Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: James Carlini.

“Once you get into Cloud Computing and past the glossy euphemisms, you better watch out for the real rocks in the road,” observes James Carlini.

“Cloud computing is the major approach that most organizations should be adapting for their applications in this new era of mobile computing.” You have all read the ads and the articles that hype it, along with all the overnight experts that tout how they know that Cloud Computing is the universal solution for today’s and tomorrow’s organizations. Now, let’s get back on the ground and understand what some of the real potholes and obstacles are on the road to a more efficient and effective IT infrastructure.

Rules of the Road, Rules of the Clouds
There are many “experts” out there touting all the positive aspects to Cloud Computing but like anything else, there are issues and concerns to address…

Grazed from FierceIT.  Author: David Perera.

Public cloud computing environments for scientific applications have the potential to be up to 13 times more expensive than existing Energy Department supercomputing centers, finds a final report of a 2-year federal study.

The study (.pdf), released in December, chronicles the build out of a private cloud dubbed Magellan by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, as well as a study of attitudes to cloud computing among scientists and cost estimates of running scientific applications in a commercial cloud…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

IDC Government Insights announced the availability of a new report, Best Practices: Regional Community Cloud Hubs — The New "Trickle Down" Effect That’s Boosting State and Local Computing (Document #GI232470). According to the new report, IDC Government Insights believes a new type of government cloud services, labeled "regional cloud hubs", will significantly change the way state and local governments procure online computing services. These regional cloud hubs, defined as one government agency (often at the state level) offering computing services to other government agencies, have proven successful in the State of Michigan and State of Utah and are further examined within the report. In addition, the new research provides a framework for building similar regional cloud solutions.

According to Shawn McCarthy, research analyst, IDC Government Insights, "We believe that cloud hubs will see rapid growth, since the first multiagency efforts have already shown a positive return on investment and solid service levels for cloud solutions subscribers."…

Grazed from IT World.  Author: Brian Proffitt.

Enterprise users are still doubling down on their Linux bets, thanks to the motivation brought on by big data, cloud computing, and virtualization.

That’s one takeaway of a new report released today by the Linux Foundation, based on a survey of just over 400 enterprise Linux users. The survey, conducted in conjunction with the Yeoman Technology Group, reveals that 84 percent of companies currently using Linux have expanded their usage of the operating system over the past 12 months.

Much of that growth is driven by big data: over "75% of respondents expressed concern about supporting ‘Big Data,’ and nearly 72% are choosing Linux to support it," a release from the Linux Foundation stated. "Only 35.9% are planning to use Windows to meet the demands of this new environment."…

Grazed from The Hosting News.  Author: Nicole Henderson.

OpenStack OS developer Piston Cloud Computing announced on Wednesday that it has launched its Piston Enterprise operating system, pentOS, to the general public.

Piston’s operating system is the first OpenStack distribution specifically focused on security and the operation of enterprise private clouds.

In September, the WHIR talked to the founders of Piston about its cloud operating system for managing enterprise private cloud environments.

According to the press release, Piston Cloud’s Null Tier Architecture combines storage, compute and networking an every node to deliver massive scalability…

Grazed from Economic Times.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Sequoia Capital, one of the most active risk capital investors in the country, has acquired a minority stake in Knowlarity, a Gurgaon-based company that offers cloud telephony-based solutions. This is the first investment in the cloud computing space in India for the PE firm that will invest 35 crore in the Indian start-up.

Founded in 2009 by IIT- Kanpur graduates Ambarish Gupta and Pallav Pandey, Knowlarity provides voice and data communication services over the internet to companies and individuals in India and Indonesia.

With this round of investment, the start-up aims to expand services to other emerging markets, including Thailand and Brazil. "We built the company to deliver simple and useful telephony products to help other businesses, primarily in the SME segment," said Gupta, who received his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007…

Grazed from CenterBeam.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

For people interested in what the future of next-generation video games may hold, Square Enix worldwide technology director Julien Merceron said he believes cloud computing will be a big factor and play an "instrumental role" in newer consoles.

"I think it has tremendous benefits," he told GamesIndustry.biz. "I don’t see any good reason not to investigate for platform holders how they could actually think about cloud storage and cloud computing for their next platforms."

He said when it comes down to future platforms, the cloud will be extremely important, as the back end of each system will become more powerful…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Jason Cowie.

In 2011, many data center managers took a hard look at the public cloud and said, “No, thank you.” The drawbacks of public cloud computing outweigh the cost benefits that are initially attractive to so many companies, particularly small to midsize businesses. While there are homegrown public cloud applications being built upon open source options like Xen Hypervisor and Kernel-based virtual machines (KVM), the public cloud remains basically a science experiment in the eyes of corporate data centers. So, the move to the cloud in the coming year will be a private or hybrid one. Will VMware own that space? Based on trends that began in the past year, the answer to this question is also, “no.”…

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

Code 42, the Minneapolis start-up that peddles CrashPlan, the automatic real-time PC and mobile backup and recovery service aimed at consumers, SMBs and the enterprise, has gotten a $52.5 million investment from round leader Accel Partners and Split Rock Partners.

It’s the company’s first investment. It’s reportedly been profitable since it launched the widgetry in 2007.

Accel dipped into its new $100 million Big Data Fund for the first time for its share.

Code 42 says it’s got some 4,000 enterprise customers including Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, LinkedIn and NASA and 100PT of data stowed in the cloud: its cloud or private clouds, other computers or devices or some combination or all of these options. That represents a total of 100 billion file and it reportedly gets 250 million unique new files a day…