Red Hat Unveils Its CloudForms IaaS Platform
Red Hat, Inc., the global provider of open source solutions, has announced the next step in its delivery of open hybrid cloud solutions to enterprises with the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms. CloudForms is an open hybrid cloud management platform built to enable enterprises to create and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hybrid clouds with the ability to make self-service computing resources available to users in a managed, governed and secure way.
“The role of enterprise IT is evolving. There’s no doubt that end users want to help themselves to cloud-like compute resources, but the IT department still needs to centralise deployment, management and integration,” said Rachel Chalmers, Vice President, Research, Infrastructure Management at 451 Research, a division of leading global analyst and data company The 451 Group. “A platform like CloudForms makes it possible for organisations to build clouds that span their in-place infrastructure and expose it to a new generation of developers and end users, all without relinquishing control.”…
Blytheco Pairs With NetSuite to Launch New Cloud Computing Solution
When it comes to finding a cloud computing service, everyone has heard of NetSuite, but now cloud computing enthusiasts will hear a new name in the cloud industry–Blytheco. Blytheco, a leading provider in business management software for mid-market businesses has announced their partnership with NetSuite to provide customers with cloud ERP services, according to a recent MarketWatch report.
The Blytheco-NetSuite team will bring scalability and reliability to midsize businesses utilizing Blytheco’s proven delivery platform with NetSuite’s dependable cloud computing solution. Blytheco CEO Stephen Blythe notes that the convenience of a fully-integrated business application suite paired with a cloud computing service is a step forward in simplifying the daily tasks of maintenance and troubleshooting that consume such a large number of IT hours. IT payroll expenses can be dramatically reduced through cloud computing, as Blytheco will take responsibility for data storage and protection…
Cloud Computing Risks: What to Watch Out For
Cloud computing is now the concept of choice for start-ups and midsize businesses that want to overhaul and streamline the performance of their IT infrastructure. Despite the apparent benefits, cloud computing risks are now becoming clearer.
The increased rate of uptake of the cloud is confirmed by the high revenue generated from cloud computing, which is reported to have increased by 15 percent in the last quarter of 2011, compared to 2010. A summary of the key figures from the 2011 research study were published in a news report by Codestone Cloud…
Bayan jumps on cloud computing services bandwagon
Local telco company Bayan Telecommunications (Bayan) has officially entered the cloud computing market announcing its partnership with DataOne Asia (Philippines), an enterprise technology services firm.
Bayan’s chief-operating-officer Rafael Aguado described their company’s tie up with DataOne as another bold step by Bayan to provide its customers with effective, relevant and affordable business solutions.
"We have chosen to partner with DataOne for the roll out of our cloud services because of our shared mission to deliver to our customers and clients the best enterprise cloud services solution there is today," Aguado said…
New Cloud Offering from HP
Cloud computing has emerged as a key focus area for all the information technology companies across the globe, and Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ – Analyst Report) is no exception. The company has recently announced a new cloud computing solution in a bid to revamp its business.
The new cloud-based service enables clients to deploy private, public and managed clouds in a traditional information technology atmosphere, helps address the business needs of several existing and prospective clients and is compatible with all the latest technologies used by various companies.
The new offering from the technology major is expected to help the airline industry to develop an integrated platform for airline reservations and travel. Moreover, the “Cloud bursting” capabilities help external clients to access the blocks of external cloud capacity through the HP Cloud System, Amazon Web Services and Savvis. It is also expected to help in arranging new tools to manage technology across various cloud environments. The new offering includes a printing system that enables driverless printing from mobile devices…
IT and Cloud security provider Qualys files for $100 million IPO
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loud security provider Qualys Inc filed with U.S. regulators to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering of its common stock.
The company, which provides a cloud computing based platform for companies to secure their IT infrastructure, said it plans to list under the symbol "QLYS", but did not say on which exchange.
Qualys is backed by chief executive Philippe Courtot, who owns about 40 percent of the company, and venture capital firm Trident Capital, which has a 27.4 percent stake…
AWS: Can anyone catch Amazon’s cloud?
One of Amazon’s secret weapons is its attitude to profit margins, where it is happy to undercut its cloud computing competitors.
This combines with its economies of scale to make life very difficult for any of its potential competitors, be they small and nimble or large and rich.
When Amazon adds capacity, it has to buy hard drives by the shipping crate and servers by the rackload, according to Carl Brooks, an infrastructure and cloud computing analyst at Tier 1 research. And the low prices that Amazon can command for its equipment due to its size could make it difficult for competitors unless they are well funded and content with entering into a price war.
"[Amazon’s] margins for selling compute and storage are absurd," Brooks says. He notes that a basic EC2 unit — the workhorse of the AWS cloud — is around one half of one modern CPU (a single EC2 unit is roughly equivalent to a 1.0-1.2GHz AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processor from 2007, according to Amazon)…
Researcher: Interdependencies Could Lead to Cloud ‘meltdowns’
As the use of cloud computing becomes more and more mainstream, serious operational "meltdowns" could arise as end-users and vendors mix, match and bundle services for various means, a researcher argues in a new paper set for discussion next week at the USENIX HotCloud ’12 conference in Boston.
"As diverse, independently developed cloud services share ever more fluidly and aggressively multiplexed hardware resource pools, unpredictable interactions between load-balancing and other reactive mechanisms could lead to dynamic instabilities or ‘meltdowns,’" Yale University researcher and assistant computer science professor Bryan Ford wrote in the paper.
Ford compared this scenario to the intertwining, complex relationships and structures that helped contribute to the global financial crisis…
Asking the right questions can ensure cloud computing data security
With organizations producing — and responsible for — more data than ever before, the cloud has proven a viable data management option. But don’t expect to just send your data to the provider and be done with it — cloud computing data security is as much your responsibility as it is theirs.
Do [your cloud providers] have processes and procedures in place to make sure people are not accessing information they should not be seeing?
During sessions on this topic at Compliance Week 2012, held in Washington, D.C., this week, experts said doing your homework on your needs, as well as on cloud providers’ business models, are key to ensuring cloud computing data security…
Egenera Makes the Leap to Cloud Management
The way blade pioneer Egenera remembers things it invented converged infrastructure before it had to abandon its x86 BladeFrame servers, switches and storage for software based on its trusty Processor Area Network (PAN) Manager.
It is now making the obligatory move from other people’s virtualized blade servers to the private cloud still focused on blades.
Egenera has yet to make the great leap to rack servers. Blades, according to CEO Peter Manca, are more uniform and – although racks dominate – blades are faster growing.
While the company works out what to do about racks, its new Pan Cloud Director offers a self-service portal that handles both physical and virtual environments, taking care of all those applications that don’t like to be virtualized and sidestepping lock-in issues…