Author: David

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Dana Gardner.

Grazed from Market Wire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing has quickly surfaced as an important IT initiative as more organizations evaluate alternatives to help manage the pace and growth of their business. To help accelerate customers’ transition to the cloud, today at VMworld(R) 2011, NetApp and VMware announced VMware cloud infrastructure and management on NetApp(R), a new joint solution that enables organizations to evolve to a secure cloud computing model at their own pace, gaining greater flexibility and efficiency without needing to rip and replace their existing infrastructure…
 

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Grazed from Information Week.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Private cloud computing would be a more attractive option if came with a guarantee it would continue running when cantankerous, legacy systems hiccup and fail. Eucalyptus Systems, supplier of software that invokes a private cloud compatible with Amazon’s EC2, says it’s built high availability into its third generation software.

Eucalyptus 3 includes high availability as a feature, not an engineering project, with an architecture that was designed to eliminate single points of failure in the private cloud, said Marten Mickos, CEO. The update has mechanisms for automatic recovery from a component failure, whether it’s a storage drive or a host server…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: James Strayer.

The Verizon acquisition of Cloud Switch is tremendous validation for solution providers in the cloud enablement space and confirmation of the need for cloud onboarding tools to help lower the barrier to entry for businesses looking to adopt cloud services. Migration tools and services are always critical for driving adoption of any new technology, as consumers seek to migrate to the new from their legacy technology.Often times, the more disruptive the technology, the greater the need, and cloud is no exception in this respect. Mid-tier and enterprise businesses especially are looking for ways to streamline the onboarding process and minimize their risk around cloud adoption, as they have significantly more sunk costs than an SMB. By providing automated solutions to enable the migration of these businesses’s existing servers, MSPs and cloud providers will increase service adoption, drive revenue, and reduce costs in multiple ways…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Anne Fisher.

Putting all or part of a company’s operations on the cloud — shorthand for large, remotely hosted data sets and applications — isn’t without risk, as recent outages and security lapses have shown. Still, cloud computing is so cost-effective that its popularity is growing by leaps and bounds.

In 2010, U.S. firms paid $21.5 billion to make the move to cloud services, a figure expected to balloon to $72.9 billion by 2015, according to a new study by IT research and advisory firm IDC…

Grazed from Gov Info Security.  Author: Howard Anderson.

Before entering a contract with a cloud computing vendor, it pays to do your homework on key privacy and security issues.

Chris Witt, president of Wake Technology Services, sums it up this way: "If you’re not comfortable with how the cloud vendor runs their operation and you’re not 100 percent confident that they can provide similar or even better protections than you are already providing, then you probably should not be moving forward with that vendor regardless of how good of a contract you can negotiate."…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Dell has officially become a cloud computing provider with the launch of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud built atop VMware technology. The move is just the first in Dell’s three-pronged IaaS attack, which will soon include clouds based on the Microsoft Windows Azure and OpenStack platforms. While Dell is busy adding a strong software play to its flagship server business, it looks to be rebuilding that business model in the cloud…