Author: David

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb.  Author: David Strom.

The folks at LearnBoost, a free classroom management suite of online tools, have blogged last month about how they use MongoDB among other things to help them replicate in the cloud to prevent exactly the same sorts of outages that hit Quora and others when Amazon’s Web Services went offline.

Guillermo Rauch writes that LearnBoost didn’t suffer any downtime, largely because they took some care to build in redundancy to their apps and cleverly
replicated their data across different Amazon regions and data centers…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Robert Dutt.

A survey released this week paints an interesting picture of small businesses working in the cloud, and that picture is one of uncertainty.

"The cloud", essentially outsourcing computing tasks of any number of varieties, has been the hot button topic of the technology industry over the last couple of years, and it’s often suggested that the cloud is a natural fit for SMB organisations, which have greater agility and less existing legacy architecture than their enterprise peers.

Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger

Eight months after it began an ambitious project to digitize a lifetime worth of music, artwork, photos and various other property of one of the world’s most renowned musicians, Hewlett-Packard revealed May 26 that Sir Paul McCartney’s new cloud storage/access system has launched and is open for business.

McCartney’s publishing company, MPL Communications, is handling the day-to-day business of using the cloud-stored content for publishing, licensing, sales–and even giveaways, if McCartney so chooses.

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author: Stephen Withers.

Game provider Zynga has more than 250 million users, and signs up five new players every second. Company officials claim 10% of the world’s Internet population plays a Zynga game once a month.

With six of the top 10 Facebook games, Zynga has a serious business. But have you ever wondered where the games actually run?

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Recognising the growing need for vendor neutral standards in the cloud computing field, the Apache Software Foundation has prioritised development of its Libcloud unified cloud interface as a top level project, the organisation announced.

Apache Libcloud provides a single interface to more than 20 cloud services, including Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute), Rackspace Cloud, Terremark’s cloud service, IBM Cloud, GoGrid’s infrastructure service and the Xen-based Linode service.

Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Jenny Williams.

UK businesses are considering the introduction of private cloud platforms while waiting for the public cloud market to mature, according to research from analyst firm Quocirca.

The survey of almost 1,000 organisations, including 101 UK companies, shows that almost half are positive about using the cloud as part of their IT platform, compared with 10% which consider cloud as a "passing fad".

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Cloud computing relies heavily on robust network connections in order to facilitate a fluid data environment. This is having a dramatic effect on the edge in particular as it adapts to its new role as a bridge between disparate resource pools.

One of the ways this is playing out is increased WAN functionality on routers and gateway devices. Coupled with outside WAN optimization and other technologies, the goal is to provide seamless transition between on-premise infrastructure and the cloud.

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Brad Peters.

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Todd Bishop.

Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for VMWare, made a swing through Seattle today, amid news that the company is planning a major expansion in its hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.

No similar announcement here, but VMWare is on the hunt for talent in general and has a modest presence in the Seattle region already, through its own offices and those brought on through its recent acquisition of Seattle-based online backup service Mozy from EMC (which owns 80 percent of VMWare).