Category: News

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Keris Alison Lahiff.

Cloud computing specialist Rackspace Hosting is tumbling in the extended session after posting fourth-quarter results and announcing the departure of CEO Lanham Napier. In post-market trading, shares have taken off 8.8% to $36.82, after gaining 2.2% over Monday.

In the three months to December, the San Antonio-based company earned 14 cents a share on revenue 16% higher year-over-year to $408 million. Earnings came in as analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected, while sales beat by nearly $4 million. Rackspace’s total server count increased to 103,886, up 2% on a sequential basis…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Editorial Staff.

As head of research at Gartner Inc., Senior Vice President Peter Sondergaard sees the big picture: where global technology is heading, and how trends such as cloud computing and business analytics are revolutionizing business. Mr. Sondergaard discussed how companies are responding to these trends in a conversation with Michael Hickins, editor of The Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal. Edited excerpts of their discussion follow.

Applications Shift

MR. HICKINS: In a Gartner survey late last year, one priority that global CIOs ranked very high for their companies was enterprise resource planning [the suite of systems used to store and use the data necessary to run a business]. But here at the conference, CIOs ranked ERP much lower. Why is that?…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Antoine Gara.

Microsoft’s founder and "technology advisor" Bill Gates said on in a Reddit conversation that he believes the company’s cloud computing offerings have "a LOT of potential" as Satya Nadella, a longtime executive, takes the reins of the company from outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer.

Gates said in a Reddit thread he believes Microsoft’s office connected to the cloud is off to a good start, adding Cloud Storage needs to be "a lot richer." Those comments, taken from an about hour-long Reddit conversation, indicate that the Microsoft founder may focus his efforts on cloud computing as he takes an more active role with the company, devoting a third of his time to product work…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Soon after I became a cloud computing reporter for Network World I signed up for a bunch of different cloud services including Box, DropBox, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services. One other service I used, and liked quite a bit, was SugarSync. The platform is very similar to Box and DropBox, offering a folder on your desktop that you simply drop files into that are then stored in the cloud and can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.

SugarSync has an intuitive mobile app and I set it up to automatically copy some folders form the hard drive of my computer so that I could easily grab a document on my phone if I ever needed to. I used it a couple times and was glad I had it. SugarSync gave me 5 GB of free storage when I signed up in September 2012 and there was no word of a pay service would be required down the line…

Grazed from TechWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

In its continuing drive to capitalize on opportunities presented by the rush of businesses to "cloud computing," Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is forming a formal partnership with Hortonworks, one of the leading providers of essential cloud software known as Hadoop. SAS already is a partner with Hortonworks as the Cary-based software firm aggressively pursues its own Hadoop technology for use with "big data" analysis.

A beta software version of a joint solution – the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) combined with Red Hat Storage – is already available. The deal comes as no surprise. Hortonworks told WRALTechWire in October that undisclosed work with the world’s top Linux software developer was already underway…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday. Author: Arnal Dayaratna, PhD.

Cloudera recently announced the general availability of Apache Spark for Cloudera Enterprise. First developed at UC Berkeley, Apache Spark is a parallel data processing framework that supplements Apache Hadoop by facilitating the development of big data applications related to machine learning, interactive analytics and real-time analytics.

Spark allows users to write parallel sets of code in Java, Scala and Python that operate on Hadoop clusters with a speed up to 100 times faster than MapReduce. Moreover, applications developed in Spark tend to require 2 to 10 ten times less code than a corresponding MapReduce application…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Public cloud, private cloud: Increasingly, these terms are losing their meaning, as enterprise cloud-computing solutions blend the best features of both approaches into one. That strategy is evident in the latest product from EnterpriseDB, an open source database provider that has now expanded its Postgres Plus Cloud Database to include support for Amazon (AMZN) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). EnterpriseDB is pitching the new functionality as a solution that offers enterprises several advantages over competing cloud databases:

• Greater scalability, since "Postgres Plus Cloud Database is based on an architecture purpose-built for the cloud so that it scales automatically in response to fluctuations in demand for processing power, server capacity or network capacity," according to the company.
• A dedicated management console for adminstering the database.
• Support for the product from staff who specialize in Postgres.
• More granular control, since the solution provides users root access to their data…

Grazed from GlobalNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond, Inc., the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced its TotalCloud Foundation (TCF) cloud computing service platform won the Best in Show (Best Development Tool) Award at ITExpo Miami, held January 28-31, 2014, at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. Top products and solutions on display at the show were recognized for their raw innovation and creativity in categories ranging from service provider and cloud solutions to enterprise and open source platforms.

Launched in December 2013, Cbeyond’s TotalCloud Foundation (TCF) is a customizable, robust and secure service platform that allows businesses and managed service providers (MSPs) greater flexibility and control of cloud computing through a fully managed or full self-service model…

Grazed from TheInformationDaily. Author: Phil Turner.

The rise of cloud computing and the increasing demand to access applications anytime, anywhere has transformed the IT landscape and for many decision makers, it’s a struggle to simply stay in control. At the heart of any IT strategy is the need to uphold data security. Yet the rise of cloud computing has allowed the battle lines, once clearly marked as ‘us’ versus ‘the outside world’, to become blurred.

While the cloud provides employees with the freedom to choose, control and manage their own applications, both its openness and accessibility, whilst advantageous, presents a new set of challenges.Businesses now have to contend with a whole host of different devices, not all of which are vetted by the IT department. Similarly employees are increasingly using the tools and applications most familiar to them to complete their job, rather than those provided by the organisation…

Grazed from Nebula. Author: PR Announcement.

Nebula, the enterprise private cloud company, today announced that Cloudwick Labs, an independent test lab for cloud computing, has confirmed that Nebula delivers Cassandra workloads to span multiple data centers and validates multi-site hybrid cloud interoperability with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace.

Apache Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database technology, provides multi-site distributed computing of big data across multiple data centers. Tests were done with DataStax DSE – the commercial provider of Cassandra. Cloudwick Labs certified DataStax’s Cassandra NoSQL operation on the Nebula One in private cloud and hybrid cloud deployments with AWS and Rackspace. To replicate enterprise workloads, Cloudwick also used Gazzang for data encryption and Datameer for analytics…