Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Mellanox Technologies, a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced 10 and 40GbE NIC support for the Microsoft OCP server and storage specification which are based on hardware used to power Microsoft’s global cloud services, including Windows Azure, Bing, and Office 365. Available now, the ConnectX®-3 Pro OCP-based 10/40GbE NICs with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and overlay network offloads offer optimized application latency and performance while maintaining extremely low system power consumption.

"The growth of hyperscale computing requires new paradigms in infrastructure, and Mellanox Ethernet NICs provide rich performance and efficiency features, such as overlay network offloads and RDMA/RoCE to provide the best infrastructure return-on-investment," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We’re pleased to collaborate with Microsoft in delivering 10/40GbE NIC technology to their OCP server and storage designs to enable superior cloud productivity, efficiency, and sustainability."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

In 2013, enterprise organizations spent a great deal of time offloading servers into infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service models. Software-as-a-service was just as popular, but you can look for the software-centric cloud to thrive as companies hand over more of the IT management reins.

IaaS and PaaS gained popularity primarily because they allowed organizations to test cloud providers without giving up complete control over managing applications. IT decision makers often pushed brand-new applications and services into a SaaS model, but they were hesitant to offload the full management of highly customized and mission-critical software in production. As a compromise, they experimented with IaaS and PaaS to offload infrastructure to a third party while allowing application-level management by in-house IT staff…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Three years after the US government implemented a ‘Cloud First’ mandate that would require federal agencies to consider cloud-based IT services for certain systems, the federal public service continues to struggle with cloud implementations according to recently published research from Accenture. Annette Rippert, managing director of technology solutions and Accenture’s lead on federal cloud work said a lack of critical skills is the leading factor at play here.

In early 2011 the then US chief information officer Vivek Kundra released the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, which became known as ‘Cloud First’ because it required agencies to evaluate cloud-based IT solutions in many cases before making any new IT investments…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

A survey from Capita IT Services has revealed that CIOs see cloud computing as a key enabler to business innovation, yet boardrooms are "nervous" places where execs have to convince them cloud adoption is the way forward. The research, a combination of roundtable sessions and surveys featuring nearly 150 CIOs, found some interesting points regarding cloud adoption. More than three in five (61%) believe that improving the company’s innovation is now one of their highest priorities, with a further one in five (20%) believing it to be a low priority.

Not surprisingly, the report discusses the shift of CIO from chief information to chief innovation officer. "The ‘C’ in CIO now represents communication, collaboration, change; ‘I’ represents integration, interfaces, investment; and ‘O’ means optimisation, organisation and operations," the report trumpets…

Grazed from ComputerWorldUK. Author: Editorial Staff.

Every year Forrester publishes our overall cloud computing predictions which occasionally includes one or two private cloud predictions. With current private cloud self-reported adoption at 33% and 55% prioritising building an internal private cloud in 2014, we thought it was time to create a report that focuses just on this deployment type.

This year we published a separate report that features our private cloud predictions across pricate cloud management and infrastructure. The report covers the full descriptions and what I&O professionals should do about it. I covered the management predictions, while my colleague Rich Fichera, covered the infrastructure trends. This year we predict:…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Ashish Dhawan.

2013 saw the elevation of cloud computing as fundamental to business strategy. IT leaders now need to rethink the role of the network to deliver on the promise of the cloud. As enterprises begin to realize the benefits of the cloud, and as deployment and orchestration systems such as OpenStack and CloudStack mature, managing data centers will be about managing cloud workflows.

Both enterprises and service providers are looking to the cloud to help them move their businesses forward. For enterprises the cloud makes workloads and applications more dynamic, but before they can take advantage of this benefit they need an infrastructure which is optimized for private and public cloud services. Service providers, be they the traditional network service providers or cloud service providers, need a quick way to deliver new services and improve the time-to-revenue…

Grazed from Whatech. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to Nick Koukoulas, managing director of BSI incorporating NCSI, both users and providers of cloud-based services have been asking for independent, technology-neutral certification to help them make more informed decisions about the services they purchase and use. He said that STAR Certification would provide organisations and consumers with a clear benchmark on which to evaluate the performance of a cloud service provider.

The CSA’s STAR Certification combines assessment for conformance to the well-established ISO/IEC 27001:2005 management system standard and the CSA’s CSA Cloud Control Matrix, a specified set of criteria that measures the capability levels of the cloud service…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Vaultas Companies (www.vaultas.com), a premier provider of collaborative and vendor / carrier neutral colocation data centers in the Upper Midwest, today announced the Grand Opening of its newest Tier III data center located in the historic Blatz Brewery Complex in downtown Milwaukee. The new 10,000 Sq. Ft. facility will meet a growing need in the region for server and data colocation, primary and backup data center, data storage, cloud computing services and application hosting.

"Now more than ever, it is critical for companies to find affordable solutions to housing and protecting the data that drives their business," said Vaultas president, John Unger. "We are excited to bring our IT vendor supported, flexible, scalable data center and cloud computing solutions to southeastern Wisconsin."…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

The five highest performing cloud computing stocks year-to-date in the Cloud Computing Index  are Qualys QLYS +5.71% (NASDAQ:QYLS), Juniper Networks JNPR +0.89% (NYSE:JNPR), Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), F5 Networks FFIV +1.11% (NASDAQ: FFIV) and Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)

A $10K investment in Qualys on January 2^nd of this year is worth $12,253 and $10K invested in F5 Networks is worth $12,069 as of market close yesterday.   IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP share prices are included for comparison.  Qualys continues to be one of the highest-performing stocks in the index.  They specialize in cloud-based compliance and security solutions that enable enterprises to identify security risks to IT infrastructures and protect IT systems from cyber-attacks…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: John Treadway.

DevOps is an exciting and far-reaching shift in IT delivery. The promises are tempting: radically higher productivity, lower cost and more reliable systems.  So I guess it’s finally time for your IT organization to get on the development-operations (DevOps) bandwagon, right? Everybody’s doing it, so don’t delay. The big question isn’t whether, but how and where do you start?

First, go out and hire some DevOps people. Wait, wait — DevOps isn’t a job.  Okay, so you should create a DevOps group or department, right? A great team of people you can train up on DevOps led by a director of DevOps. Hold on! DevOps isn’t a department or function either…