Author: David

Grazed from Daily Finance.  Author: Anders Bylund.

It’s been nearly six years since Amazon.com (NAS: AMZN) had the brilliant idea of monetizing its oodles and oodles of surplus computing power.

The e-tailer built up a truly epic computing infrastructure to support its core operations, but much of that hardware had a lot of downtime. While still requiring electric power, man-hours of server maintenance, and data center cooling, the servers would often sit unused. Why not rent out idle servers by the hour instead?

The idea was an instant hit, and Amazon’s cloud-computing services have come a long way since then. Management routinely holds up the collection of data-mangling products, collectively known as Amazon Web Services or AWS, as an example of a fast-growing Amazon operation. These days, Amazon pumps millions of dollars specifically into building out the AWS infrastructure, which now is separate from Amazon’s general operations…

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

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, decked out in dark Armani duds for the trial of his landmark case against Google and Android, testified Tuesday that he had considered buying RIM or Palm to compete against Apple and its iPhone.

Ultimately he decided that RIM was too expensive and Palm wasn’t competitive enough and a separate "Project Java Phone" that Oracle had started was a "bad idea."

Google’s lawyer claimed that because Oracle failed to develop its own product it’s going after Google and Android to get a piece of the action.

Google CEO Larry Page, widely reported as uncomfortable on the witness stand and unable to make eye contract except with the ceiling, testified that he couldn’t remember much of anything…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Rick Blaisdell.

Cloud computing has definitely revolutionised the IT industry and transformed the way in which IT Services are delivered. But finding the best way for an organization to perform common management tasks using remote services on the Internet is not that easy.

Cloud management incorporates the task of providing, managing, and monitoring applications into cloud infrastructures that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location or of the system that delivers the services. Monitoring cloud computing applications and activity into requires cloud management tools to ensure that resources are meeting SLA’s, working optimally and also not effecting systems and users that are leveraging these services…

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon and Salesforce are odds-on to join the UK government’s G-Cloud and start serving civil servants with hosted computing, storage and ERP from May, reports the The Register.

The companies have been in talks to join G-Cloud, with government officials driving the programme having to reassure the firms’ legal people on their obligations under the G-Cloud’s terms and conditions.  The duo had passed on G-Cloud 1.0 which launched in February, over concerns about their legal obligations and responsibilities on things such as data audits.

Newly named G-Cloud leader Denise McDonagh revealed the development during a UKAuthority.com webcast on Thursday in response to The Register. McDonagh, who is also head of IT at the Home Office, was named on Friday as the successor to incumbent Chris Chant, who is retiring from the civil service after just 18 months in charge of G-Cloud…

Grazed from Channel Insider.  Author: Michael Vizard.

As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated.

The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it. For the service provider that makes it a lot more feasible to work with custom system builder distributors such as Super Micro, as opposed to buying commercial systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Oracle.

Of course, the major server vendors would strenuously argue that modern servers come with higher levels of IT automation that make them much easier to manage. As such, they are ideal for cloud computing environment because they allow each IT administrator to holistically manage more servers, storage and networking resources…

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

Microsoft – for reasons that haven’t been plumbed enough to satisfy skeptics – has set up a wholly owned open source subsidiary. Given history that’s an unusual step.

It’s called Microsoft Open Technologies and it’ll be run by Jean Paoli, an XML standards expert whose interoperability strategy team will form the nucleus of the new subsidiary.

Figure about 50-75 people and a board composed of Microsoft people. Paoli will be president.  He’s credited with calming the ISO brouhaha between Open Office XML and the competing OpenDocument contingent.  His new domain is supposed to advance Microsoft’s investments in openness, he said in a blog posting, including interoperability, open standards and open source. Through it Microsoft should get out code more quickly and ensure compatibility…

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

Rackspace, which wants to be the "Linux of the cloud" mimicking the now billion-dollar-a-year Red Hat, said Monday that it’s "drawing a line in the sand against cloud providers."

Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the "Linux of the cloud" because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story.

Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Balaji Viswanathan.

If you are migrating from enterprise to a cloud based solution, it is necessary to understand the different roles in cloud computing. In this post, I will cover the 6 major roles in the cloud setup.

Cloud Service Provider

This is the entity that provides the cloud service. The cloud service provider owns and controls the cloud computing platform. The services include SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and IpaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). Based on the services provided, the CSPs can be broadly categorized into 3 types:…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Did you hear? Some employers are asking for your Facebook and Twitter passwords before they offer you employment. This issue caused so much of a stir that Maryland passed legislation to ban employers from such requests. I suspect the employers with these ambitions will have to go back to drug tests, blind reference checks, and background investigations to vet their candidates.

What does this have to do with cloud computing? The rise of personal clouds — such as iCloud, Mozy, Carbonite, Box, Dropbox, Google Apps, Microsoft SkyDrive, and other cheap or free ways to store our personal data outside of our homes — could make us vulnerable to requests or demands for access…

Grazed from ITWeb.  Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

The era of cloud hyper-giants, providers so big and so critical to the delivery of information and commerce, is clearly here. But unlike an electric utility, which can give an exact count of customers and power consumed, understanding the true size of a cloud provider hasn’t been as easy.

But DeepField Networks, a new cloud intelligence company operating in semi-stealth mode, posted some eye-popping findings Wednesday about the breadth of Internet activity Amazon is now responsible for.

Fully one third of all Internet users now access Amazon’s cloud site at least once a day, according to Craig Labovitz, DeepField’s CEO and co-founder. And about 1% of all Internet consumer traffic in North America goes to the Amazon cloud. While that may seem small, it isn’t…