly double to $207 billion by 2016…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

CIOs are focusing the bulk of the growth in their IT spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies, which squares with the findings of Gartner’s new report on global IT spending.

Dominion Enterprise CIO Joe Fuller said mobile application development currently accounts for 26% of his total budget for the marketing services firm, but will rise to 40% by the end of the year as the company seeks to better compete with Zillow and other online brands.

He and his team developed roughly 29 mobile applications to enable customers to access brand websites such as ForRent.com and Homes.com from the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone handsets. “We want to have the best mobile offerings out there,” Fuller said. “So we’ve got to step it up a notch.” Fuller is also on the process of testing hybrid cloud computing using virtualization software from VMware with the notion to gradually move away from locally-stored software to a complete cloud for its brands…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Rumors keep swirling about for the next-generation of video game consoles.

What sort of specs will the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 have? How will these systems compare to the current-gen consoles? To gaming PCs? And how will cloud-computing figure in to the next generation of games, both in terms of processing power and distribution?

There’s no clear or certain answer to any of this, and likely won’t be for some time…

Grazed from HealthTech Zone. Author: Deborah Hirsch.

For a long time, healthcare organizations shied away from cloud computing, rightfully worried about privacy issues and security when confidential data was stored and managed on the Web.

But all that seems to have dissolved. A recent report by Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets predicts the market will grow to $5.4 billion worldwide by 2017, according to a story by James Ritchie. In 2011, market penetration for cloud computing in healthcare was apparently 4 percent, representing only a $1.7-billion market.

Cloud computing allows organizations to rely on remote machines owned by another firm for software and data storage via a Web-based service for such functions as electronic medical records and for back-office functions, including billing and payroll, according to the study…