Author: David

Grazed from LiveMint. Author: Editorial Staff.

With the advent of cloud computing, the Web is no longer used only as an application, but as a data provisioning system. Dropbox is one of the most popular tools available today for online file saving and syncing, and is one of the first steps towards full-scale cloud computing (true cloud would have the computer as only an input-output device; with Dropbox the storage and processing of your files happens on your own computer, and copies are saved online).

Dropbox allows its users to store at least 2 GB of free data, and has a number of incentives to add more free storage. In addition, there are paid data plans as well, with 50 GB costing $99 (Rs. 5,425) per year. You can access your data from any device connected to the Internet, using the Dropbox clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even the mobile clients for iOS, Android and BlackBerry phones. Here are things you don’t already know about Dropbox…

Grazed from The Motley Fool. Author: Daniel Ferry.

Enterprise software is typically a staid field. Customers in this industry tend to be sticky: businesses often stay with their incumbent provider due to the high switching costs of retraining staff and IT departments for a new system. This has been especially true while business software required physical installation on local machines.

However, as storage and processing increasingly takes to the cloud, companies are rethinking their software needs. Cloud computing is typically more efficient, as the machines that actually store and compute data in the cloud are far more powerful than local machines. It’s probably inevitable that most, if not all, enterprise customers will eventually migrate to the cloud. This creates a rare juncture for customers to choose new enterprise software en masse. In an industry with high customer retention rates, capturing a big market share today pays off well into the future. The rush for cloud computing customers therefore resembles an Old West-style race for prospectors to stake their claim in gold country…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Like it or not, sweeping software bugs are just part and parcel with operating the largest computing systems the world has ever seen. On Monday night, Amazon Web Services published a detailed post-mortem of its latest cloud outage, which struck on Friday night as massive thunderstorms knocked out power to one of the company’s east coast data centers. However, issues with the data center’s backup generator were just a catalyst — it was a handful of latent software bugs that manifested themselves as the system attempted to restore itself that did the real damage.

Although AWS is already working on fixes at all levels, this won’t be the last cloud computing outage we see, either from AWS or its competitors in the cloud provider space…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Riverbed Technology RVBD +2.14% , the performance company, today announced that Riverbed Steelhead(R) Cloud Accelerator has been named the Best of TechEd Award winner in the Cloud Computing category. Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, developed by Riverbed(R) in partnership with Akamai(R) Technologies, provides a first-of-its-kind solution to accelerate software-as-a-service (SaaS) performance for Microsoft Office 365. Winners were announced during the Microsoft TechEd Conference, which took place at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.

This award recognizes the innovation behind Steelhead Cloud Accelerator, which provides a complete solution to overcome the potential performance problems created by the distance between end users and their applications, problems that must be addressed to realize the full potential of SaaS…

Grazed from IEEE. Author: PR Announcement.

The IEEE Technical Activities Board has approved the launch of an IEEE Computer Society journal dedicated to cloud computing.

The online IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing will debut next year with two issues, advancing to quarterly during its second and third years. TCC will fill the need for a cross-disciplinary and internationally archived journal that publishes novel cloud computing developments.

“We wanted a high-quality research publication that can capture all content relative to cloud computing,” said Alicia Stickley, IEEE Computer Society senior manager of Publishing Services.
Besides the IEEE Computer Society, the journal is being sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Power and Energy Society, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, and IEEE Systems Council…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stuart Johnston.

Google launched its IaaS platform last week to compete with AWS and Windows Azure, but the Web giant may have an uphill battle with a cloud offering that only supports open source operating systems.

The Google Compute Engine, revealed during the Google I/O conference in San Francisco last Thursday, is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform that allows customers to launch and manage virtual machines (VM) running either Ubuntu or CentOS Linux on one, two, four or eight virtual core instances with 3.75 GB of RAM per virtual core…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Emma Joseph.

IBM has come up with great and easy ways to understand cloud computing and make it functional as well. IBM is a leader when it comes to cloud computing, so it is no surprise that they have managed to do this. Cloud computing can also go beyond cost savings by allowing your users to access the latest software and infrastructure offerings to foster business innovation. Think about what that simple statement means. Yes, saving money is good – even important – but even more important is how the end user uses software and infrastructure. Do you know what that really means?

From the infrastructure side of things, you should be able to offer something that has enough servers, storage and other essential components to get the task at hand done. In this case, the task is setting up a cloud computing structure. IBM offers four different types: X86, Power7, zEnterprise System and iDataplex…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Alexander Haislip.

It ought not surprise anyone that Google has entered the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business. GigaOm’s Derrick Harris broke news of the plans in mid-May, but among knowledgeable cloud circles, it was a foregone conclusion that the search giant would enter into rentable infrastructure.

It was a natural move for Google to join the fray. HP entered the cloud game in April. Microsoft hit CTRL+ALT+DEL on its Platform as a Service (PaaS) in early June and brought it back as an IaaS. Google couldn’t afford to sit idle and hand over the future of an eleventy billion dollar industry to an online book store.

And Google needs new things to talk about. New tablets, new glasses, new media players, etc. “New” is the gas that keeps Google going, what gives it that sheen of innovation that makes it seem like more than an advertising company. More product launches mean more bonuses too, so it’s critical to keep putting products out the door. That’s the incentive plan that brought us Google Wave, Google Buzz, Google Answers and GoogleFlooFlaFlippidittyFloop…