Category: News

Grazed from JourneyToTheCloud. Author: Ben Stephenson.

It’s no secret that the Winter Olympics in Sochi has had its fair share of problems. From infrastructure issues, to handling incidents, to security, to amenities for athletes, it seems like anything that could go wrong has gone wrong. So, what can IT learn from what has unfolded at Sochi?

Have your infrastructure in place beforehand

There are plenty of examples from Sochi about the proper infrastructure not being in place before the games started. There was unfinished construction around the city that consisted of exposed wires, uncovered manholes and buildings that weren’t finished. Many of the hotels were also unfinished. Some didn’t have working elevators, completed lobbies, or even running water (not to mention toilets that don’t flush). There’s a great picture circulating the web of an employee spray painting the grass green outside of an Olympic venue. Even the rings at the opening ceremonies malfunctioned…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Rob Sax, John Reeher.

In 2012, a Government Accountability Office report outlined seven major challenges to adopting the Office of Management and Budget’s cloud-first policy for IT deployments. Of these, ensuring data portability and interoperability within the cloud is the most daunting due to the large number of competing cloud technologies for data storage and retrieval.

Despite the many options available, a lack of mature and open computing standards for data interoperability has hindered cloud adoption. Each technology carries the risk of cloud provider lock-in that creates impediments to easily moving data into, around and out of the cloud…

Grazed from Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Author: Ari Levy.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. co-founder Graham Weston, who took over as chief executive officer this week, is meeting with shareholders face-to-face after the company’s stock plunged on news of his predecessor’s retirement. Weston came to San Francisco, where investors gathered for Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s technology and Internet conference. The returning CEO said he’s sitting down with about a dozen shareholders to reassure them about the company and that he’s “energized.” Taylor Rhodes, Rackspace’s recently appointed president, spoke at the conference.

Rackspace shares tumbled 19 percent on Feb. 11, the day after Lanham Napier, the company’s CEO for eight years, said he’s retiring immediately. Weston, who founded San Antonio-based Rackspace in 1998 and has remained chairman, said that while the news surprised investors, he wanted to avoid following the path of Microsoft Corp., which announced Steve Ballmer’s departure as CEO without having a successor in place…

Grazed from WireService.ca. Author: PR Announcement.

"Files on the Cloud?", the art of storing and sharing files on the internet and accessible anywhere using any device such as laptops, mobile devices, tablets etc… is a trending phenomenon with incredible benefits. But with the latest reports of corporate espionage in the news, storing your files on the cloud is also an incredible risk.

If you are not familiar with the internet cloud or cloud file sharing, it is basically a means for people to store their files on the internet, and have them synchronized on all of your devices. For example, if you have several mobile products, you could use the cloud to store your pictures and have them accessible on all of your devices automatically. There’s no need to copy, paste, move etc… That means of transferring files is thing of the past. With the cloud, it just does it for you without even looking…

Grazed from eCommerceTimes. Author: Jeffrey M. Kaplan.

Computer and software companies have been battling for the hearts and minds of students for decades, and now school administrators are becoming the target of smart Software as a Service and cloud computing service providers. The most notorious examples of using classroom marketing tactics to gain a long-term strategic advantage are Apple and Google.

Apple made a concerted effort to win over a new generation of corporate end-users long before they ever entered the workplace by enticing them with brightly colored, easy-to-use eMacs. Google has been giving away Google Apps to public schools and college students for years to get them hooked on its simple collaboration tools…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Marcus Austin.

The scientists at IBM have invented a new technology to speed up internet data transfer rates to four times the current rates with speeds approaching 400 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) and all done at extremely low power. As Big Data and Internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates. For example, in 1992, 100 Gigabyte of data was transferred per day, whereas today, traffic has grown to two Exabytes per day, a 20 million fold increase.

To support the increase in traffic, scientists at IBM Research and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have been developing ultra-fast and energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technology to enable complex digital equalization across long-distance fibre channels. The speed boost is based on a device that can be used to improve transferring Big Data between clouds and data centres four times faster than current technology. At this speed 160 Gigabytes, the equivalent of a two-hour, 4K ultra-high definition movie or 40,000 songs, could be downloaded in only a few seconds…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Microsoft has quietly released details on license-included Oracle VMs for Windows Azure, months after the companies announced a strategic partnership that brings Oracle’s enterprise software to Microsoft’s cloud. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s former cloud chief and now the software giant’s new CEO, announced the team-up, which brought the big competitors together, last summer.

"As part of this partnership, Oracle will certify and support Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and Windows Azure," he said in a June 24 statement. Cloud computing’s impact on the IT market space can turn rivals into allies. The enterprise cloud era "requires companies to rethink what they build, to rethink how they operate and to rethink whom they partner with," said Nadella…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Too often these days, organizations plow ahead with cloud computing projects, without considering how it fits into the rest of the enterprise. An enterprise architecture approach will help align cloud plans with the short-term and long-term needs of the organization — just as it has helped with on-premises systems. In his latest book, titled Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models, Mike Kavis, a seasoned chief technology officer and IT architect, shows how cloud proponents can map out their cloud plans. Mike identifies the five key questions that are essential to cloud architectural planning:

1) Identify the problem statement (why): "The single most important question to answer," Kavis observes. While cloud is a no-brainer for startups, more established enterprises need to evaluate how cloud will benefit the business. Ultimately, a cloud-based solution may focus on one specific business problem where existing systems aren’t delivering satisfactory results. An enterprise may end up with numerous cloud models to address varying requirements…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Open source virtualization for the cloud is at the center of the Linux Foundation’s latest move. This week, the nonprofit group announced the addition of seven new organizations that will become partners in the recently launched Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) initiative, which promotes virtualization solutions based on the open source KVM hypervisor.

The organizations, which represent the latest additions to the Linux Foundation consortium, are Autonomic Resources, Bloombase, BlueCat Networks, op5, Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, Scale Computing and 6WIND. With legal, financial and advocacy support from the Linux Foundation, these organizations will collaborate to support the OVA, whose goal is to promote virtualization solutions for the cloud that are based on KVM (short for "kernel virtual machine") as "an alternative to expensive, proprietary virtualization solutions."…

Grazed from LinuxInsider. Author: Jack M. Germain.

Linux on the desktop may have missed its adoption time line, but Linux in the cloud is a win-win proposition for the post-PC movement. Linux shows signs that it is the go-to cloud platform. Microsoft’s Azure may be the only real threat to Linux cloud dominance — all other major cloud software platforms are based on Linux and open source software.

Some enterprise Linux distros are showing up as cloud-based offerings. It is becoming very common to find options to run Ubuntu, CentOS, Suse Linux Enterprise Server and openSuse offered on cloud platforms. Even better for Linux fans is that Microsoft includes openSuse as an option to run on its own Azure platform…