Author: David

RightScale, the leader in cloud computing management, is taking its cloud knowledge to South by Southwest Interactive in Austin. The company will be participating in two discussions at the conference and is also hosting a cocktail party fit with an indie rock band and renowned graffiti artists.

The cloud is no longer a trend — it’s the way business is done. And with the cloud explosion, RightScale has seen tremendous growth over the past year, including customer and partner momentum. With RightScale, users now have access to 10 public clouds across the globe, and can also build private clouds with the help of three leading private cloud partners. The company has increased the number of registered users per account by more than 80 percent since 2008, and this past fall, reached the three million server milestone…

You can now run a website for $250 a year, says Amazon.  Amazon has announced it has dropped the price of its Web Services cloud computing platform. The company says it is the 19th price reduction in the last six years.

The price drop will be one Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Elastic MapReduce and ElastiCache, the company said.

In a statement Amazon said the new prices mean that running a website on an m1.small instance with a High Utilisation Reserved Instance can cost $250 per year, whereas a website on the same set-up six years ago would have cost nearly $900…

In light of its globally-distributed workforce, translation agency Acclaro has redoubled its investments in cloud-computing technologies this last quarter. They announced the most recent development in this trend today—the internal launch of a new portal for Acclaro companywide communications, collaboration, training and data access.

“This SharePoint site is just one of many web-based business applications that our internal teams leverage to efficiently manage projects across time zones,” says Acclaro President Michael Kriz. “The flexibility, mobility and accessibility of these technologies have changed how we do business.” One advantage has been increased ease in supporting and centrally managing application environments for Acclaro’s global employees and partners. With translators, project managers and production staff located across all time zones around the globe, having central information, file sharing and workflow is critical to seamless communication and timely service…

Rarely a week goes by without news of new jobs being created within the cloud computing industry.  Cloud Strong currently employs five people and is recruiting two more in their sales department. And the company expects to create at least 15 new jobs over the next two years.

For those who may not be familiar with the term, Cloud Strong Technical Director Daryl Byrne explains that cloud computing is:

    * a way of delivering IT services via a web browser. It allows business owners to remove themselves from the ownership of their IT infrastructure, so that they can focus on their core business. “Business owners should see cloud computing as a service such as your phone line,” says Mr Byrne…

IT organizations today are striving to establish data centers that support virtualization and cloud computing to become more competitive and agile, reduce the cost of physical infrastructure, and support the demands of data growth and Big Data analytics. Cisco /quotes/zigman/20039/quotes/nls/csco CSCO +0.88% today announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System(TM) to deliver a third-generation fabric computing platform — which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management — to address these challenges and help customers respond rapidly to changing business needs, scale their data centers, and accelerate transition to virtualization and cloud computing…

Revenue increased by 44% to £2.914m from 2010 (£2.021m) and overall operating profit for the period rose by 317% to £0.422m from 2010 (£0.133m).

In spite of the tough market conditions globally, Asite continued to deliver outstanding sales growth in 2011 of its cloud computing solutions and overachieved on its target by executing its strategy to focus on enterprise deals and expand into new international markets…

Cloud computing has been hailed as the best way to provide any data to any gadget at any time. Unfortunately, all this ubiquity comes at a cost—the data centers that store, send and receive all of that data consume a lot of energy, most of it from fossil fuels.

Apple has been targeted by Greenpeace as one of the worst offenders. But Apple is trying to shake its image as a dirty data-provider. The company plans to power at least part of its new $1 billion data center in North Carolina using a massive solar array located on about 170 acres of nearby land. The solar panels could produce 20 megawatts of energy. Apple also claims to be building a 5-megawatt, biogas-powered fuel cell near the data center, according to BusinessGreen.com…

Gerald Caron from the US Department of State has been confirmed as a speaker for the 2012 Green IT and Cloud Summit on April 18th. As Branch Chief for EMS, he is responsible for implementation and management of Federal Desktop Core configuration (FDCC) and United States Government Configuration Baseline (USGCB) desktop configurations. Gerald also has responsibility for the Power Management for Desktops program at the State Department. This program introduced a centralized solution that allows for the shutdown, wakeup and centralized reporting for all desktops throughout the Department’s enterprise and has resulted in significant savings and Return on Investment…

Gerald Caron is a Civil Service employee at the Department of State in the Bureau of Information Resource Management, Deputy CIO for Operations, Directorate of Enterprise Network Management. He has a total of 15 years of Federal Government experience. That experience includes 7 years with the U.S. Army, 2 years as a Federal Contractor with the Department of State and 6 years as a Computer Management Specialist Civil Service employee with the Department of State. His current assignment is management of the Department’s Enterprise Lab which evaluates, tests and configures software for use on the Department’s network and oversight of the implementation of the Federal Desktop Core Configuration within the Department.

Some 90 percent of all Web-connected devices will have consumer cloud services tucked into them by the end of 2013, the better to help Web surfers quench their desire to store, synch, stream and share content from any device or platform.

That’s the postulation from researcher Gartner, which defines the "personal cloud" as a system that allows consumers to seamlessly store, sync, stream and share content across devices including smartphones, media tablets, televisions and PCs connected to the Web.