Category: News

Grazed from InfoStor. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Cloud computing’s runaway popularity is leaving providers in a bind. While it’s generally a good problem to have, accelerating growth — 200,000-plus customers and counting in Rackspace’s case — can lead to complexity in the data center, not to mention outsized power bills. Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based provider of cloud computing services, turned to Brocade and its Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN interconnection platform to help implement an upgrade storage architecture that can grow with the company while promoting energy efficiency.

Brocade’s tech is also helping the company squeeze a little more precious rack space out of its data centers. Sean Wedige, CTO of Rackspace Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, said in a statement that his company worked with Brocade and EMC to "to design a SAN fabric that was easy to grow and manage, while providing the flexibility to allow our data center technicians to connect any device to any switch in the fabric."…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

NaviSite, Inc., a Time Warner Cable Company, has announced it has received two leading industry awards from CRN: the Data Center 100 list, which recognizes the top 100 data centers, and the Top 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list, which recognizes the top 100 most innovative and creative cloud vendors. These awards cement NaviSite’s position as a leader in delivering secure cloud-based storage technology and solutions, as well as in developing innovative and creative solutions to help customers and partners maximize the flexibility, scalability and cost savings possible through cloud technology.

“We are honored to be recognized by CRN for the innovation and depth of offerings we have delivered in the Cloud arena,” said Craig Sandman, senior director of NaviSite’s channel program. “We have a demonstrated track record of enabling our channel partners to position themselves strategically with their end-customers, unlocking efficiency and innovation by leveraging our comprehensive and personalized portfolio of cloud-based solutions.”…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Lance Boley.

Cloud computing is seeing phenomenal growth. The benefits are enough to convince most businesses to make the switch. However, cloud computing is still in its infancy, and cloud contracts still have bugs that need to be addressed. This is particularly the case with solutions such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Businesses utilizing SaaS services are discovering loopholes concerning risk management, data confidentiality, data integrity and recovery. The results should serve as a friendly reminder to any business interested in the cloud: read your Service Level Agreement (SLA) thoroughly.

Alexa Bona, VP at Gartner, mentioned in a statement that “We continue to see frustration among cloud services users over the form and degree of transparency they are able to obtain from prospective and current service providers.” As with all other legal contracts, not knowing is not an excuse. Signing your name on the dotted line makes any document legally binding, and it is assumed that you have done so after reading it. Cloud computing contracts need to be transparent to alleviate users’ concerns. According to research by Gartner, they are often found to be lacking – especially when it comes to data confidentiality, integrity and recovery…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CollabNet (www.collab.net), a leading provider of cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions for agile software delivery at scale, today announced that its CloudForge development platform is currently available as an add-on service in Pivotal’s on-demand PaaS service, powered by Cloud Foundry and available on-line at http://run.pivotal.io.

CloudForge continues to see strong adoption by organizations that want the benefits of cloud computing with the compliance and traceability CollabNet delivers to enterprises increasingly using open-source tools and cloud-based platforms. CloudForge availability in the Pivotal Web Services add-on marketplace provides developers with an integrated development and PaaS offering. It will accelerate development and deployment of enterprise applications to any Cloud Foundry-based platform, whether it is hosted in a private or public cloud…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Cloudant, Inc ., a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to easily and quickly create next generation mobile and web apps. Financial terms were not disclosed. Clients across a variety of industries, including gaming, financial services, mobile device manufacturers, online learning, retail and healthcare are already using Cloudant technology. For instance, video game developer Hothead Games relies on Cloudant to scale application data for its popular series of Big Win Sports mobile games on iPhone®, iPad® and Android™ phones and tablets. With Cloudant running on IBM SoftLayer, Hothead Games can efficiently handle large influxes of users, even when traffic spikes a hundred-fold.

Cloudant will extend IBM’s leadership in Big Data and Analytics , Cloud Computing and Mobile , further helping clients take advantage of these key areas of growth for their businesses. It joins IBM’s newly formed Information and Analytics Group, a business unit within the IBM Software & Systems Group led by Senior Vice President Bob Picciano…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

You’re a large organization, using cloud computing to your advantage. You’ve enjoyed your cloud experience and see how this model is helping you evolve. Still, you wish you could make your cloud infrastructure run a little bit better. You’d love to experience better performance and utilize your cloud resources a bit more efficiently. But how can you upgrade your cloud experience without recreating your entire architecture?

Many shops have now migrated to some type of cloud model for many different reasons. There are lots of use cases emerging which make cloud a powerful platform to utilize. Still, like everything in technology, solutions right out of the box have the potential to be optimized. So let’s take a look at five technologies which have helped organizations of all sizes utilize their cloud infrastructure more intelligently…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware is trying to convert its large presence as the virtualization supplier for federal agencies and become a supplier of public cloud services to the US government. The company on Tuesday is launching vCloud Government Service. Well, almost. Stopping just short of that, it’s announced a bid to secure FedRAMP Authority to operate a hybrid cloud service for the government.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Program (FedRAMP) is a set of security and operations requirements drawn up by National Institute of Standards and Technology that must be verified as being in place at a service provider by a third-party audit. Getting FedRAMP approval "requires a lot of time and can hinder innovation and drive up costs," wrote Sean Applegate, director of federal technology strategy at Riverbed Technology, in a recent posting on InformationWeek.com…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Pivotal spun out the Cloud Foundry Foundation last week, marking another instance where a commercial effort turns into an open source play. It’ll be interesting see how this move works, given that both OpenStack and Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS platforms are aimed at the same users. There are three hurdles for the CFF to get past:

• The PaaS market is relatively small compared to the IaaS and SaaS spaces. Having three or more open source standards may be too many for the market to support.
• IT organizations and developers are already confused about what PaaS brings to the cloud computing table. Having three open source versions won’t help clarify matters.
• Inevitably, somebody will end up on the right side of the wrong standard, adding risk for those adopting PaaS…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: John Grady.

Cloud computing has experienced exponential growth over the last few years. As of December 2013, almost 60 percent of current small-to-medium businesses (SMB) use cloud services, and 72 percent of these businesses virtualize substantial portions of their servers. The growth is only expected to increase over the next few years. Here are just a few of the major current trends in the industry today.

1. Hybrid clouds. There has been an ongoing debate between the merits of public and private cloud models for quite some time now. Hybrid clouds feature an infrastructure that combines private cloud security with cost-effective, powerful and scalable public cloud attributes. IT executives get more choices for personalized solutions while big data advocates and security experts are still satisfied. As hybrid models become mainstream, more companies are likely to adopt this cloud deployment model and drop the old debate…

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies. Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening. The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for. I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014. Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the following analysis was completed…