Category: News

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today at the Cloud Computing Expo Japan, PROMISE Technology Inc., a recognized global leader in the storage industry, announced the Japanese launch of its new cloud storage solution: FileCruiser. The new FileCruiser enables businesses and organizations to create their own scalable private cloud storage service.

An exclusive FileCruiser launch event will be hosted by James Lee, CEO of PROMISE Technology, on May 14 from 3:30-4:30 p.m. during the Expo at the Tokyo Big Sight seminar area. Additionally, attendees can learn more about FileCruiser and PROMISE’s full range of cloud and IT storage solutions by visiting booth #East 2-23 at the Tokyo Big Sight during the Expo…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Larry Warnock.

Cloud computing, big data, and the hybridization of IT environments represent real, seismic shifts in the way organizations leverage technology to provide better customer service, more effectively solve problems, and gain a competitive advantage. But as adoption of these technologies grows, so too does the amount of sensitive data and variety of information objects that require tight management and security.

As companies put more of their IT infrastructures, critical applications, and valuable company data into the cloud, they should be using security measures, such as encryption, tokenization, authorization, and access controls to protect these valuable business assets. These security procedures create an abundance of encryption keys, tokens, certificates, passphrases, and configuration files…

Graxed from Technet. Author: Adrienne Hall.

Previously in this series, we looked at cloud security trends in the financial services and healthcare sectors, based on survey data derived from Microsoft’s Cloud Security Readiness Tool (CSRT). Next I’d like to discuss some findings that relate to the retail industry. IT departments at retail businesses are expected to manage a number of important security tasks, some of which have evolved considerably in recent years.

This includes meeting regulatory requirements, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) specifications on protecting customer data, without diminishing the shopping experience in stores or online. Retailers have also expanded their use of technology to manage supply chains, operate web services and self-service portals, and deploy customer relationship management (CRM) solutions that can address their customers’ needs…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Violin Memory, Inc., a leading provider of all-flash storage arrays and appliances delivering application solutions for the enterprise, today announced it has joined the OpenStack ® Foundation as a corporate member to collaborate with other industry leaders and promote open standards for cloud computing.

As a new OpenStack Foundation corporate member, Violin offers its all flash storage arrays with an iSCSI plug-in option for customers running business applications on the OpenStack platform. Currently in beta is a Fibre Channel plug-in supporting OpenStack that will be available in the second quarter of the calendar year…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Anthony Myers.

Salesforce finally connected the powerful Heroku cloud application platform to its own database layer on Tuesday with the release of the Heroku Connect tool. The move was promised last year when the company debuted its Salesforce1 mobile app, which was designed as a mobile one-stop shop for all of Salesforce’s various business application tools.

Heroku and Force.com, the cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS) from Salesforce.com, represent two vastly different development systems based on completely different programming languages—but Salesforce now has a working bi-directional connection between them, in the form of the Heroku Connect Tool…

Grazed from TheLawyer. Author: Caroline Atkins and Katherine Armytage.

Cloud computing is a major trend in today’s ICT environment. However, unlike participants in some other sectors, governments in the Asia-Pacific region have been slower to take up the significant financial benefits that this technology stands to offer. One major reason for this is the concern about privacy and security, which has received much attention from commentators to date.

However, as the technical issues needed to ensure adequate privacy and security of cloud solutions are gradually addressed and resolved, and governments become more convinced that cloud computing is a viable option for at least some of their ICT needs, it is becoming apparent that there are other contractual issues acting as barriers to the successful uptake of cloud computing by governments…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

AMD today announced that its SeaMicro SM15000(TM) server set a significant industry benchmark record for hyperscale cloud computing with a demonstration that highlights how OpenStack can quickly and reliably provision on-demand computing services at scale. The test provisioned 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts. The first 75,000 virtual machines were deployed in six hours and thirty minutes.

This is the largest known demonstration of OpenStack scalability ever. AMD achieved the record in collaboration with Canonical using the Ubuntu OpenStack (Icehouse) distribution. MaaS (Metal as a Service), part of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu OpenStack, was used to deliver the bare metal servers, storage and networking. The solution is available today and is the most scalable, automated application for deploying OpenStack in hyperscale environments…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center, today announced the release of its first Agile Infrastructure (AI) reference architecture for OpenStack. SolidFire AI is a pre-validated, converged infrastructure design which enables start-to-finish deployment of an OpenStack cloud infrastructure in less than one hour, through the combination of industry-leading compute, networking, orchestration and all-flash storage technologies.

"The wave of cloud computing continues to gain strength as enterprises strive to deliver a broad set of IT services with greater speed and agility than ever before," said SolidFire’s Founder and CEO Dave Wright. "A key part of SolidFire’s value is our ability to make the complexities of cloud deployment, management and predictability — simple…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Internap Network Services has taken its OpenStack-driven public cloud into general availability. AgileCLOUD, which was announced in November 2013, was designed to be a flexible, high-performance public cloud, and Internap unveiled its general availability at OpenStack Summit Atlanta.

"OpenStack offers a flexible platform that gives providers the ability to innovate and deliver cloud infrastructure that is free of vendor lock-in," said Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap, in a prepared statement. "Building AgileCLOUD on OpenStack allowed us to focus on integrating the features that are central to our value proposition, including infrastructure hybridization and delivering best performance to end users…

Grazed from DimensionData. Author: David McKenzie.

Are you trying to compare DIY vs using a managed hosting provider to deliver your SaaS application? It’s a common comparison and yet we have found many instances where this was far from apples vs apples. I personally have had conversations with CTOs of SaaS companies who when asked about how they were going to compare a fully managed solution with an internally built solution actually seemed to be more focused on the hardware costs and not all of the other expense criteria involved in their web application delivery services. Hardware is a critical and important component of the cost model, but it is one of many items that need to be identified to properly make a comparison.

First, ask yourself these questions before you start thinking about using a service provider:

• Is building and maintaining infrastructure a core competency of yours?
• Who will do the work in-house?
• Do you feel you can trust a Service Provider with your application/data?
• Can you give up some control?