Category: News

Grazed from NexGov. Author: Aliya Sternstein.

Sometimes consolidation can be a good thing for the federal workforce. Centralizing networks in the cloud has allowed human eyes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to weed through 1.2 billion cyber transactions per day for signs of hacking. Typically, federal executives name cost and energy savings as the main perks of shutting down government data centers and shipping operations to the Web.

"We ultimately will save not only money in terms of our electricity bill — we’ll have better security and better safety," said Darren Smith, who manages the 5 megawatt NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center, home to a supercomputer called Zeus that models weather and climate changes…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Andrei Maguleanu.

Startups have a ton of things on their plate, and IT services should be working for them, instead of wasting time, money and other precious resources. If you want a safe, inexpensive and useful cloud storage solution for your startup, there are solutions out there. Here are the three major players in the cloud storage game and here’s what each has to offer:

Google Drive: If your company has Android phones, it’s a no-brainer – Google integrates so smoothly into the mobile OS that it just blows competition out of the water. They offer 15 GB free storage right off the bat, but you can store an unlimited number of photos in your drive if you compress them to 2048 px – which is definitely more than enough for most uses. If you want more storage space, Google has larger plans that come with a monthly rate:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Everything the cloud stands for is diametrically opposed to what enterprise computing stands for. But that’s okay — cloud promises to free up and expand enterprises in ways never imaginable with traditional systems. That’s one of the key takewaways of a talk given by Chris Kemp, founder of Nebula, co-founder of OpenStack and former CTO of NASA, speaking at the Compute Midwest conference.

Following the definition established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cloud computing “as an on-demand, elastic, metered and accessible resource computing service,” says Kemp. However, from an enterprise computing perspective, “this is exactly the opposite of the way you think about computing,” he continues…

Grazed from EEJournal. Author: Bruce Kleinman.

The 1980s witnessed a “golden age” of the computer. While the commercially successful x86 architecture continued to evolve at the microarchitecture level, completely new architectures and instruction sets innovated rapidly and set the stage for intense competition. RISC concepts were refined and expanded in the MIPS, Sparc, Power, PA-RISC and Alpha (to name a few) architectures with great success.

In short, there was a lot of Darwinian action taking place. Interesting in retrospect, the vast majority of these architectures focused on workstation CPUs: by and large, the architectures were optimized for compute horsepower with a focus on integer and floating-point performance. The race was on to build faster and faster compute engines…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

This afternoon I had an interesting chat with two executives of startup Cloud Technology Partners, a consulting and software development firm founded by veterans of Cambridge Technology Partners, which was a big deal in Web and Internet development during the DotCom boom.

CTP, as the new outfit usually refers to itself, is consulting with large enterprises, including General Electric (GE), about how to develop software to run in cloud computing environments, including new projects and also conversion of older workloads. That includes both privately-built and run cloud data centers, and also public cloud data centers…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google, like other companies offering online storage, still faces doubts about the security of cloud computing following last summer’s revelations about the reach of the National Security Agency. But it’s doing its best to reassure customers and to attract new ones. Following a declaration this month by Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Apps, that "the cloud can be as safe as — or in many cases, safer than — storing data on-premise," Google is making a financial case for the cloud.

The company lowered the cost of Google Drive storage substantially Thursday. "Today, thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we’re able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere," Google product management director Scott Johnston wrote in a blog post…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jessica Guynn.

Aaron Levie, the 29-year-old chief executive of Box Inc., walked the red carpet at the Oscars this year in a dark suit and tie, pressed white shirt and his trademark neon blue sneakers. "I asked about the sneaker dress code," said Levie, who like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs doesn’t like anything slowing him down, least of all a pair of dress shoes. "Apparently it was not a problem."

It was the movie industry’s biggest night and Levie didn’t waste any time talking up cloud computing to Hollywood stars including Harrison Ford. "He seemed to get it," Levie said of the 71-year-old actor. Levie, whose 8-year-old company is gearing up for the most hotly anticipated technology initial public stock offering to come out of Silicon Valley this year, has been spending a lot of time in Hollywood lately…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Gail Dutton.

When a business picks a cloud-based operating system for its data and communications, it’s pretty much stuck with that provider. That’s because cloud systems, which operate through the Internet, aren’t compatible with each other, so switching providers — or “cloud hopping” — is very difficult. “Our ability to move to another provider is very limited because there are no universal standards for cloud interoperability,” says Paiman Nodoushani, vice president of engineering and CTO for Continuum Managed Services, an application service provider.

“To change providers, data centers must develop a system to change codes and processes,” he adds. “Development can take between two and five months.” But cloud hopping may soon become much easier. The ability to move information among cloud providers is improving as developers start to think about common industry standards. The process is similar to what happened in the early days of the Internet…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (CHKP – Analyst Report) recently announced a partnership with VMware, Inc. (VMW – Snapshot Report) to provide cloud-based security services. With this partnership, Check Point will enrich its virtualization, automation and cloud-based portfolios.

Through this collaboration, Check Point will combine its security solution Virtual Edition (VE) with VMware’s vSphere or the new VMware NSX network virtualization platform that provides private cloud-based service to make the cloud-computing environment more secure, simple, flexible and efficient…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudSigma, a public cloud IaaS provider with advanced hybrid hosting solutions, today announced that it has partnered with software analytics company New Relic, Inc. to provide customers with new levels of real-time insight into the health of their applications and server infrastructure. Tightly integrated into CloudSigma’s existing public cloud infrastructure, New Relic’s software-as-a-service application performance management solution gives CloudSigma customers the confidence to deploy more mission-critical workloads into the cloud, knowing that their applications and services are running at peak performance.

With New Relic’s advanced feature set, CloudSigma customers can now get full visibility and insight into their end-user, application and server performance. Presented on a New Relic dashboard, which is accessible in CloudSigma’s Web console, all of the performance data is presented in an easy-to-understand way that makes it actionable, so customers can not only identify the root cause of any performance degradation, but also how to remedy it. For instance, customers can easily monitor server resource loads and even dive into code-level application performance metrics to pinpoint the exact bottleneck in the stack…