Category: News

Grazed from DisCo.org. Author: Matthias Langenegger.

This post is part of a series on the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing in the developing world. The previous post covered the transformative potential of the cloud and the different types of cloud services. Let us now turn to the economics behind the cloud. It’s a tough, fast-moving business involving substantial investments, and, most importantly, cloud services are effectively competing in a global marketplace.

The ‘borderless’, instantaneous nature of online communications means that cloud services can be provided from anywhere in the world, creating almost perfect markets in some areas. At least technically, competition is just a click away. That’s particularly relevant in an environment where many of the competing services are “free” to end-users (supported through ads, donations or other business models)…

Grazed from EEJournal. Author: Bruce Kleinman.

In part one of this article series, I suggested that datacenter architectures could benefit from revisiting the parallel computing innovations of the 1980s, and I waxed lyrically about the Transputer, which struck a chord with a surprising number of readers – including one reader who wrote “we built a fabulous Transputer board … didn’t sell many of them … I haven’t thought about it for decades.” It was a heartfelt email, though I am not clear if that was because of his fond memory of the Transputer or the commercial failure of his product. In any event, I firmly stand by my belief that much could be learned and leveraged from revolutionary parallel computing architectures.

In mobile computing, I observed that quad+ core CPUs are vastly underutilized in the majority of real-world applications (the notable exception being gaming). Virtually all of these apps are built on a simple client-server model, taking fractional advantage of mobile CPU horsepower…

Grazed from NIUToday. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Cloud is all around us. A swirl of data, program suites and virtual store fronts such as Amazon, iTunes, and Google Drive are revolutionizing the way that we use and store information. This revolution will provide great opportunities for experts who understand Cloud computing. Research from Microsoft shows that public and private Cloud services will generate an estimated 14 million jobs worldwide in the coming year.

In response to the demand for well-trained information technology experts, Northern Illinois University is offering a Cloud Genius Certification course at NIU-Naperville. Cloud Genius® is a Cloud computing training institution founded by computing industry experts. In partnership with universities nationwide, Cloud Genius® provides cutting-edge, hands-on Cloud DevOps training that helps students learn to assist businesses transitioning to Cloud computing…

Grazed from Toss.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

As you read this post, keep in mind there is no “perfect” solution. All options – be it an in-house network or a cloud solution – have both upsides and downsides. Your selection has to be determined on a case-by-case scenario before you can come to a complete conclusion on which option will work best for you. (Warning: Do not let a cloud expert tell you there is only “one way” of doing something.)

Some companies end up with a hybrid solution where some of their applications are in the cloud and some are still hosted and maintained from an in-house system. We discuss more about these options in our post Different types of cloud solutions explained. Here are the general pros and cons of cloud computing:…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Ann Braley Smith.

For healthcare providers, the forecast calls for more clouds. And that’s a good thing. The healthcare and life sciences industry has been slower than others to adopt cloud technology, citing (most often) security concerns for proprietary patient data. A 2013 survey (PDF) showed that healthcare was ranked seven out of eight industries for cloud adoption, just ahead of state and local governments. The trepidation is understandable. Healthcare data is arguably the most personal of data, and the industry’s diligence, compliance and privacy regulations reflect this idea.

However, the attitude toward cloud computing is shifting. In 2011, only 4 percent of healthcare IT providers had adopted some sort of healthcare cloud solution. Since then, it’s growing at a rate of 20 percent per year. Why are health IT experts changing their minds about the way we manage and store patient information? IT experts are finding that the old concerns are largely unfounded, including these five common myths for healthcare cloud deployment, which include lack of security, high cost and insufficient functionality for end users…

Grazed from Cruxialcio. Author: Antone Gonsalves.

Nvidia has introduced its next-generation GPU platform, which is expected to significantly increase the speed of high-performance systems used in cloud computing and scientific research. Called Pascal, named after 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, the upcoming platform has a couple of proprietary technologies that move data much faster between the GPU and memory chips and the computer’s main processor, called the CPU.

GPUs are best known for rendering graphics in online gaming or videogames. However, the specialized design of the chips also makes them much better than CPUs at processing large blocks of data found in cloud-computing, machine learning, analytics and scientific research…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

I seldom comment on beta test software until it is a released product. I thought, however, that the direction Red Hat is taking for its KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.4 beta made it worth publishing a comment.

What Red Hat has to say about RHEV 3.4
New features in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta include stronger OpenStack integration, enterprise network capabilities enhancements, and advanced manageability of the entire stack.

OpenStack Support and Integration
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta strengthens and simplifies the provisioning and sharing of networking resources used by both traditional and cloud-enabled workloads through OpenStack Networking (Neutron) integration. The beta release offers enhancements that improve the security and scalability of Neutron provisioned networks. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta supports open vSwitch and its software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Adam Ritchie.

Piston Cloud Computing Makes Creating and Managing Private Cloud Servers Easy with OpenStack 3.0. OpenStack is a project that shares a free, open source cloud computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), written in the Python coding language. This project was initiated by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in July 2010. Big name tech companies such as Cisco, Dell, Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Go Daddy and Yahoo! have all contributed processing, storage and networking resources to the OpenStack community.

Who is Piston Cloud Computing?

In 2011, Piston was formed by some of the original creators of the OpenStack project. Their objective is to further the growth of the OpenStack project, while also providing a software product that uses advanced systems intelligence to make managing IT infrastructure as simple as possible…

Grazed from Stephen Lawson.

As it heads toward an estimated $250 million initial public offering, cloud storage and collaboration provider Box is thinking outside, well, itself. The nine-year-old company introduced an alternative to its traditional per-user pricing on Wednesday, as well as its first service that doesn’t rely on customers storing their data with Box.

Box has built its business on giving enterprises a place to store files for easy access and sharing by employees, partners and customers. It claims 25 million users. They can tap into the platform through Box’s own software or integrate it with desktop and mobile applications using APIs (application programming interfaces)…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Gayle Nixon.

In the latest of Trillium Software’s Hashtag chats (see #DQChat for details of the discussion) I moderated a session focusing on the rapid growth of Cloud Computing and its impact on Data Governance. We explored questions such as: How is Cloud impacting Data Governance? What are the major issues to be addressed? How can these be tackled? How does Data Governance as a discipline need to evolve to meet these challenges? Is Cloud a gathering storm for Data Governance and its practitioners or a sunlit window of opportunity?

As usual these questions generated many opinions and a few disagreements. There was however strong consensus that Cloud is radically changing the traditional Data Governance paradigm. Increasingly the storage and management of data in the Cloud, held as it is outside the traditional physical boundaries of organisations, means that Data Governance has to shift from being largely an inward facing activity to one where active involvement with external third party suppliers of IaaS, SaaS, etc. becomes the norm…