Author: David

Grazed from The New York Times.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is becoming popular in business and industry because it can cut costs and simplify information technology maintenance. There is no reason law enforcement agencies couldn’t benefit too, says Taser International, the company that makes the nonlethal electric-shock guns.

Quentin Hardy reports that the company is selling small video cameras that attach to the glasses, collar or shoulder of a peace officer in order to record his actions in the field. The real innovation though is in how Taser proposes law enforcement agencies manage the videos as evidence…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Unisys Corporation today announced release 2.1 of its Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution. The new release addresses a key challenge facing IT management: lowering IT costs by managing resources more efficiently.

Release 2.1 includes a new dashboard capability that gives administrators a single, integrated view of all cloud resources: servers, networks, storage systems and more. They can use the dashboard to determine the operational status of specific resources and take necessary actions to respond to business changes in real time, deliver performance mandated by service-level agreements (SLAs) and increase infrastructure productivity…

Grazed from SFGate.  Author: PR Announcement.  

ClearDATA Networks, Inc., the fastest-growing provider of cloud computing services for the healthcare industry, today announced it is offering HIPAA-compliant cloud hosting services with HP.

ClearDATA will provide specialized healthcare-as-a-service and private cloud IT infrastructure services to their customers utilizing the HP Converged Infrastructure, leveraging HP 3PAR Utility Storage as the storage foundation. This new offering is designed to provide healthcare organizations with secure, compliant, and affordable cloud hosting services for EMI/Imaging, offsite backup and storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, EMR hosting, and genome research to the 5,000 hospitals and hundreds of thousands of clinics/medical offices in the U.S. market. ClearDATA will be exhibiting its services at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Conference in Booth #12313 and the HP Booth #3845…

Grazed from PCAdvisor.  Author: Anonty Savvas.

A casino-specific cloud has been built in the US, in a further sign of the trend towards industry-tailored software as a service solutions.

International Game Technology (IGT) is using the AppLogic cloud computing platform from CA Technologies to deliver its casino software through the cloud.  "Casinos of all sizes will find it more cost effective and have higher agility in managing their gaming content through the IGT Cloud," said Chris Satchell, chief technology officer at IGT.

"Using the IGT Cloud, customers will be able to optimise and monitor their operations and rapidly adapt the mix of games on their casino floor to match their customers’ tastes."  With its cloud initiative IGT aims to reach new markets where adoption and cost barriers exist around traditional software deployments. The IGT Cloud will streamline software deployments and reduce the infrastructure requirements of its casino customers…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Muz Ismial.

While the Private vs Public Cloud debate continues to plod along, a major Public Cloud user struck an equally massive blow for Hybrid Cloud when Zynga decided to make the move from AWS to their own zCloud private servers. In a move which flipped 80% of their Public Cloud usage to specialized Private Cloud servers which Zynga have dubbed zCloud, the move illustrates one potential path for small startups and SMBs to follow in their pursuit of massive exponential growth on a Cloud Computing based platform.

Just a few years ago, Zynga’s piece of the online gaming pie was almost inconsequential, but the maker of games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars has quickly grown to include millions of subscribers with this number set to grow even further. Originally most of their needs were covered by Amazon Web Services mainly because they were unsure as to their exact data center needs…

Grazed from Mashable.  Author: Sarah Kessler.

When I imagine “the cloud” where most of my daily interactions with web services such as Facebook and Google compute, I think of a free-floating space — complete with scalloped edges — that isn’t tied to a physical location.

In reality, however, cloud computing is very much tethered to the physical world, through football-field-sized warehouses of connected servers that enable it. A computing job, though it can be accessed from anywhere in the world, can’t be easily moved from one warehouse to another. It can’t even necessarily be moved from one area of a warehouse to another area of the same warehouse…

• Part 1: General concept
• Part 2: Private cloud specifics (this article)…

Grazed from The Metropolitan Corporate Council.  Author: Joshua Gold.

Presently, there is heavy pressure to migrate company data to the cloud. Individuals already shift a large amount of their data to “the cloud” in the form of family photos, vacation videos, contact information, and music. Shifting sensitive business information to the cloud, however, brings with it more complex considerations. Should a company be sending information to a third-party cloud site that hosts data for other businesses? And just what specific information is being sent: customer information? Trade secrets? Employee health information?

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Aquantia, the leading developer of High Speed Ethernet connectivity solutions for cloud computing and large scale data center deployments, announced today it will be joined by Cisco and Intel to present on a panel titled "Connecting the Next Big Wave of Cloud Computing Infrastructure" at this week’s Ethernet Technology Summit 2012 in San Jose, California. The panel will be held at 10:00am, on Thursday, February 23, as part of the Tutorial T1-2A: Ethernet and Cloud Computing (Emerging Technologies Track).

The panel will bring together experts in the areas of high-speed physical layer interconnect technologies and system-level architecture. The panelists will review the trends underlying the upcoming shift in cloud computing infrastructure from 1 Gigabit Ethernet to 10 Gigabit Ethernet. They will provide insight into choices for connectivity that Data Center administrators and planners will have at their disposition. As the next generation servers based on Romley platform are massively deployed, 10GBASE-T, in particular, is projected to play a critical role as a ubiquitous interconnect technology between servers and switches…