Category: News

Grazed from OpenStack. Author: Hui Cheng.

With the rapid growth of Sina Weibo, which now has over 350 million registered users around the world, and its affiliated services such as Weibo open API and the WeiGame platform which are now the most popular social and online gaming platform in China, we needed a robust and flexible infrastructure to host those applications and platforms.

In the early 2011, we initiated Sina Web Services (SWS), the first public IaaS cloud based on OpenStack in China. Thanks to the extensible architecture of OpenStack and the help of the OpenStack community, we were able to build up our IaaS platform and push it into production in a very short time…

Grazed from RapidScale. Author: PR Announcement.

RapidScale (http://www.rapidscale.net), a leader in Cloud Computing solutions, has announced that CloudOffice, its Desktop Virtualization platform for small to medium businesses, is now available on the Samsung Solutions Exchange™. The Samsung Solutions Exchange addresses the needs of line of business owners by creating holistic mobile solutions on a robust portfolio of enterprise-grade Samsung Mobile devices.

CloudOffice is a ground-breaking all-in-one SMB cloud solution that brings together core business applications, business vertical applications, and key business drivers such as Microsoft Office Professional, Microsoft Lync, unlimited storage, 24x7x365 “We Care” support, the Adobe Suite, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SharePoint, and Citrix ShareFile. Furthermore, CloudOffice provides an unmatched user experience, is budget-friendly, and can be used on any Samsung smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. RapidScale has established one of the most expansive and comprehensive cloud solution sets in the market today and will be featured as a premier Desktop as a Service (http://www.desktopasaservice.us) provider for Samsung…

Grazed from Clustrix. Author: PR Announcement.

Clustrix, provider of the leading scale-out SQL database engineered for the cloud, today announced a partnership with Joyent Inc., the high-performance cloud infrastructure and big data analytics company. As a result of the partnership, ClustrixDB, the industry’s first and only scale-out database for real-time analytics on live operational data, will be available to Joyent customers who need scale-out SQL and real-time analytics.

New cloud-scale applications have unpredictable workloads with rapidly growing and varied data. Poor application performance can result in the loss of customers, reduced employee productivity and a decrease in revenue. Joyent’s public cloud ensures companies can create and deploy dynamic applications that scale effortlessly for millions of users. With the introduction of ClustrixDB, Joyent’s high-performance computing platform will further increase and maintain application performance in cloud computing environments…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Keith Dawson.

Companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook don’t just innovate with products: Just look at their data centers. The designs and operations playbooks of these new centers aim to lower costs, increase reliability and maintainability, and improve agility, while reducing energy use and carbon footprint.

As big data and cloud computing push the limits of traditional data centers, new trends in data center innovation have followed. Google started the ball rolling when it scaled up its search operations starting in the late 1990s. By 2001, Google, still three years away from its IPO, was building its own servers from piece-parts, seeking not only economy but also reliability and ease of maintenance. Prior to 2003, Google was investigating putting large numbers of servers in a shipping container. That year it applied for a patent on the idea of the modular, drop-in-place data center…

Grazec from InformationAge. Author: Ben Rossi.

The beauty of the cloud is that it seeks to enable a business to become more agile, efficient and competitive, yet compliance seeks to restrain it. And this is what is preventing some businesses from making the most of the cloud. Recent research from NTT Com Security revealed businesses across the globe are wary of the using the cloud. A worrying 86% admitted that issues around data protection, legislation and regulation are responsible for cloud computing being adopted more slowly than they would like.

You only have to look at the publicity surrounding the NSA and PRISM revelations and compliance, data sovereignty laws and regulation requirements from authorities like the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). With these increasingly complicated data laws, it’s becoming something of a minefield for businesses looking to embrace, or experiment with, the cloud…

Grazed from inCloud360.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Have you been considering a move to the cloud, but are not sure where to begin? If you haven’t read, cloud computing is both the present and the future of technological innovation for businesses of all sizes. Certain benefits of cloud computing include the following:

• The opportunity to easily and quickly acquire enterprise class IT services
• Minimized up-front and on-going operational investments
• Flexibility and agility allowing companies to better meet current and changing business needs

Cloud computing offers greater choices and benefits, but can be difficult to understand for the layperson. Therefore, greater communication is needed in order to properly implement and capitalize on cloud benefits, as well as ensure the user understands what he or she is actually buying…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is expanding at an impressive rate among small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Certain attributes of the technology, which include communication and collaboration as well as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), have proved to be the most appealing for SMBs, according to the latest Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ report.

Communication and Collaboration

According to the report’s findings, which were featured in ChannelPro Network, the small and midsize cloud market is predicted to grow at a 26 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR), reaching $125 billion by 2016. The report included the opinions of midsize companies with 100 to 999 employees. The findings ranked communication and collaboration, comprising business-class email and hosted private breach exchange (PBX) services, as the top growth drivers…

Grazed from GCN. Author: John Moore.

Security best practices traditionally call for encrypting data in transit, as it moves from one storage locale to another, and data at rest, when it resides in an organization’s storage systems. The advent of cloud computing, however, has created the need for yet another stage of security: data “in-use,” as when a third-party cloud provider maintains it.

The Cloud Security Alliance recommends securing data when it exists in this in-use state. In its 2012 implementation guidance, CSA recommended “controls should be applied throughout the entire lifecycle (in transit, at rest and in use) to allow the customer to maintain control over the data while the [cloud service provider] hosts and processes it.” Securing data in use, however, presents encryption challenges. For one thing, data typically needs to be decrypted in order for users or work with it…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Brad Vaughan.

It is still very difficult for a traditional enterprise to find a path from current infrastructure deployment models to a pure cloud architecture. I have discussed many times before that a very tangible "Trigger Event" needs to be identified that will get the gears in motion. The recipe for this change, often needs a second ingredient which is readily accessible technology that allows IT to create solutions with minimal upfront investment (i.e ShadowIT).

This "Trigger Event" cannot be described in abstract terms like "ROI" or "TCO" and definiely not business strategy terms like "agility" or "time-2-market". These are all good labels to frame the beginning of the discussion at executive levels, but where the rubber meets the road is real applications providing real intelligence or new services. The problem is most enterprises have a large legacy environment of applications…