Author: David

November 29, 2011 Off

TeamQuest Extends Lead in Dynamic Cloud and Virtualized Capacity Management with Acquisition of Performance Surveyor

By David
Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

TeamQuest Corporation announced the acquisition of Performance Surveyor from Solution Labs, a Canadian capacity management company.  Performance Surveyor strengthens the unique TeamQuest automated analytics and capacity management offerings that are so critical to the success of physical, virtual and cloud IT environments.

"Virtualization is a main technology underpinning cloud computing — and capacity management is a key pre-requisite to successful virtualization," said TeamQuest Product Manager Scott Adams. "If capacity is not effectively managed in these environments, you’ll have service disruptions, or waste the efficiency and cost savings that prompted these virtualization and cloud computing projects in the first place…

November 29, 2011 Off

How Apple and Microsoft are selling the cloud to humans

By David
Grazed from The Next Web.  Author: Matthew Panzarino.

Both Apple and Microsoft have invested greatly in the idea that the cloud is the way to germinate customer loyalty through ecosystem lockin. The cloud is a convenience feature that disguises

Microsoft has been trying to sell people on ‘the cloud’ for a while now. I’m sure you’ve seen the series of ads in which it tried to convince people that streaming media from home was actually cloud computing.

But with its mobile offerings, Microsoft is actually doing a bang-up job of it. Specifically a recent ad showing off the OneNote app for Windows Phone is very well done…

November 28, 2011 Off

The Great Cloud Computing Pricing Debate

By David
Grazed from CIO.  Author: Bernard Goldstein.

A continuing controversy in cloud computing is its putative cost benefits; specifically, whether public cloud computing can provide cost advantages over computing carried out within a company’s own data center.

Certainly, billions of bytes have been expended on this discussion, with steadfast advocates for both positions. I have often heard people confidently state that their internal cloud environment is cheaper than the public alternatives. I have even seen spreadsheets proving that an internal cloud has lower costs than the primary public provider, Amazon.

Briefly summed up, the argument in favor of private clouds goes something like this: If one examines the posted prices of Amazon and projects a given application’s resource demands to those prices, it seems clear that an IT organization could achieve lower costs running its own infrastructure…

November 28, 2011 Off

Recovery-as-a-Service

By David
Grazed from Channel Pro.  Author: Ian Masters.

Where can the channel capitalise on Recovery-as-a-Service?

Business continuity and disaster recovery will always be necessary investments for companies – data and applications are critical tools that support revenue generation, service to customers and their overall success. However, budgets for investment in technology have been severely hit over the last couple of years. To cope with these challenges, organisations are looking at how cloud computing could be used to meet this need around continuity…

November 28, 2011 Off

10 disruptive cloud companies we’re excited about

By David
Grazed from Cloud Beat.  Author: Sean Ludwig.

There is so much happening right now in emerging cloud computing — the entire economy is being disrupted by the trend.

With publicly-traded giants like Amazon, Google, VMWare, Microsoft, Cisco and Salesforce lurching around with new and improved services that can help businesses with cost and efficiency gains, sometimes it’s easy to miss the hot players that are up-and-coming…

November 28, 2011 Off

The Client Aware Cloud

By David
Grazed from ZD Net.  Author: Alan Priestley.

Rewind a few years and ‘mobility’ was the word that represented the exciting new direction for enterprise computing. The vision was that mobile devices would help enterprises spread their wings, cut their costs and thrust forward into a realm of new opportunity. Today the benefits of enterprise mobility are pretty much unanimously recognised. The real focus now is how to fuse enterprise mobility with the cloud.

To briefly spell out the issues around enterprise mobility and the cloud just think of all the different mobile devices out there and their different capabilities. Some can run web productivity and communications apps with no issues, others can’t. Now consider all the new platforms that are emerging: smartphones that are becoming ever smarter, tablet platforms that are seemingly proliferating by the week, laptops with the computing power of high-end PCs and more…

November 28, 2011 Off

Cloud Infrastructure Equipment to Exceed $33B in 2011

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Synergy Research Group announces the publication of its Cloud Market Share Report, which provides quarterly market shares, sizing, and forecasts for the Public and Private Cloud equipment markets. The foundation of Synergy’s segmentation includes the networking, computing, and storage platforms deployed for Private Cloud, Public Cloud (VPN), and Public Cloud (non-VPN)…

November 28, 2011 Off

Cloud Computing: A Comparison of Computing Models

By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Anne Lee.

A simple definition of cloud computing is that it’s a unique storage service that involves storage of data and software. With cloud computing, the person or company who enjoys the service is not fully aware of the location, storage facilities or configuration of the system used to offer the storage services. A good analogy to explain this concept is the regular power grid that supplies power to homes and businesses. The end user who enjoys the services is hardly aware of all the power generation and distribution devices and components used to deliver the service.

Since its introduction, cloud computing has evolved through several stages like virtualization computing to autonomic utility form of cloud computing. It has also evolved from service-oriented architecture…

November 28, 2011 Off

Spanning’s Backup Service in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Austin (Tex.)-based start-up Spanning has embraced the concept of cloud computing so much that its product is a backup service for Google Apps (GOOG), completely hosted and run from Amazon Web Services (AMZN). The idea of backing up one cloud service via another intrigued me, so I asked Mike Pav, Spanning’s vice-president of engineering, how he does it.

The company charges people or businesses $30 a year to back up Google Apps, including e-mail and documents. That covers customers who somehow delete or lose those files. Google will support users if it loses their data, but it won’t search for your files if you mess up…

November 28, 2011 Off

Apple iCloud

By David
Grazed from WinSuperSite.  Author: Paul Thurrotte.

n 2007, Apple released its first take at cloud computing, an intriguing service called MobileMe which apparently bombed with consumers. Certainly, MobileMe was a bit buggy out of the gate. But what most people don’t realize is that Apple actually fixed the bugs and delivered a pretty excellent service for a few years there, one that really did follow-through on its original promise of bringing Microsoft Exchange capabilities to the masses.

This past year, then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs infamously dissed MobileMe during the introduction of the service’s follow-up, iCloud. But as the laughter subsided, I became intrigued. It was immediately clear that iCloud would be a much bigger deal than MobileMe, more aggressive and offering far more functionality. And unlike MobileMe, iCloud would be free…