Author: David

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Rob Dutt.

IT departments looking at standing up private cloud environments in a hurry, and without some of the complexity usually associated with cloud infrastructure, would do well to take a look at Piston Cloud from Piston Cloud Computing.

In a new Information Week Report on the Piston Cloud OpenStack Environment, Kurt Marko finds that “its unique setup process can enable enterprise IT teams to build a private cloud in an afternoon, with commodity gear."…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Doug Dineley.

"If you build it, they will come" may be a line from a baseball fantasy, but it describes what really happened in the world of cloud computing. One late summer day in 2006, online bookseller Amazon.com quietly made a portion of its excess data center capacity available to curious developers over the Web. Within hours, hundreds of developers had jumped at the chance to spin up some servers simply by opening their browsers and typing in their credit card numbers. Today, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is the foundation for countless tech startups, and Amazon counts its business customers in the hundreds of thousands…

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

Zumbox, the American digital mail start-up, has changed its overseas strategy. Rather than try to involve the local postal operator – as it has once with New Zealand Post – it’s going to go it alone.

It’s starting in Australia where its wholly owned licensing arm, Zumbox Software Inc, has just climbed in bed with two big publicly traded mail outsourcers to create a joint venture called Digital Post Australia (DPA) that will offer consumers a way to get their paper mail electronically…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Justin Lee.

Cloud computing technology owes a lot to the various open source projects that continue to propel the technology forward, along with helping to create a greater awareness — both within and outside the IT industry — for cloud capabilities.

OpenStack, in particular, has been one of the greatest contributors to cloud computing. Since Rackspace and NASA launched the open source cloud project two years ago, the community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing platform for both public and private clouds…

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

Xoreax, a 10-year-old Israeli software acceleration house, says it can employ the idle PCs and servers cycles in a corporate network SETI-like to create a so-called private processing cloud – Windows-based, of course – that’s got the heavy-duty commute of a virtual supercomputer.

It seems it’s a matter of accelerating time-intensive computational processes.  The company’s new signature IncrediBuild-XGE, an agent-based distributed computing solution, is supposed to let ISVs and application developers create this virtual cloud environment.

They can reportedly add features to it while tickling the processing…

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

Little six-month-old ClearStory Data, which calls itself a self-driven data exploration service, came out of stealth mode Monday with an undisclosed amount of seed money from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and some relatively eminent private parties.

Those personal investors include Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at Wealthfront; Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, senior VPs at Walmart Global e-Commerce and co-founders of Junglee and Kosmix; Tim Howes, co-founder of Rockmelt and ex-CTO of Netscape, and Nitin Donde, a one-time executive at EMC, 3Par and Aster Data…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix Systems today announced upcoming opportunities for global entrepreneurial companies to contribute to the next wave of innovation for mobile workstyles via the Citrix Startup Accelerator, its Silicon Valley-based seed investment initiative. The IT landscape is in a period of dramatic change, shifting expectations of IT and computing capabilities and providing an opportunity for entrepreneurs to contribute their ideas. Startups have always challenged the norms and assumptions in computing and in business. As the exceptions of the PC Era – mobile users, personal devices, and wireless access – become the assumptions of the Cloud Era, staying close to new thinking is important to Citrix as it continues to help shape the future…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Justin Lee.

Web and cloud hosting provider Rackspace recently introduced its new Rackspace Advisory Services to help enterprises with migrating to a cloud computing model.

As enterprises take on the complicated task of moving to a cloud computing model, they must decide which applications or platforms to transition to cloud computing, as well as prepare for the transformation that their internal IT departments will undergo.

The new Rackspace Advisory Services will provide the detailed intelligence and insight necessary for enterprise customers to complete their strategic IT vision, while providing Rackspace with another value-added recurring revenue stream…

Grazed from OneStopClick.  Author: Dan Blacharski.

The language of IT backup, security, disaster preparedness and business continuity can be confusing. Having a network backup procedure in place doesn’t necessarily mean you also have a disaster plan, and having a disaster plan doesn’t mean you also have a business continuity plan. In short, the disaster plan outlines what to do when disaster strikes, the business continuity plan outlines how to keep things moving in the aftermath.

As any CIO who has been through a fire, hurricane or earthquake can tell you, the hardest part doesn’t come until days after the terrible event has already occurred. Business failure occurs less as a result of immediate loss, and more a result of the delays suffered in getting back to business as usual. With every passing day, full recovery becomes less likely…