Category: News

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Newtek Business Services, The Small Business Authority, today announced the launch of its first television advertising campaign for its industry-leading cloud hosting services. The advertising campaign will focus on Newtek’s ability to provide incomparable service, with free 24/7/365 domestic support necessary to enhance the daily operations, and bolster security for its business customers. Newtek also announced that switching to the Newtek Cloud could save customers up to 60 percent in information technology ("IT") costs with its offerings at multiple price-points without sacrificing quality or availability of service around the clock. Newtek welcomes IT professionals and resellers to also utilize its Cloud on a private-label basis.

Newtek’s decade-long focus on independent business owners and resellers, and its subsequent depth of understanding have provided the insight necessary to construct a highly functional cloud environment that boasts premium security, dependability with 99.9% uptime, and lightning-fast scalable performance which allows independent business owners to control their IT costs and, at the same time, grow to their fullest potential…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Henry Kenyon.

In its ongoing efforts to reduce network and IT infrastructure costs, the US Navy wants to move most of its non-classified, publically available data to a commercially provided cloud, cut the number of Navy data centers from 150 to 25, and eliminate redundant costs including duplicative software applications.

The move reflects the Navy’s desire to cut $1.3 billion from its IT budget, and cloud-based data storage is a cost-effective option, Navy CIO Terry Halvorsen told executives at a government IT event in Washington D.C. on March 13. A substantial part of those savings would come from consolidating the Navy’s data centers and adopting cloud computing and virtualization for most of the service’s non-classified data, Halvorsen said, adding that the Navy would continue to keep mission-sensitive and critical information in its classified databases…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Web publisher Online Backup Mag is proud to announce its re-branding and re-launch as CloudWedge.com. Originally founded as a news site covering the online backup industry, it has expanded its content focus to include everything related to cloud computing technologies.

Senior editor Natalie Lerner commented, “We are excited about this opportunity to branch out and expand our former repertoire to cover the whole of the cloud. The cloud computing industry has already started to shape the way we interact with the world, and will only grow from here; we want to cover every inch of this as it unfolds.”…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Howard Solomon.

Cloud computing in some ways eases the strain on organizations to create new applications — why develop when almost everything you need is in the cloud? The thing is not everything is in the cloud, so app development continues — particularly mobile applications but also enabling on-premise apps to connect to cloud services.

So application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are as important as ever. Hewlett-Packard Co. has released updated versions of several of its ALM tools to automate and leverage the cloud for application testing. “With the acceleration of mobility as a key strategic initiative, and more customers moving to Agile methodology to deliver faster, we’ve seen a struggle occur between trying to release (applications) faster and trying to maintaining and improving the overall quality,” explained Kelly Emo, director of product marketing for HP Software’s application development and management group. The enhancements help dev and test teams achieve that balance by automating processes and accessing the power of the cloud for large scale testing.

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Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Believe it or not, it was eight years ago that Amazon Web Services’ S3 (Simple Storage Service) went into production. At the time, the promise was revolutionary: Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It’s designed to make Web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon S3 provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of websites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Where were you when AWS started production eight years ago? I was the CEO of a cloud computing company and had just left another cloud computing company where I was CTO. The cloud existed well before AWS, but somehow AWS was able to ignite the market, then dominate it…

Grazed from SFGate. Author: Editorial Staff.

Googling a person is about to take on a completely new meaning. The Mountain View search giant recently invited geneticists to upload information to the company’s cloud infrastructure. Google also provided scientists with instructions on how to import, process, store and, of course, search DNA data that could unlock clues to curing diseases.

Google’s foray into genomics could open big markets for a company that has already made substantial investments in health care. "This whole area, by the way of genome analysis, is really in general a hot area," said George Geis, an adjunct professor who specializes in technology mergers and acquisitions at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management…

Grazed from Business.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Telstra and Cisco have cooked up a grandstand cloud computing deal with the telco becoming the first to jump in and develop cloud infrastructure in conjunction with the global giant.  The partnership will see Cisco bring a local node of its global cloud platform into Telstra’s data centres and oversee management and operations

It substantially increases the scale of Telstra’s cloud offering as it leverages Cisco’s platform, rather than starting from scratch, to keep the likes of Amazon Web Services and Dimension Data at bay.  According to Telstra, the co-build infrastructure will provide cloud and network services in real-time, providing greater speed, security and performance…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Nicole Hemsoth.

At the height of the first wave of the commercial cloud computing boom, around 2008, two HPC industry figures, Brian Schott and Robert Graybill, put their heads together to see how clouds might support high performance computing workloads. Their efforts led them to develop a “clearinghouse” for cloud-based HPC platforms and applications, which in turn prompted them to bundle, price, and support variations on these packages for companies and HPC centers to use along software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS) lines.

Offering a service like this was novel at the time, especially for complex environments in government and manufacturing where licensing, regulation, data access and collaboration, and multiple other challenges exist. Further, while the Amazons of the world were busy building their own marketplaces, these were heavy on Web 2.0-driven applications but not robust or specific enough for many HPC workloads. Even with the eventual addition of HPC-oriented instance types and GPU accelerated nodes for rent on Amazon’s boxes, the ecosystem for high performance computing, particularly for government lab and agency users (and smaller to medium-sized manufacturers), remained underdeveloped…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Bare metal clouds are addressing performance and security issues with which IT professionals are often challenged. What exactly are these "metal" clouds? A recent article from ZDNet explains that bare metal cloud computing services are physical servers that follow the standard cloud model; they are built on demand and billed by the hour. This model can be an attractive option for growing firms looking for a flexible cloud solution that features a dedicated cloud server to address specific business needs.

Metal-Minded

Standard virtual machine (VM) cloud computing can eat up too much abstract memory and CPU space, which can affect performance. Another option is bare metal, which is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) technology combining a mix of custom-designed hardware that can potentially provide better performance and security than VM clouds…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Bill Kleyman.

IT consumerization is one of the biggest trends in recent years. Many users are now asking to have two or even three devices connected to the corporate network. Why? Flexibility, productivity, and because it’s easier. With more users bringing in their own devices, administrators have scrambled to support them. BYOD initiatives require solid planning, good policies, and educated users, but there’s no need to overcomplicate an environment, especially when there are such powerful tools around to help.

IT consumerization has led to a change in focus at the datacenter level, too. Cloud computing, BYOD, and a growing "data-on-demand" paradigm have created a user-centric model. The idea isn’t just to deliver an application or a desktop to users. Rather, it’s to allow users to carry around their personalized settings regardless of the device or platform. This is where virtualization technologies can really make the process easier:..