Author: David

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Ciara Byrne.

London’s Notion Capital  just raised a $100m new fund focused on cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) startups in Europe. The fund is expected to reach $150 million by the time it closes in the next few months.

Investments from Notion’s previous fund included on-demand business services supplier Star and “Skype for invoicing” Tradeshift, which also received seed funding from Paypal. Tradeshift is already valued at $137 million after 2 years in business. A typical investment single investment from the new fund will be in the $1-3 million range, but the fund is prepared to put up to $15 million into a single company over the course of several rounds…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today at the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

 

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft’s private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds."…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Gary Hilson.

Enterprises deploying cloud computing infrastructures using OpenStack now have another configuration tool at their disposal thanks to Puppet Labs. The Portland-based company unveiled one of the first OpenStack implementations suitable for enterprise-class production deployments at this week’s OpenStack Summit in San Francisco. The company’s IT automation software is aimed at system administrators, designed to help them launch and support cloud computing infrastructures.

Puppet Labs collaborated with OpenStack community members Cisco, Morphlabs and eNovance to develop OpenStack configuration modules for its products, Puppet open source and Puppet Enterprise, to provide enterprise-ready IT automation for OpenStack’s compute, object storage and image service capabilities. These modules are already available for free download from Puppet Forge, the company’s online marketplace…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), world leader in massively scalable storage, today announced the availability of the DDN NAS Scaler 1.1, the latest update to the company’s highly-scalable, feature-rich unstructured data storage platform.

Introduced in April 2011, NAS Scaler enables customers to create a customized blend of capacity, throughput, and IOPS to align with specific applications, a breakthrough that eliminates both system and namespace sprawl and the costly over-provisioning found in other NAS systems. NAS Scaler 1.1 marks the introduction of VMware integration and data deduplication features, along with major enhancements in disaster recovery and multi-protocol file access capabilities to enable enterprise organizations to start small and then scale their Big Data applications with ease…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Aspera, Inc., creators of next-generation software technologies that move the world’s data at maximum speed, today announced that its patented faspTM transport technology will be demonstrated as part of numerous partner solutions at NAB 2012. Aspera enables a growing ecosystem of partners in the areas of cloud computing, network-attached storage and digital media production and delivery, where leading technology suppliers bring high-performance transport capabilities to their products, systems and services by building upon the Aspera platform.

A pioneer in the enablement of high-speed data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, Aspera has now unlocked the cloud for big data with its industry-leading high-speed transport solutions. Amazon Web Services and Aspera offer combined solutions for high-performance storage, processing and distribution in the cloud, allowing media companies large and small to take full advantage of integrated media workflows at scale on AWS. Microsoft selected Aspera to enable Aspera high-speed transfer with Windows Azure Media Services. Video encoding pioneers, Sorenson Media and Zencoder provide cloud-based services that rely Aspera for big-data movement to and from remote infrastructures in order to offer massively scalable video encoding to their customers. And, online file sharing leader YouSendIt is taking advantage of the Aspera transport platform to deliver enhanced file transfer speeds for large files…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

TELUS AgilIT is a flexible, on-demand, enterprise-class Cloud offering designed specifically for business needs

TELUS today announced the launch of the TELUS AgilIT Virtual Private Cloud, an innovative service that enables businesses to take full control of their cloud environment. The first of TELUS’ AgilIT cloud offerings, and unlike other cloud infrastructure services, TELUS’ Virtual Private Cloud service provides organizations of all sizes access to computing resources on-demand with a powerful, full-featured portal that enables 24×7 remote access to view and manage their cloud.

"TELUS has taken a quality-based approach to cloud computing by providing customers with secured, guaranteed capacity of computing power while maintaining the flexibility to create, change or suspend their computing jobs as required through a centralized view of their cloud infrastructure," said Tony Krueck, vice-president of Business Products & Services at TELUS. "This allows businesses to respond with greater agility to market demands, develop new applications faster, and contain IT costs by subscribing to computing capacity only as needed."…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Lucas Mearian.

Cloud storage service provider SpiderOak is taking on Dropbox, Box and other more established services with what it calls the first truly secure data backup and collaboration cloud for businesses.

There are three service levels for SpiderOak Blue, the company’s new cloud storage service, which span small-to-midsize and enterprise-class businesses.

SpiderOak has had a consumer cloud storage service — SpiderOak Orange — since 2006 that allows consumers to back up, share and sync their data. SpiderOak’s claim to differentiation is its "zero-knowledge" privacy standard, which allows users to create their own passwords so that the SaaS provider couldn’t read a customer’s unencrypted data even if it wanted to…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Christine Burns.

We assembled this list with help from analysts at Cloud Technology Partners, Current Analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC and Neovise who watch the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service scene very closely. Each was asked to name the companies they believed have the most influence — whether that’s measured in market share, mind share, revenue, existing enterprise pull or underlying technology links — in drawing enterprise customers into the realm of public cloud infrastructure. They are listed here in alphabetical order.

1. Amazon Web Services: The gold standard

Amazon is the standard bearer in the public IaaS space, as its paid-by-the-VM Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is both the market share and mindshare leader by a fairly big gap. It’s got a huge portfolio of services that run atop its Xen-based virtualized infrastructure and Amazon keeps adding to those offerings while it lowers its prices. The company has built a thriving ecosystem of partners around its public cloud, has clamored to get all the necessary security and compliance certifications and offers world-wide data center coverage…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Bert Markgraf.

The IT departments of many companies are juggling the security issues that arise with employee requests for remote access to data, increasing data volumes, and cost reductions in an uncertain business environment. Suppliers are offering solutions, but with an emphasis on different features. Some companies operate their own cloud. The technology is evolving to a standardized service, but the standards are not clear yet.

The largest IT companies offer cloud computing with a wide array of IT infrastructure. In an article on ComuterWorld, HP presents its view of the future of the cloud. According to the company, there will be 10 to 20 major cloud suppliers with smaller clouds focused in particular industries or geographical areas. HP believes the cloud will be more than just remote servers and virtual machines. They think companies will want software services in the cloud, and requirements could range from simple apps to data analytics. An open environment leading to interoperability is also important…