Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a core layer of the cloud computing architecture, and its evolution will affect the future of most users and vendors in enterprise software markets, according to Gartner, Inc.

"With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing," said Yefim Natis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPassage, the leading cloud server security company, today unveils Halo NetSec, an automated solution that provides advanced network access control for servers running in public clouds including Rackspace and Amazon EC2. Halo NetSec is specifically designed for multi-cloud environments, installs in less than five minutes and provides administrators with easy-to-manage perimeter controls.

"Cloud computing has ushered in a new set of security risks and challenges that are not addressed at the IaaS level, and traditional firewall defenses do not adequately translate into the cloud," said Andrew Hay, senior security analyst for 451 Research. "A host-based server security solution designed specifically for cloud environments picks up where the IaaS leaves off, providing organizations with the scalable security they need to consider when migrating traditional on-premise systems to the cloud."…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Frank Ohlhorst.

EnterpriseDB has announced a new database-as-a-service offering, which will bring  EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL Plus database products to the cloud.

The company has already forged agreements with leading cloud services hosts to immediately offer EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service. Service providers, such as CloudBees and Engine Yard, will use  PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service for their core offerings while Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud Compute will offer PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service directly to customers.

Offering the service as an alternative to entrenched Oracle users means that EnterpriseDB must include some specific features to support enterprise customers. One critical feature that EnterpriseDB’s PostgreSQL Plus Cloud Service includes is support for fully ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) compliant relational database service…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Gridstore(TM), the leader in grid based, scale-out storage solutions, today announced that the company has been awarded the first Cloud Computing Excellence Award from TMC. Gridstore was selected as one of the top 30 companies that most effectively leveraged cloud computing in efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. The winners will be published in the January 2012 issue of Cloud Computing Magazine.

With Gridstore’s scale-out storage solution small and medium sized organizations enjoy simple plug and play scaling of capacity, IO and performance without the cost, complexity and 3X capacity bloat of first-generation cluster based offerings. Gridstore’s unique grid based NAS is the only scale-out solution that provides a fault tolerant system designed to withstand multiple, simultaneous failures without downtime or data loss to ensure customers can run 24/7 non-stop…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced the introduction of SGI® Modular InfiniteStorage™, an integrated server and storage platform designed to provide Cloud and data storage customers with the maximum flexibility for compute and data management applications. Leveraging industry-leading density in an innovative, adaptable design, the core SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform will be available as either SGI Modular InfiniteStorage Server (SGI MIS Server) or SGI Modular InfiniteStorage JBOD (SGI MIS JBOD) storage products, for wide-ranging, functional scalability in diverse data environments.

“The SGI Modular InfiniteStorage platform aims to allow IT managers to design customized solutions based on standards-based components.”

Grazed from GreenBiz.com.   Author: Tilde Herrera.

We’ve all seen the recent headlines publicizing the Army’s push to significantly scale back its operations.

That push reaches far beyond its ground forces to include a fleet of data centers that must shrink from about 200 to 20. The military arm’s top IT brass wants the Army to meet this consolidation target ahead of its original deadline of fiscal year 2014.

Keeping in line with this timeline, the Army recently awarded its first cloud computing contract to several contractors to help create its own private cloud, including MicroTech, Lockheed Martin Corp. and IBM…

Grazed from The Globe & Mail.  Author: Grant Buckler.

Grazed from PR Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

ClearDATA Networks, Inc., the fastest-growing provider of cloud computing services for the healthcare industry, has partnered with Comport Consulting Corp., a leading provider of data management and infrastructure solutions for healthcare providers, to deliver Medical Image Storage and Archiving solutions utilizing ClearDATA’s healthcare cloud platform.

Because of the increasing amounts of data created by medical imaging, hospital CIOs face significant challenges managing their PACs and clinical data storage infrastructure with predictable cost efficiency. “ClearDATA Medical Image Storage and Archive provides an economical, vendor neutral alternative to perpetually purchasing local hard drives by providing the right amount of storage at any given time. The hospital only pays for what they use.” said Brian Mitchell, VP Sales of ClearDATA. “The ClearDATA cloud network is 100% HIPAA compliant and manages data security beyond NIST standards, giving the client complete confidence that their data is in a facility that minimizes the risk of breach.”…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

AppFog Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson isn’t shy about touting platform-as-a-service as the ideal way for developers to access cloud computing resources, but he isn’t blind either. Although PaaS has been around for a couple years now and has already spurred hundreds of millions in M&A spending, Carlson knows it’s nowhere near the mainstream yet.

Carlson lays out his version of the evolution of cloud computing in the infographic below. Right now, API-based infrastructure-as-a-service offerings like that from Amazon Web Services and SysOps (or DevOps) tools are developers’ best friends in the cloud. Application-lifecycle platforms such as Cloud Foundry (the VMware-ran open source project  on which AppFog is built) and Red Hat’s OpenShift  are poised to reach critical mass in 2012, whereas so-called “NoOps” platforms such as AppFog and Heroku will reach that point in 2013…

Grazed from YouTube.  Author:  Blackwateropsdotcom.

Public, Private, Community and Hybrid — these are the four types of cloud that are recognized by the NIST model. Of cource, Hybrid is a combination of the first three.  But for ease of discussion, these are the four types of Cloud.