Author: David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babbcock.

Cloudability has added a "tribes" feature to its cloud bill monitoring service that lets a company aggregate employee users into a project team or a business unit to see the computing bill they are generating and spot whether it exceeds their monthly budget.

The inability to see into a bill as its taking shape versus paying it after its reached runaway heights is a common complaint of major cloud computing users. Several startups have attempted to address the issue, each in a different way. They include Apptio, Cloudyn, Uptime Software, 6Fusion, and CloudCruiser.

Cloudability is giving companies the means to automatically aggregate individual accounts into a company-wide bill, then segregate groups of users within that bill…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Citrix today announced that leading Web hosting provider 1&1 Internet has designed its public cloud offering, Dynamic Cloud Server, on Citrix XenServer™ technology, demonstrating significant momentum for the rapidly growing Citrix Cloud Platform Business. Fueled by the strong leadership and rapid adoption of open source Xen technologies, 1&1 Internet has strategically adopted Citrix technology for its public cloud computing solution. Citrix XenServer is now powering cloud services for four out of five of the world’s largest hosting providers.

With 11 million customers supported by five highly secure green data centers across Europe and the U.S., 1&1 Internet selected XenServer to provide a flexible infrastructure from which to launch its public cloud services. XenServer will make it possible for the global hosting company to deliver granular control of server resources using a proven cloud-ready virtualization platform to meet customer price, performance and scalability requirements…

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…