Author: David

After a year that has seen much of the buzz around Hewlett-Packard Co. focused on the software side, hardware was front and centre on day one of the vendor’s global partner conference as the vendor launched its new generation of Gen8 servers and announced a new cloud computing partner specialization.

Canada has been a little behind the curve on cloud computing adoption with our more conservative business nature, but in the last six months customers have begun moving into the proof of concept stage and it’s time for HP and its partners to really build an ecosystem arond cloud computing, said Dave Frederickson, vice-president of enterprise servers, storage and networking (ESSN) with HP Canada…

NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and Indra, the number one IT multinational in Spain and a leader in Europe and Latin America, announced today the launch of a new cloud management solution. The solution will provide broad variety of innovative services and mobility to companies in markets throughout the world.

Operational improvements, cost reduction and a focus on core business are the major benefits for customers of this new cloud management system…

There’s been a lot of talk about "the cloud" when it comes to technology and IT in the past few years. It’s a revolution as big as the advent of the microprocessor and just as relevant as the desktop computer. The cloud is quickly changing businesses as we know them, forcing them to reboot how they think about their consumers in this everconnected world. We’re not just talking about everything from owning data centres to your accounting software to your email server, but the products and services that are being sold. If the cloud isn’t on your business’s mind, rest assured that it should be, and that it will (once again) change everything.

In simplistic terms, the cloud is just another term for the Internet as a storage facility. The core technological innovation is that, instead of storing a single piece of software and/or data on your own, single, fixed computer, you can now store data and run software off of the Internet – giving it freedom to be accessed by any computer of your choice and creating the ultimate backup plan…

OCZ Technology Group, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, today announced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express (PCIe) flash storage solution, designed to dramatically accelerate cloud computing applications and significantly reduce operating expenses in the data center. The new Z-Drive R4 CloudServ features monumental data throughput, and raises the bar in performance and capacity.

"The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe solid state drive delivers game-changing performance and enables clients to process massive data-sets with up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single, easy-to-deploy card," said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. "With this new solution, system architects are able to design more efficient and dynamic cloud computing infrastructures while simultaneously reducing system complexity and the high maintenance costs associated with traditional infrastructures."…

I’m a big fan of the work done by Weta Digital to bring to life films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When a chance presented itself to speak with Scott Houston, CEO of GreenButton and former CIO of Weta Digital, I had to schedule time for a meeting regardless of the company or its products. As it turns out, GreenButton is doing clever things to make it easier for software suppliers to package and deliver functions to the cloud to help their customers.

Houston helped Weta Digital set up and run a sophisticated data center in New Zealand to support the digital content creation for the films. The data center almost couldn’t grow fast enough to support the timely implementation of Peter Jackson’s vision for the films. Once the films were finished, the next question was how to make profitable use of the equipment to support the needs of other companies…

Coupa Software, the leading provider of innovative cloud spend optimization software, today announced that TMC, a global integrated media company, has named Coupa’s Cloud Spend Management Solution a winner of the 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award presented by Cloud Computing Magazine.

"At Coupa, we leverage the power of the cloud to deliver a simplified, easy-to-use software that provides our customers unparalleled time to value," said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software. "Being recognized for our innovative solution reflects our goal of giving our customers a best-in-class solution to help optimize spend and improve profitability."…

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms.  So what is CloudStack? It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011…

The hot technology buzzword in computing today is the “cloud.” You see this used all over the place from consumer services like Apple’s new iCloud™ or Pandora to business services from companies such as Oracle or IBM but what does this mean to radio? What is the cloud? Does radio have a place in the cloud? Does radio care and if so, why?

Let’s start with what “the cloud” is. Simply put, having something in the cloud just means that where you used to operate your own servers (either on your site or more likely in a data center) that performed all of your digital services (ad management, trafficking, automation, hosting, streaming, etc.), you can now run your digital services on computers that someone else manages and maintains.  Furthermore, cloud companies’ offer a host of important but low-level services that you don’t have to think much about anymore including fault-tolerance so your services are always “on”, ability to add new capacity automatically, disaster recovery, and more.  This means cloud computing can dramatically lower your costs and will certainly lower the cost of launching new services and maintaining them…

Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HPQ) on Monday unveiled a new storage service support model and gave partners a sneak peek at a cloud computing partner specialization that’s slated for launch in November.

On the storage side, HP is now giving select partners the option of selling their own branded services backed by HP support. The new model, dubbed ServiceONE Partner Support for HP Storage, will be available for select partners in March with a worldwide rollout slated for later this year…