Author: David

Grazed from Spend Matters.  Author: Steve Kekick.

While there are differing views on the definition of cloud computing, the key is that an organization purchases computing services on a consumption basis versus paying for a dedicated resource or asset (software, hardware, storage, infrastructure, etc.). There is often much debate regarding the move to cloud computing, the risks, and what benefits it can provide. It is vital to understand your organization’s IT needs and prominent factors in making the proper decision. Below are five questions I’ve come up with to ask yourself:

1) How much Control does your organization need to maintain?
The amount of control required by a company will determine whether they choose a private or public cloud. In a private cloud your data and resources are simply that, private. Your organization’s information is separate from all others and this can result in paying a premium price due to less efficiency in storing only your data and applications. In a public cloud, resources can be leveraged to optimum levels, though it does mean your data and systems will share resources with other organizations. One of the cloud’s greatest powers is being able to leverage resources. This can be done best in a public cloud with great amounts of data as compared to a individual or private cloud. However, in moving to the public cloud you retain less control, and some organizations require immediate and complete access for any number of reasons. The trade-off on control is that your organization will benefit from improved features and efficiencies that evolve from experience in supporting other clients. But your organization is susceptible to larger performance issues, if they arise, as well as a standard upgrade path…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Dr. James McCaffrey, Associate Vice President of Volt Technical Resources, a staffing business of Volt Information Sciences, Inc. will appear as a speaker at the upcoming International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations (ITNG 2012) April 16-18, 2012 in Las Vegas. McCaffrey will present “A Hybrid System for Analyzing Very Large Graphs.”

McCaffrey’s research explores previously unpublished approaches for efficiently analyzing huge data files stored in Cloud Computing environments.

“This research has the potential for use in identifying patterns of influence and communication flow in vast amounts of social network data,” said McCaffrey…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Pedro Hernandez.

In a big vote of confidence for OpenStack, HP today announced HP Converged Cloud, a suite of public and hybrid cloud services that incorporate the open source cloud platform.

Amid growing industry support OpenStack, Citrix raised eyebrows recently when it announced that it was ditching its OpenStack-based Project Olympus project for its own open source cloud software called CloudStack. Could be schisms be forming so early in OpenStack’s rise?

HP doesn’t look concerned.

Today’s announcement signals that HP believes OpenStack has what it takes to power enterprise-class workloads. HP already leads in cloud equipment and a successful cloud implementation could add momentum to the OpenStack community by hastening adoption and broadening market opportunities for software developers, service providers and technology partners…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Grazed from The Press Enterprise.  Author: Courtney Kaufman.

With all the hype surrounding cloud computing, there are been a flood of cloud-based products from Microsoft, Google and Apple that have hit the market in the last two years. They all promise to be low cost, easy to use and a convenient way to work from anywhere, but are they really all they’re cracked up to be? And if they are, how do you know which one is right for your business?

Since these services are relatively new to the mainstream business world, new features are being added on a monthly, or even weekly basis. This means that the application will change much more rapidly than a stable desktop application hosted on your machine. Patches for the desktop version of Microsoft Office come out about once a month and generally only fix vulnerabilities. Major feature and functionality updates aren’t released until the next version, so you have a couple years to settle into the program before it changes again…

Grazed from Nasdaq OMX.  Author: PR Announcement.

Convirture has released updates to its ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud software that is used by organizations worldwide to manage virtual and cloud infrastructures based on KVM and Xen hypervisors. The updates to ConVirt Enterprise and ConVirt Enterprise Cloud include additional features that enable IT managers to effectively manage their virtual data centers, as well as usability enhancements that make the software even easier to deploy and use.

In addition to virtual machine management, ConVirt Enterprise provides advanced automation features including high availability, dynamic workload management, and backup and restore. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud delivers public, private, and hybrid cloud management, side-by-side with traditional virtualized infrastructure management…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: Sinclair Schuller.

The data center is undergoing a significant transformation. In the past 15 or so years, data center discussions have been extremely hardware-centric, but as the power of cloud computing comes to pass there is a shift towards infrastructure software. The next-generation data center will be defined by the software that coordinates all of the hardware to achieve a greater level of efficiency. In fact, all of the devices that we have will no longer be directly exposed to business applications. Instead, business applications will be cushioned from the details of hardware by a “data-center-wide operating system” known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), ushering in a true private cloud world.

The past decade of enterprise IT has been driven by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and virtualization. While these technologies have brought great value to the data center and software developers, they have not provided a universal remedy to all that ails enterprise IT strategies. Significant issues still exist, but the recent emergence of PaaS in public cloud and private PaaS as its private cloud sibling, has been touted as the newest technology to revolutionize enterprise IT…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author:  PR Announcement

ConnectWise, developer of the leading service management software designed exclusively for IT service providers, VARS, ISVs and MSPs, announced today that Veddio Cloud Solutions has completed integration of its Cloud Dashboard (C.H.O.M.P.S. – Cloud-Hosting Ordering, Management and Provisioning System) with ConnectWise for more profitable provisioning and management of cloud computing for SMB clients.

Veddio’s C.H.O.M.P.S. platform provides Veddio channel partners with a unified system that allows for multi-product single location management and automatic services provisioning. The integration simplifies the quoting, provisioning and management of cloud and hosted services while giving MSPs a single, web-based interface. In addition, it makes it easier for MSPs to offer their clients a complete suite of white-labeled cloud services from a single source…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Technologies like virtualization and cloud computing promise enormous leaps in efficiency and flexibility, but they can lead organizations into a quagmire if they don’t plan properly for the transition, says Bill Hurley, CIO, CTO and executive vice president of Westcon Group. Without proper planning, organizations can stall in the midst of their transitions to virtualized environments or the cloud, finding themselves with a bundle of sunk costs and no path forward.

Westcon Group is a value-added distributor of unified communications, network infrastructure, data center and security solutions that has made its own transition to a 100 percent virtualized environment and now helps its reseller, system integrator and service provider customers guide their own customers through the transition to virtualized environments and the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM in the near future will unveil a comprehensive initiative that better ties together its multi-pronged efforts to offer cloud computing services, according to one of its top cloud strategists.

It’s not just concentrating on devoting new resources to developers or more hosted services in the cloud for large enterprises, something IBM has already done for years. Rather, IBM will present customers with a broad initiative meant to help them leave behind today’s complex and inefficient data center management model and move toward a more cloud-like operation–whether a private cloud on-premise or a private cloud at an IBM data center.

Ultimately, IBM believes many Fortune 500 cloud services users will become hybrid, public/private cloud operations, said Jim Comfort, VP of cloud offering management for IBM’s Global Technology Services. We’re not there yet by any means. But as a giant step in that direction, "many businesses are becoming service providers for themselves," Comfort said. They’re concentrating on a private cloud first, with use of public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service to follow. Consider some key parts of IBM’s plans…