Author: David

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Xerox for the past few years has steadily, and quietly, been building out its cloud offerings. Now officials from the venerable printer and copier company are ready to make some noise about it.

"We’ve done the work, we’ve served our customers and now we’re ready to start talking about it," says Rob Schilperoort, vice president of product management for Xerox Cloud Services, the business unit of the $20 billion company that has been best known for its document management and IT outsourcing (ITO) business units. Xerox boasts an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that supports multiple operating systems, plus a more traditional hosted collaboration offering.

Schilperoort says Xerox already has more than 85 customers using Xerox Cloud Services…

Grazed from CNN.  Author: Doug Gross.

Google expanded the digital world of cloud computing on Tuesday, announcing the rollout of "Google Drive."

The service, which will give users 5GB of free remote storage and additional space for a monthly fee, puts the Web giant in competition with Apple and Microsoft, as well as specialized services like Box and Dropbox, in a space that increasingly looks like the future of computing.

"This is really just the next step in the evolution of Google Cloud," Scott Johnston, group product manager for Google Drive, told CNN. "It’s really letting people live more in the cloud by connecting them more easily with all the devices they have."…

Grazed from V3.co.uk.  Author: Rosalie Marshall.

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

EMC is reportedly hot to buy three-year-old Israeli flash storage start-up XtremIO.

According to Globes on Sunday, EMC is dangling $400 million-$450 million in front of its quarry and closing in for the kill.

Supposedly EMC rivals including NetApp have also been after XtremIO.

One of XtremIO’s founders previously sold Rainfinity to EMC and there are other family ties. XtremIO’s CFO Robin Ren was once director of R&D at EMC subsidiary VMware.

Globes says EMC CEO Joe Tucci, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod and VMware finance VP David Golden have all been in Israel. NetApp’s M&A guy and its EMEA VP also made the pilgrimage, but EMC usually brings a bigger checkbook to such affairs as NetApp can testify…

Grazed from Business Wire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), today announced significant new enhancements to its award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and its bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI). These new enhancements reduce overall costs by enabling organizations to better manage unstructured data growth, ensure content security in shared storage environments and reduce the complexity and inefficiency in traditional, cloud computing and distributed IT environments.

“Organizations are looking for new, innovative approaches to deal with the expansive growth of unstructured content and extract the full value of their data,” said Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, Hitachi Data Systems. “Our content cloud approach allows organizations to store billions of data objects and use intelligence layers to index and search the data independently of the application that created it. The data is available across devices, anytime and anywhere. By deploying HCP and HDI, customers will cut costs in managing, storing and accessing data and build a foundation for the information cloud.”…

Grazed from ITWeb.  Author: Admire Moyo.

The majority of local organisations believe their IT staff will require training in cloud computing and virtualisation in the next 12 months.

This was one of the major findings of the ITWeb/Foster-Melliar IT Training Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for 14 days, attracting 190 responses.

Besides cloud computing, which was selected by 40.72% of respondents, IT security is the next training priority, at 39.52%. This was closely followed by ITIL (38.32%), networking (32.93%) and project management (26.95%)…

Grazed from Business Wire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Dell is working with Clemson University to provide more Internet2 institutions and organizations access to high performance research computing technology, responding to the Obama administration’s Big Data R & D Initiative and a continued commitment to the global research community. Scientific research requires intensive computation capabilities to help solve complex, and many times life-saving issues. Dell and Clemson University will support members with cloud-based research computing solutions and services that can efficiently meet these demands.

Dell and Internet2’s NET+ Services program will provide high performance computing solutions and services that support the next generation of collaborative research and simplify research computing from the desktop to the datacenter including:…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Skytap, the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced a new secure remote access experience called SmartClient, which offers users a fast, easy, and secure way to connect and interact with computing environments in Skytap Cloud. SmartClient offers the flexibility to access Skytap Cloud virtual machines using a new browser app, or a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-capable client, on any device including desktops, laptops, smartphones and tablets.

SmartClient brings to market innovation that spans both the unique software layer that powers Skytap Cloud and the remote access clients used by Skytap customers. These new capabilities make it easy for users to access any Skytap Cloud supported guest host — including Windows, Linux, or virtual appliances — just like they were sitting in front of a physical machine…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

SoftLayer(R) Technologies, a leading provider of global cloud infrastructure, and RightScale(R), Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, have partnered to provide unmatched scalability and automation solutions that allow internet-centric companies to speed their time to market. Companies such as social gaming developer Broken Bulb Game Studios are able to use SoftLayer’s public and private cloud infrastructure with RightScale cloud management to easily deploy, automate and manage their computing workloads across the globe.

"Our business is growing dramatically as we launch new games on Facebook and mobile platforms," said Robert Nelson, CEO at Broken Bulb Game Studios, which is the developer of games such as My Town, Braaains, Ninja Warz and Miscrits. "The combination of RightScale and SoftLayer has made our cloud environment more robust and simplified our deployment process, enabling us to automatically scale to meet customer demands. With this solution, we have lowered our costs and increased our redundancies allowing us to quickly react to massive influxes of new traffic as our games spread extremely rapidly to new players."…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.