Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Adrian Sanders.

Most small business owners understand cloud computing as a tool. A pay-as-you-go, web based tool. Not more, not less. And they’re pretty much right.

Thing is, tools matter. They carry distinct advantages and disadvantages, which are sometimes subtle, long term, and structural. Cloud computing is no exception: besides the usual advantages, cloud based tools help businesses become more transparent, more flexible, and (ultimately) more profitable. Here’s how.

1. Cloud computing makes business more transparent.

First off, cloud computing tools tend to centralize everything together. Contacts and files and tasks aren’t spread across multiple desktops or servers anymore: they’re nested online, in one place, always. This tends to make business more transparent, as it’s harder to partition data off than it is to keep things open. We’ve seen clients go from pitting reps against one another to providing shared incentives and a company-wide contact repository. That’s a crazy change, and it happened because of cloud based tools…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Red Hat is planning to roll out a number of product sets for building hybrid clouds over the next few months, the company announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.

"This is a new era for Red Hat," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering, during a press conference. Years ago, customers were primarily Red Hat Linux customers, but now they’re consuming a number of the vendor’s products, he said. To this end, the new hybrid cloud announcements represent Red Hat’s intention to integrate groups of products into single offerings with their own road maps, he said.

The OpenShift Enterprise PaaS offering will bundle Red Hat’s CloudForms management framework along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss middleware.

OpenShift was first launched last year as a public PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offering hosted by Red Hat. "What we heard from [early users] is that they love [OpenShift], but they want to consume it completely inside their data center," as well as in hybrid form, leading to the new on-premises option, Stevens said…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

FORTRUST, the Rocky Mountain Region’s premium data center and colocation services provider, today announced that Ajubeo, a national provider of enterprise-class cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), has chosen its Denver, Colorado data center for their high-density cloud computing colocation deployment. The decision was based on FORTRUST’s 100% uptime track record as well as its ability to accommodate Ajubeo’s need for 17 kW per cabinet/rack. FORTRUST owns and operates the 224,000 square-foot data center that is an SSAE 16 SOC 1 and 2 Type 2 compliant facility in Denver, Colorado.

Cloud infrastructure companies such as Ajubeo are ideal customers for FORTRUST due to their high-growth potential, interconnection ecosystem development and on-site co-marketing synergies such as data center consolidation endeavors that include hybrid colocation to cloud deployments. Analysts have projected the cloud computing market to grow at a 56% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. My colleague Om Malik covered the details in a post earlier today, and we’ve both offered our pre-emptive views in posts breaking the news that Compute Engine was coming and then confirming it would be announced at IO.

Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry…

The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the public availability of the OpenNebula Marketplace, an online catalog where individuals and organizations can quickly distribute and deploy virtual appliances ready-to-run on OpenNebula clouds. The new Marketplace is fully integrated with the new OpenNebula 3.6 so any user of an OpenNebula cloud can find and deploy virtual appliances in a single click. The OpenNebula marketplace is also of interest to software developer looking to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.

The OpenNebula Marketplace is available at no charge to all OpenNebula users and appliance developers. The Marketplace is not an online store but a service to bring together cloud users interested in pre-built software solutions and software developers and vendors interested in distributing and promoting their applications and services. The Marketplace contains community appliances built with open-source components and commercial appliances that provide evaluation versions of commercial software. It also includes appliances only available for C12G Labs subscribers.

ScaleXtreme, a leading provider of cloud and server management products, announced coming support for Google Compute Engine. As part of this support, ScaleXtreme customers will be able to monitor, manage, patch and automate deployment of Google Infrastructure-as-a-Service servers.

“We’re excited to see Google give public cloud computing customers additional choices in who to partner with for infrastructure,” said ScaleXtreme CEO Nand Mulchandani. “We built ScaleXtreme to handle multiple clouds simultaneously and along with internal enterprise infrastructure. Google Compute Engine, along with services like Amazon EC2, Rackspace, HP Cloud Services, Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware vCloud powered services is making multi-cloud infrastructure a reality for customers, and ScaleXtreme has given customers native support for all these platforms.”

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Atlantis Computing thinks that as cheap as storage has become, it’s still too expensive. Its goal is to suck as much of that cost out of your IT infrastructure as possible. First it offered software that CEO Bernard Harguindeguy says cuts the storage requirement for desktop virtualiation implementations by up to 90 percent. The ILIO Diskless VDI software does so by compressing the data and using local desktop storage to shoulder the burden.

Now, this GigaOM Launchpad finalist is applying its software smarts to storage-intensive server applications such as Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server as well with ILIO Flexcloud.

“Hadoop requires a lot of storage very close to the compute resource, we think we solve that problem,” he said. Running it on server RAM lets you virtualize Hadoop and run multiple copies on the same server sharing RAM as the primary storage, Atlantis CEO Bernard Harquindeguy told me in a recent interview…