Author: David

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: Greg Bensinger.

Amazon.com Inc. on Saturday restored service to its cloud computing operations after electrical storms cut service to some customers including Netflix Inc. and Instagram. But Amazon waited until Monday to tell the world that those operations were fully back up.

In a statement Monday, the Seattle company said thunderstorms affected several of its datacenters on the East Coast on Friday night. But while “several of our datacenters had their utility power impacted,” Amazon said “in only one of them did the redundant power not operate correctly.” The power outage “ended up impacting a single digit percentage” of customers, Amazon said in the statement.

Amazon added that it restored service to most of its customers on Friday night, with the remainder restored on Saturday…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

Proprietary models for cloud computing are a major barrier for midsize businesses considering moving data and applications to the cloud. It takes substantial resources to configure business functions to work in a cloud-based environment and companies must be able to move if there is a problem with one supplier.

Open source cloud platforms address this fear of lock-in by offering transparency and open structures at a basic level. This means that companies could transfer from one cloud supplier to another using the same open source platform, but it doesn’t mean that other open source platforms would be compatible. The key for a midsize business wanting to avoid lock-in to preserve its investment in cloud development is to choose an open source platform that will be adopted widely.

Sun BurstThree open source cloud platforms were represented at last week’s GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco. OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus representatives participated in a debate on the respective merits of their cloud technologies. InformationWeek reported on the discussions…

Grazed from DABCC. Author: Editorial Staff.

Recently VMware’s first certification around cloud computing quietly went into beta. Let’s learn more about this new certification option, the VCP-Infrastructure as a Service (or VCP-IaaS) certification…

Top 10 Must-Knows for the New VCP-IaaS

As this certification is still in beta, as of today, we don’t have a lot of official information yet but here’s what we do know:…

Grazed from Dow Jones. Author: Editorial Staff.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) this weekend pulled the plug on one of its rare missteps, MobileMe. On Saturday, the company shut down its much-maligned cloud-syncing service, preserving account holders’ data for a limited time so they might migrate to its new cloud service iCloud.

The closure brings to an end Apple’s first foray into cloud computing, one that, at the time it debuted, threatened to tarnish the company’s brand…

Grazed from ChannelPartners Online. Author: Editorial Staff.

The chief objection to the adoption of cloud computing is security. End users are concerned that cloud service providers do not have the security infrastructure, policies and procedures necessary to adequately safeguard data and respond to security incidents. As trusted advisers, channel partners need to understand their concerns and be able to reassure customers that their business-critical applications are safe in hosted environments. To help partners do that, this issue will identify risks and ways to mitigate them:

Top 7 Threats to Cloud Computing
To help organizations in making educated risk-management decisions regarding their cloud adoption strategies, the Cloud Security Alliance, has compiled a guide to the top cloud computing threats…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

Consumer use of cloud computing will ramp up over the next few years, according to research firm Gartner, Inc., which recently predicted consumers will store 36 percent of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. This compares with a mere 7 percent of consumer data housed in cloud storage in 2011. Consumers’ increasing desire to share content and use multiple devices is driving this trend, Gartner said.
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“Historically, consumers have generally stored content on their PCs, but as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras,” said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This is leading to a massive increase in new user-generated content that requires storage. With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices.”…

Grazed from Integration Developer News. Author: Vance McCarthy.

A survey finds the future of cloud is bright, as firms become more trusting in cloud solutions to run business-critical operations. The Future of Cloud Computing Survey, released by North Bridge Venture Partners asked 785 industry experts, vendors and end users about drivers inhibitors and best practices for cloud computing.

More than half of those surveyed expressed confidence in the viability of cloud solutions for critical business apps. Some 57% said scalability would be critical to cloud success.

Among those who feel confident about clouds, SaaS (software-as-a-service) looks to be a big reason, according to the survey. In fact, SaaS remains the Number One cloud investment, with 82% of respondents noting that this cloud expense was their top budget item. SaaS also has proven its merit to IT and business users, as a whopping 88% said they still planned to use SaaS five years from now, according to the survey…

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Dave Courbanou.

It’s all about infrastructure. Whether it’s metal inside a skyscraper or ‘metal’ inside a data center, you can’t touch the clouds without it. But sometimes the channel is so caught up in the cloud that it can forget there’s a foundation of hardware behind those nebulous services.

Ingram Micro hasn’t forgotten, which is why it’s rolling out a brand new high-performance computing program, set to be exclusively delivered by the enterprise-focused community of channel partners.

In particular, Ingram Micro is looking to entice system builders and VARs to jump aboard. The program has been meticulously designed in partnership with PSSC Labs, a member of Ingram Micro’s System ArchiTECHs program. The new portfolio of computing solutions goes beyond servers, covering computing workstations, “supercomputing clusters” and high-end software installation services to go along with that high-end hardware…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.

Cloud computing was meant to do away with vendor lock-in, but the work of an independent researcher suggests it could be having the opposite effect.

Researcher and cloud architect Dave McCrory has spent the past two years working on a theory of "data gravity", intended to allow IT buyers to assess cloud products’ potential for vendor lock-in and so make decisions to keep their data as accessible as possible.

According to the theory, clouds are not the adaptable systems that their marketing portrays them as, but planets that are always hungry for more data – and loathe to let it leave. "The motivation for looking at things like this is to determine what you want to do with your data and where you want to put your data, so this allows you to look at it as instead of just storing bits and bytes, it could be the longer term effects of your decision to put your bits and bytes over there," McCrory says…

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

Apple has agreed to pay $60 million to make the Proview Technology (Shenzhen) Company’s claims that it owns the iPad trademark in China go away.

Apple bought Proview’s iPad trademarks in 10 countries through a UK lawyer and a specially organized company for about $55,000 (£35,000) in 2009 before the iPad came out and sued when Proview claimed the Taiwan affiliate it dealt with wasn’t authorized to sell the Chinese rights. Apple lost the suit and appealed.

The appeals court, which announced the settlement on its web site, reportedly mediated the deal, which, it said, was struck on June 25. The dickering took since the end of February…