Author: David

Storage clouds are the conduit for an increasing percentage of business users to access their daily computing needs, not just for casual access to files while traveling, or sending an occasional large file among collaborators. Rather than base their storage clouds on traditional RAID architectures, service providers, online storage companies, and even large organizations are moving to achieve scalability and cost-efficiency in the same way as Facebook, Google and Amazon have done – with object storage implementations. This is particularly true with Big Unstructured Data applications, where the traditional file structure no longer can meet today’s demand for scalability and cost-efficiency…

 

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Symform, a revolutionary cloud storage and backup service, today announced two award wins that acknowledge the company’s innovative product and work environment. Symform won "Best Cloud Storage Solution" in the 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Series held in London earlier this month, recognizing Symform’s innovative and disruptive global peer-to-peer cloud storage network. In addition, Seattle Business magazine selected Symform as one of Washington’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ in 2012.

These latest accolades come amid a year of record growth and achievement for Symform, including 100 percent quarter-over-quarter customer growth with tens of thousands of active users across 138 countries, and the company’s recent $11 million Series B funding round…

The cloud is more green than traditional on-premises setups, according to a recent Carbon Disclosure Project survey. But that survey, which Cloudline put to a question in March, did not sit well with readers (see the comments section.)

Now Google is championing the Carbon Disclosure Project, and touting its cloud apps’ energy efficiency as well as their green cred (notably, too, the post was lifted from the Google Green blog)…

"Our ‘Plug & Play’ suite of software products continues to be recognized by our industry peers as a game changer in the Cloud and SaaS space. We are honored to receive this award and look forward to continuing to deliver high value to SaaS and software vendors as well as to global enterprises, which can now gain a decisive competitive edge by delivering their SaaS solutions – on any public, private, or hybrid Cloud – at a significantly lower cost of service," said Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology…

Reuters claims the unidentified mystery bidder is Dell after talks to buy Quest broke down earlier.

The $25.50-a-share cash offer bests the $23 a share Quest accepted back in March from private equity house Insight Venture Partners. Insight has to sweeten its offer or let it go for a break-up fee of either $4.2 million or $6.3 million…

James Taylor, automated decision management proponent and author/co-author of two books on the topic, says cloud computing is elevating the art and science of predictive analytics to a whole new level. No longer do such efforts need to be be constrained by companies’ current server and storage capacity — with online, sharable resources, the sky’s the limit. Based on a survey Taylor conducted at the end of last year among 200 business intelligence professionals, 43%  have already developed predictive analytics solutions within their companies,and 82% have predictive analytics in their plans going forward. “Separately, predictive analytics and cloud solutions are changing the way organiza­tions do business,” he states. “Together, they open up a wealth of opportunities.”…

Now all customers will automatically get free support and enterprise support will be based on usage rather than a flat fee, a potential cost saver.

Support levels have been renamed. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum are now Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All plans cover an unlimited number of cases and can be cancelled at any time. There are no long-term contracts. All plans are available worldwide…

In order to have an environment capable of this rapid application deployment cycle, an infrastructure must be in place that can handle it. Hardware and software must be properly architected to provide both application and hardware scalability. This requires a rethinking of the design principles that have brought IT to where it is now…