Category: News

Grazed from Citrix. Author: Rachel Berry.

A few weeks my colleague Bob, blogged (here) about how GPU-passthrough on XenServer under OpenStack had been achieved by the xlcloud project. This is a delightful demonstration of Citrix’s open technology stance. Although Citrix has heavily invested in CloudStack, over the last few years we have remained active in OpenStack development. You can find out more about building products using XenServer as the hypervisor using both OpenStack and CloudStack, here.

XLcloud – a fascinating project

XLcloud is an open sourced project, with sound financial backing ($Millions) and technological commitment from some heavyweight companies including Bull SAS. The XLcloud project strives to establish the demonstration of a High Performance Cloud Computing (HPCC) platform based on OpenStack, that is designed to run a representative set of compute intensive workloads, including more specifically interactive games, interactive simulations and 3D graphics. XLcloud is a three-year long collaborative project funded by the French FSN (Fonds national pour la Société Numérique) programme…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As Computerworld reported, a panel at the RSA Security Conference last week agreed that, if cloud providers are vetted properly, most enterprise workloads and data are safe with those providers. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that cloud computing is inherently less secure and, thus, not a good fit when security and privacy are priorities. In fact, organizations that have already made the leap to the cloud appear mostly satisfied with cloud security, the panelists agreed.

A funny thing about misconceptions: They are typically more accepted than the facts. People cry out against "vulnerable clouds," and no one challenges their so-called facts, or lack thereof. When I’ve identified such falsehoods in calls or meetings, I felt as if I were pushing back on some kind of religion, where faith was both deaf and blind. Anything I would say to contradict the "fact" of the cloud’s inherent vulnerability simply had to be wrong…

Grazed from ScienceWorld. Author: Editorial Starff.

Last week’s event Cloudscape VI in Brussels, Belgium, which had the tagline ‘cloud for a smart economy and smart society’, featured much discussion of the policy aspects of cloud computing, as well as the potential benefits of cloud computing for both business and scientific research. “Cloud is still very emergent,” says Ken Ducatel, head of software and services, cloud computing at the European Commission. “There are a lot of business models and they’re very complex: there’s no one-size fits all solution.”

The event also featured a panel discussion on the subject of cloud adoption and how to measure success. In this session, Ducatel cited trust as the greatest barrier to adoption, whereas Abdella Battou from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology highlighted standards, particularly in relation to security, as the greatest barrier…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

"Cloud Computing" – it’s been a hot topic for the past few years. Despite the amount of press it receives, many people still don’t understand the "cloud" fully. There is a substantial amount of confusion, overlap, and even misinformation about the "cloud." First, is the common misconception that there is a single "cloud." Even worse is the assumption that the "cloud" is safe. It may be, but do your homework. While I’m not a huge fan of clichés, especially those that end in a preposition – "you get what you pay for" really applies here.

While the typical intended audience of my blog is highly technical, I decided to write this article for IT decision makers where their primary role may not be IT. Given my professional experience speaking to clients, prospects, sales staff – as well as my service delivery, technical architecture and educational background it is intended to be well rounded for the person who is familiar with business concepts and IT service management. As someone who speaks to customers and sales people regularly, one of the questions I get asked most often is:…

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Aaron Pressman.

As the era of cloud computing begins, Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal, wants to see a more open outcome than the information technology industry is used to. In fact, he’s betting on it. Pivotal, a spinoff from EMC (EMC) and VMWare (VMW), where Maritz served as CEO for four years, is building an open cloud computing platform that can run on top of many kinds of underlying cloud servers.

“We’re coming to the end of a 30- or 40-year era in the IT industry,” Martiz said on Wednesday, speaking at the Oasis Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California. “This really is a very profound shift that’s happening.” That may not be what the biggest cloud providers, Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and particularly Amazon (AMZN), are seeking. They’re battling for dominance comparable to Windows on the PC or IBM (IBM) in mainframes, Maritz says…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Derek Schoettle.

These are heady times for both cloud service providers and their customers. Never before has it been so easy to spin up large-scale applications and databases, fueling remarkably agile manuevers by companies of almost any size. In this week’s New Tech Forum, Derek Schoettle, CEO of Cloudant — bought by IBM just two weeks ago — walks us through the rapidly evolving world of cloud data management and where the cloud transition will be taking IT over the next few years. –Paul Venezia

Big bets in cloud data management

I’m not going to bore you with terms like "big data" and the capabilities of various strains of NoSQL databases. What I’d rather discuss is something that is changing drastically: how we store and access our data. As the cloud evolves beyond cheap infrastructure, the real innovation in 2014 will come from how we manipulate data stored on that infrastructure…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

Nearly 10 years ago Excite and Jotspot founder Joe Kraus exulted: "There’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur because it’s never been cheaper to be one." Powerful open-source software running on cheap, commodity hardware meant that entrepreneurs could get to scale and/or profitability much faster without raising capital. Everything Kraus argued has proved to be true. It is also largely irrelevant.

As it turns out, while it’s cheap to get tens of millions of users with a free web or mobile service, building a large, data-driven business costs a lot of money, and that money is spent on the very thing that cloud computing was meant to obviate: data centers. For every 10 Instagrams that mushroom into prominence on the back of Amazon Web Services (AWS) or another public cloud provider, there is one Google or Facebook that insists upon building its own data centers to control its own destiny…

Grazed from DealBook. Author: William Alden.

Ben Uretsky, the chief executive of a cloud computing start-up called DigitalOcean, uttered what may be the ultimate Silicon Valley “humblebrag” when he explained why his company had to raise millions from venture capitalists just months after an earlier financing round. “The challenge was the rate of growth kept increasing,” Mr. Uretsky said in an interview.

That prodigious growth was enough to entice Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, to lead a $37.2 million financing round in DigitalOcean, according to an announcement on Thursday. The start-up previously announced a $3.2 million round in August…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing has become a massive engine helping the corporate and end-user world interconnect at new, massive scales. There is a very real reason that data center business continues to grow around the surge of cloud traffic. There are two very interesting statistic from the latest Cisco Global Cloud Index report:

• Annual global data center IP traffic will reach 7.7 zettabytes by the end of 2017. By 2017, global data center IP traffic will reach 644 exabytes per month (up from 214 exabytes per month in 2012).
• Global data center IP traffic will nearly triple over the next 5 years. Overall, data center IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25 percent from 2012 to 2017…