Category: News

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Taylor Soper.

All the way back in October 2011, Sundar Kannan stood in a basement of the Techstars Seattle headquarters and spent one minute pitching an idea for his new company, Computenext. The startup didn’t have much to show back then, but fast forward to today and the progress is impressive. With a team of 12 based in Bellevue and more than 50 in India, Computenext just raised $4 million of a $10 million round with plans to grow quickly and rapidly in 2014.

Kannan, who formerly worked on the Windows Azure team at Microsoft, describes the company as an “Expedia for cloud computing.” At its core, Computenext is an online brokerage firm that hosts a marketplace for businesses who are both building and seeking an array of cloud services. Computenext, which also offers its own cloud solutions for specific verticals, makes money by taking a small cut from every transaction…

Grazed from Futurity.org. Author: Kevin Stacey-Brown.

To keep data safe in the cloud, a group of computer scientists suggests doing the Melbourne Shuffle—not the dance move, but the new computer algorithm. The computing version of the Melbourne Shuffle aims to hide patterns that may emerge as users access data on cloud servers. Patterns of access could provide important information about a dataset—information that users don’t necessarily want others to know—even if the data files themselves are encrypted.

“Encrypting data is an important security measure. However, privacy leaks can occur even when accessing encrypted data,” says Olga Ohrimenko, lead author of a new paper describing the algorithm. “The objective of our work is to provide a higher level of privacy guarantees, beyond what encryption alone can achieve."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: David Bonderud.

Cloud-based data centers suffer from an efficiency problem. Despite massive resource pools, many offer utilization rates that are no higher than 20 percent, which in turn drives up cloud costs for midsize businesses and increases server sprawl. Now, a team of researchers from Stanford University may have found a way to improve data center efficacy while still meeting strict performance goals.

No More Reservations

According to a recent Stanford News article, Associate Professor Christos Kozyrakis and doctoral student Christina Delimitrou have developed a cluster management system called Quasar that can theoretically triple server efficiency without affecting service reliability. How? It starts with a move away from the "reservation model." Used by many cloud providers, this model starts with a question to IT professionals: How much resource capacity does a specific application need? IT administrators understandably overestimate in their efforts to mitigate potential issues, but a new problem is emerging — data centers bursting with resources that no one is using…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Deborah Gage.

Secure storage and sharing of data have become sensitive topics since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked details of U.S. government snooping. But ownCloud Inc. co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Frank Karlitschek saw the danger before that.

Convinced in 2010 that new cloud computing services were a threat to security and privacy, he wrote what ultimately became ownCloud’s code, putting it into open source and gathering a community of developers around it. In 2011, ownCloud the company was formed, and it has now raised $6.3 million in Series A funding co-led by Devonshire Investors and current investor General Catalyst Partners, taking total funding to $10.1 million. Valuation is not disclosed…

Grazed from LightReading. Author: Editorial Staff.

Following his announcement of the “Five Fundamentals” to be prioritized for the Cloud, James Walker, President, CloudEthernet Forum (CEF), has named the first three working group Co-Chair appointments. Jay Wampold, VP Marketing, CHEF, has been selected for the Automation committee; Dr. Mehmet Toy, Distinguished Engineer at Comcast involved in Computer Networking Architectures and Standards, for the Programmability committee; and Dr Hongwen Zhang, Wedge Networks, for the Security committee.

“We are now selecting industry leaders with specific expertise, connections and experience relevant to each of our Fundamentals,” Walker explained. He was referring to the key issues that had been identified by the CEF under the acronym VASPA – Virtualization, Automation, Security, Programmability, and Analytics – with two Co-Chairs being appointed under each heading…

Grazed from Tech Page One. Author: Ann Braley Smith.

Over the past five years, legacy modernization has been a hot topic in federal government IT discussions. Modernization makes application environments more efficient and responsive, and puts them in a stronger position to address new requirements and technology. And federal agencies are especially poised to reap benefits and cost savings, which is why it was included in the 2010 25-point plan for IT reform (PDF).

Truth in numbers

The need for agencies to transform old, cumbersome systems, eliminate data silos, reduce redundancy and usher in new technology is an urgent one. The numbers are compelling. In June 2013, MeriTalk and VMware surveyed 152 federal IT leaders to determine what steps agencies are taking in that direction and what kind of benefits they have seen. Agencies are spending 79 percent of their IT budget, or an average of $62 billion annually, just to maintain legacy IT systems…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

When this winter’s ice storms, artic deep freezes, and nasty nor’easters hit, it provided a good time to hunker down and get some inside projects done. Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler has been working on a big one: consolidating 13 datacenters down to four, relying extensively on public cloud providers, and moving to a NoSQL-powered big-data platform.

When we last spoke to Koehler his company was preparing to move its Weather Underground business onto the new big-data platform, which runs the Riak database on Amazon public cloud computing resources, with backup resources on the Google Compute Cloud. Next up, plans called for the flagship Weather Channel to move to that same platform within a matter of weeks. Koehler’s team has learned some key lessons along the way, particularly about the challenge of predicting costs when using external cloud services…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Core Informatics, a leading provider of scientific informatics is seeing strong demand for the Platform for Science, the market’s only Scientific Platform-as-a-Service (sPaaS). Released in November 2013, the Platform for Science is the premiere cloud-based solution providing a marketplace of applications for customers engaged in all phases of scientific product innovation and development.

Platform for Science provides an ecosystem for scientific collaboration and data management in support of a single laboratory or a virtualized global network of researchers. The foundation of the marketplace is an integrated suite of Core applications (LIMS, ELN, SDMS) already used by thousands of researchers. Designed for rapid creation of scientific applications, Platform for Science is a generation beyond traditional applications hosted in the cloud. The increasing library of apps already includes, Chem ELN, Bio ELN, Compound Registration, Biological Registration, and a collection of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflows that provide out-of-the-box support for Illumina and Ion Torrent platforms…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Danny Palmer.

Once approached with caution, cloud computing is being embraced by more organisations, both in the public and private sectors. Many organisations looking to adopt cloud for the first time are tempted to put all their eggs in one basket with one provider. However, according to recent research by Adapt, many firms feel they can’t get all they want from a single vendor, leading some to adopt solutions from multiple providers, as Kevin Linsell, head of service development at Adapt, explained.

"Those that have only just embraced the cloud and are still in their first iteration are learning lessons. They’re realising they want more diversity rather than just one solution," he told Computing. It’s a view shared by David Goodman, CIO at global humanitarian NGO the International Rescue Committee (IRC). He said the specialist needs of his organisation, which provides relief in some of harshest environments on the planet, meant an all-inclusive cloud solution from a single provider wasn’t suitable…