Author: David

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Businesses and other organizations face tough challenges when trying to find the right way to build cloud applications and handle big data. Those issues, and in-depth discussions of advanced cloud use cases, will be features at the 2012 Cloud Connect conference and expo in Santa Clara, Calif., Feb. 13-16.

Phillip Easter, director of mobile applications at America Airlines, will be one of the featured speakers during the Wednesday 9-11 a.m. keynotes. He plans to address how legacy mainframe data can be integrated with real-time flight data in Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, according to Steve Wylie, Cloud Connect general manager. Easter’s session is titled, "Azure Delivers On-Time Data: How American Airlines has Turbo Charged Flight Status in its Windows Phone App."…

"Up until this year, the show has tended to be about defining what the cloud is. This year’s event is about doing it," said Wylie.

Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems, will give one of Cloud Connect’s to the point, 15-minute keynotes during the Tuesday 9-11 a.m. keynote session. He will examine "Your Data Center In The Cloud" and explain what has to change in enterprise data centers to give business users access to virtual, multi-tenant data center services. Networking, for example, needs to be an individualized service for the user in the form of a virtual, isolated subnet on the main network, he said in an interview.

Among other things, he plans to ask, and provide Cisco’s answer to, the question: "What do we mean by virtual data centers? How can we provide the isolation needed for each tenant" in a multi-tenant setting?

Tucker will also examine the alternative world of open source code and explain how Cisco is trying to bring some of its virtual networking concepts to the OpenStack open source project for cloud software.

Chris Pick, chief marketing officer of Apptio, will address, "Understanding Cloud Economics: From Best Practices to Hidden Costs," in a session at 11:15 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Tuesday. Pick said that cloud users may believe that cloud computing is cheaper without really having the means to do a cost comparison. Whether it is less expensive than their existing infrastructure can only be determined once IT has established baseline costs for its own IT operations, a task Apptio assists with its IT Service Costing application and other IT expense modeling software.

"One reason we exist is cloud computing," he said in an interview. "We can draw up a bill of IT … the fully burdened cost to provide IT services to the business, including outside contractors and cloud services," he said.

With such a bill in hand, IT managers can confront the business users who view IT as non-competitive in meeting their needs. The business users may be right, and it is cheaper to go around IT into the cloud. On the other hand, they may not have understood the real costs of adding another application and support.

A company that’s grown through acquisition often ends up with multiple copies of CRM systems. That firm needs to assess how to rationalize its applications, establish the cost of a single, consolidated application, if that option is pursued, and compare it to adopting a Salesforce.com subscription for each user.

"We see a lot of people making decisions on how to build a virtual private cloud. They can go Vblocks (from VMware, EMC, and Cisco systems spin-off, Virtual Computer Environment) or they can go Eucalyptus (private cloud software), two extremely different choices," he said.

Other speakers include: Jan Jackman, VP of global cloud services for IBM’s Global Technology Services; Peter Magnusson, director of engineering at Google; Allan Leinwand, CTO of infrastructure at Zynga; Geva Perry, author of the popular cloud blog, "Thinking Out Cloud."

LinkedIn data scientists Mathieu Bastian and Sal Uryasev will discuss "LinkedIn Maps: Building A Large Scale Visualization Product In The Cloud" during the Tuesday 9-11 a.m. sequence of short keynotes.

HP, IBM, Nimbula, Uptime Software, and other cloud computing vendors will be making news announcements during the show Feb. 13-16 show.

Register here for Cloud Connect 2012.

Grazed from Dilbert.com.  Author: Scott Adams

On Friday, we like to step away from some of the news and headlines of the day, and instead hit the water coolers and have a bit of fun.

This one is an oldie, but a goodie.  Enjoy this Cloud Computing jab from Scott Adam’s Dilbert strip.

Grazed from Gov Info Security.  Author: Eric Chabrow.

Cloud computing gives the jitters to those charged with protecting their organization’s IT systems and data. After all, vital data flow through the Internet to servers that often are beyond the control of an enterprise’s IT security organization. And, to gauge that concern, Information Security Media Group, publisher of GovInfoSecurity, has just fielded Cloud Computing Security Survey 2012.

The survey will examine not only cloud security concerns, but how security leaders address these concerns through policy, technology and improved vendor management. Survey takers will be from all sectors and from around the globe and include IT, IT security and business managers and professionals involved in their organization’s cloud computing efforts…

Grazed from Information Management.  Author: Justin Kern.

Those were prime expectations for the near-term of cloud computing from discussion topics during an update on cloud standards held Thursday between U.S. and European standards organizations. The virtual summit was led by the Open Data Center Alliance and held in conjunction with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), standards consortium OMG, storage and networking standards group SNIA, and the European telecommunications and network standards group, ETSI. All of the organizations are doing their own work with end users and vendors to establish cloud standards, which are then discussed among the organizations in bi-weekly calls.

Although representatives from the five organizations stopped short of exact timelines and strict guidelines in the discussion, they each provided insight on the direction of standards in the coming year…

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

Apple is going to launch the iPad 3, or whatever they call it, the first week of March at a special event in San Francisco according to AllThingsD, a prophecy the punters regarded as being as good as a statement from the company.

As a result Apple Thursday hit an all-time high, teasing the magic $500 number, with a closing price of $493.17, up from $315 last June, after seeing $496.75 during the day.  The blog figures street availability a week or so later.

The dingus, the same size as the iPad 2, will reportedly be built on a way faster chip with improved graphics and a 2048×1536 Retina Display – "or something close to it," the blog said…

Grazed from TechWorld.  Author: Sophie Curtis.

Grazed from FierceBioTech IT.  Author:  Suzanne Elvidge.

Many companies, especially biopharma and bioinformatics companies, end up with a pool of unstructured and semistructured data, these days dubbed "Big Data." U.S.-based global IT company EMC is planning an R&D center in the Skolkovo Foundation’s Innovation Hub in Russia to create cloud infrastructure solutions and Big Data analytics technologies focusing on bioinformatics, as well as energy efficiency.

The innovation hub, which is also known as "Russian Silicon Valley," is still in the planning and construction stages but will be a high-tech business area to include the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skolkovotech), research institutes, a business incubator, and R&D, technologies development and commercialization centers, as well as housing. EMC will also collaborate with Russian universities, government agencies, and local and multinational companies in the local area…