Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

www.IceWEB.com , a leading provider of Unified Data Storage and building blocks for cloud storage networks, announced today that it has received an order from a Federal Government Agency for an IceWEB Model 5000 unified storage system. The system will be deployed in the agency’s Washington, D.C. data center to provide cloud computing services for mission-critical applications. Configured for a VMware operating environment, the system includes dual 10Gb Ethernet, six 1Gb Ethernet, 24TB of ENT SAS disk and 400GB of Solid State Disk (SSD).

"Building on a flawless implementation of IceWEB’s unified data storage systems deployed at this agency previously, this agency naturally expanded its deployment with IceWEB’s systems among all other vendors," said Tim McNamee, IceWEB VP Sales. "Our Model 5000 is now being deployed for the agency’s state-of-the-art cloud computing service center. With its 400GB of Solid State Drives, the IceWEB 5000’s hybrid storage pool, IceCAP(TM), will dramatically increase the speed of Input/Output Operations (IOPS), providing the agency with optimized performance levels for mission critical applications."…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite all the hoopla around cloud computing, Microsoft’s SQL Azure cloud platform will likely co-exist with on-premises SQL Server installations for some time. The hybrid deployment scenario means integrating data will present challenges to developers, especially since much of the technology is still in flux.

Rather than flip the switch on a wholesale conversion to the cloud, most companies will move applications over to SQL Azure at a more measured pace, initially spinning up applications best positioned to reap the benefits of the cloud’s scalability and lower costs. Companies may choose to work through some of their cloud security and performance concerns by using SQL Azure to experiment with new applications or by adding features and data sets that live in the cloud to existing SQL Server systems. Both approaches demand a robust level of integration between the platforms…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Paula Rooney.

Red Hat took a major step forward today in its goal to establish the open source kernel-based VM hypervisor as a leading virtualization platform for desktops and servers and a core component of its cloud computing strategy — the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0.

Red Hat’s much anticipated Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 platform represents a turning point in the maturity of KVM hypervisor and the company’s cloud computing goals, one IDC analyst claims.

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon announced today DynamoDB, a fully managed cloud-based NoSQL database service that builds on the company’s SimpleDB service by delivering faster, more consistent database performance to keep pace with the demands of ever-scaling cloud apps.

The secret sauce here is Amazon’s homegrown Dynamo non-relational database architecture, which the company built to suit the demands of its complex, service-oriented e-commerce architecture. Designed to be a highly reliable, ultra-scalable key/value database, Dynamo has  inspired such offerings as Red Hat’s Infinispan data grid technology [1] and Apache Cassandra [2]…

Grazed from Talkin Clouds.  Author:  Joe Panettieri.

JetBlue is the latest company to embrace Microsoft Office 365, the cloud computing platform that runs Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and other cloud services. JetBlue is certainly a big win for Microsoft’s cloud strategy — but it’s still difficult to measure exactly how well Office 365 is doing in the market, especially among channel partners.

According to a Microsoft blog, JetBlue, Patagonia and the American Heart Association are among the most recent Office 365 converts. The blog also says:

• Office 365 is on track to be one of the fastest-growing offers in Microsoft’s history.
• More than 90 percent of Office 365 customers have less than 50 employees, suggesting the cloud suite is a hot seller for small businesses…

Grazed from Washington Today.  Author:  David Hubler.

Expect disruptive technologies – cloud computing, mobility, social computing, big data and smart analytics, IT appliances, and cybersecurity – to become more tightly woven into mission-critical systems and processes in 2012 as government and private organizations look for ways to innovate and also operate more cost efficiently.

That’s one of Unisys’ predictions for 2012 based on its work with clients around the world.

The findings were released on Jan. 18.

Among the company’s predictions: Cloud computing will continue to be the top IT investment priority in 2012…

Grazed from CIO Update.  Author: Paul Carmody.

The cloud is an increasingly viable infrastructure deployment option for enterprises, but is it the right choice for all of your applications?  Before you take the plunge, you need to realize there are fundamental differences between available cloud offerings, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.

To determine which model is right for you, you’ll need to evaluate your needs carefully. As you go through this process, consider the top five mistakes today’s organizations are making in cloud adoption, and how to avoid them:

Mistake No. 1: Leaping before you look – CIOs are under pressure from business to speed time-to-market of business critical applications, while simultaneously being squeezed to accomplish this with smaller staffs and shrinking budgets. The lure of the cloud is tempting, but rather than rush in, it is in your best interest to begin with a thorough audit of your IT needs to determine whether a cloud solution will truly help you meet your business goals…

Remember, the cloud is a means to an end, not the end in itself. You don’t want to throw an application into the cloud and not get the performance and cost improvement you are looking for. Moreover, not all clouds are created equal: Public clouds solve different problems than private clouds. Clouds based on open-source hypervisors may have fewer/different features than their VMware-based cousins.

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author:  John Foley.

Cloud services are proven for many business and consumer applications, but what if the problem to be solved is measuring the expansion of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy has determined the cloud can help there too, but it won’t be cheap or easy.

The Energy Department set out two years ago to determine the feasibility of cloud computing for the kinds of CPU-intensive processing jobs done by its national laboratories, and the results of that assessment are now in. Researchers at the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national labs determined that cloud computing offers "many advantages," but with caveats. In a recently released report on the project, called Magellan, they point to a steep learning curve, performance and scalability shortcomings, and missing pieces in the cloud software stack, among other challenges…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

There may not be any love lost between Microsoft and Google in the cloud computing space (and elsewhere) (See: Google vs Microsoft: US Government Agrees to End Microsoft Bias  and Microsoft And Google Are At It Again); however, it would seem that Microsoft is not averse to the occasional tie-up with an IT biggie, especially one who poses no direct threat to its software supremacy.

Microsoft recently announced a global, four-year deal with HP to deliver its communications and collaboration applications via HP’s cloud services. As per the press release, the deal would include:…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, today announced the launch of its first hands-on Cloud Computing training course, "Building and Using a Cloud with Nimbula Director". This course will teach students how to build and administer private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Nimbula Director is powerful cloud software that works out of the box and can be used to implement a number of business enabling cloud use cases, such as deploying a private cloud in minutes instead of weeks or months.

To help customers achieve immediate benefits such as reducing the time and cost to build new application or infrastructure services without sacrificing security and control, Nimbula has built an industry-first Cloud Computing training course that educates and empowers organizations to implement real world cloud computing use cases such as: how to build a scalable platform to support web or SaaS applications, how to build a zero-touch data center, how to blend Amazon EC2-like scale, agility and efficiency with customization and control, and how to give traditional IT the same capabilities as public clouds…