Category: News

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: James Laird.

Cloud computing is everywhere. In its various forms, it’s being adopted across the full technology spectrum, from consumers using it at an alternative to traditional storage to enterprises employing it as an end-to-end infrastructure solution. After visiting Bett 2014, it’s also obvious that education stands to benefit from cloud deployment.

In many ways, the needs of schools aren’t that different from those of the modern SME: simplified resource management and the efficient, reliable provisioning of key services. Indeed, the increasing importance of cutting-edge tech in education is reflected by the number of blue chip firms looking to enter the space – major vendors like Acer, Google, HP, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, Misco, Sony and Toshiba were all out in force at Bett…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: William Bain.

The use of in-memory data grids (IMDGs) for scaling application performance has rapidly increased in recent years as firms have seen their application workloads explode. This trend runs across nearly every vertical market, touching online applications for financial services, ecommerce, travel, manufacturing, social media, mobile, and more. At the same time, many firms are also looking to leverage the use of cloud computing to meet the challenge of ever increasing workloads. One of the fundamental promises of the cloud is elastic, transparent, on-demand scalability — a key capability that has become practical with the use of in-memory data grid technology. As such IMDGs are becoming a vital factor in the cloud, just as they have been for on-premise applications.

What makes IMDGs such a good fit with cloud computing? The promise of the cloud is a reduction in total cost of ownership. Part of that reduction comes from the ability to quickly provision and use new server capacity (without having to own the hardware). The essential synergy between IMDGs and the cloud derives from their common elasticity. IMDGs can scale out their memory-based storage and performance linearly as servers are added to the grid, and they can gracefully scale back when fewer servers are needed. IMDGs take full advantage of the cloud’s ability to easily spin-up or remove servers…

Grazed from CIOL. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud is accelerating the implementation of a rapid continuous delivery model, with 25.9 per cent of developers active in Cloud development releasing updates or new versions at least once a day, and 63.3 per cent releasing at least once a week, as Evans Data’s new Cloud Development Survey shows.

The survey, conducted in November – December 2013 with 436 active Cloud developers also showed that 51 per cent feel that Cloud computing in general will improve coordination between development and operations, which will also help to enable continuous delivery. However, opinions and practices diverge across segments…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Red Hat has updated a number of its products for running private clouds, better preparing them for the complex ways of the enterprise. "The journey to the open private cloud has got multiple stages. We’ve got offerings to help you along every single step of the way and today we’ve refreshed all these offerings so you can take these capabilities into your environment and get to an open private cloud sooner rather than later," said Radesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat’s general manager for virtualization business, in a Wednesday webcast detailing how the new products could be used in enterprises.

The company Wednesday released Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is Red Hat’s commercially supported edition of the OpenStack cloud hosting software. The new version is based off of the Havana version of OpenStack, released in October…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

If you spend any time listening to what government IT executives are talking about in Washington these days — besides the NSA’s data-collection practices and what everyone should have learned from HealthCare.gov — it’s hard to ignore at least some discussion about secure cloud computing and a federal program called FedRAMP.

Talk to IT executives outside of Washington, however, and it’s evident that discussions about FedRAMP and its impact on cloud service providers are reaching far beyond the Beltway and rippling through the boardrooms of IT services providers. As Amazon Web Services VP Teresa Carlson said in a recent interview: "Cloud companies won’t be able to participate in any [government] procurement or award without being able to achieve the FedRAMP standards."…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing company VMware says it is buying mobile computing company AirWatch for about $1.18 billion in cash. The deal also includes about $365M million in installment payments and assumed unvested equity. VMware says the acquisition of the privately held Atlanta-based company will boost its mobile computing offerings for businesses without compromising security.

AirWatch will continue to be led by its founder and CEO John Marshall and will become part of VMware’s end-user computing group. AirWatch has more than 10,000 customers and 1,600 employees around the world…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloudnexa, an industry leading cloud managed services provider known for helping clients realize the full utility power of cloud computing, today announced that it has been recognized as a Premier Consulting Partner by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company was one of twenty two partners to receive this status for 2014 globally. In addition to its Premier Consulting Partner Status the company also recently received its specialization competency in Managed Services, Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange from AWS.

The AWS Premier Consulting Partner designation highlights the top Amazon Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners globally that have distinguished themselves by investing significantly in their AWS practice, providing exceptional customer service, helping a large number of significant customers run their applications on top of AWS and building a healthy consulting business on AWS…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is piloting the cloud security model it developed for the Defense Department in an effort to better formalize processes for future commercial cloud service acquisitions. To test the new model, DISA will leverage a series of pilot programs between mission partners — various DOD agencies — and cloud service providers as both take initial steps to harnessing commercial cloud computing services within DOD.

According to a DISA spokesperson, "If a mission partner wishes to execute a cloud service pilot with controlled unclassified information" – the information at DOD Impact Levels 1 and 2 – "it coordinates its implementation plans with DISA, the cloud broker." Once a mission partner procures the pilot cloud service, the agency and DISA will meet regularly to assess the pilot and its effectiveness…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Sensing the customer need for more computational muscle in smaller packages, Amazon Web Services has added a number of new packages in its Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) service. The Amazon subsidiary also reduced prices on selected storage packages, reducing the cost of its Simple Storage Service (S3) by up to 22 percent and Elastic Block Service (EBS) by up to 50 percent. The new packages, or compute instances, in the EC2 line fill out the company’s second-generation M3 line of instances, which the company is now touting as the successor to the original M1 line.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the M3 series a year ago as a more performance-minded alternative to the base M1 offerings. The M3 series features faster CPUs, making them better suited for compute-intensive tasks such as video encoding, batch processing and caching. The M3 line also features SSDs (solid-state disks) which, according to AWS, offer a more consistent I/O rate than M1 services…