Category: News

Grazed from Parallels. Author: PR Announcement.

Parallels, a leading hosting and cloud services enablement provider, is now a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation. By formalizing its support for the open source cloud computing platform, Parallels is aligning its open source strategy to support OpenStack. The overall goal of the Parallels OpenStack initiative is to enable service providers to easily deploy OpenStack as their cloud platform for delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that helps organizations manage compute, storage, and networking resources in private and public cloud environments. Service providers, enterprises, government agencies and academic institutions around the world use OpenStack to power demanding production workloads…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM and 21Vianet Group, Inc. VNET announced today that they have entered a definitive agreement to introduce IBM’s premier private cloud infrastructure service and accelerate high value managed private cloud services to China. This partnership brings IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+, a powerful, secure and scalable private cloud built on open standards, to China to keep up with the rising demand for managing more complex, mission-critical workloads and applications in the cloud for large enterprises throughout China. Pursuant to the agreement, IBM will provide the physical point of distribution (POD) and service while 21Vianet will host the POD facility at its data centers in Beijing.

Mr. Josh Chen, Chairman and CEO of 21Vianet, said, "IBM is a global leading enterprise-level cloud computing provider. What’s more, IBM is a sincere partner, not only sharing its own technologies and services, but also growing together with us in business insights, management experience, operation and marketing etc. Through this cooperation, 21Vianet Group, Inc has not only strengthened its ability to accelerate business growth, but also comprehensively enhanced the service capability of its cloud computing."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Here’s a Christmas gift you don’t even need to pay for: Fedora Linux, the open source operating system supported by Red Hat (RHT), has introduced Fedora 20, the latest and greatest version of the platform. Code-named "Heisenbug" (yes, that’s a geek pun), the release brings updates for the open source cloud, virtualization and more.

Perhaps the biggest new feature in this release is official support for ARM as a primary architecture, which could help drive Fedora adoption not only on mobile but also in the emerging ARM server world. As Red Hat noted: "While x86/x86_64 serves as the default architecture for the majority of Fedora users, ARM is rapidly growing in stature and already dominates the mobile world. Beyond mobile and the maker movement, ARM shows great promise as a powerful and cost-effective technology for the server world."…

Grazed from Saba. Author: PR Announcement.

Saba (OTCPink: SABA), a global leader in next-generation cloud solutions for talent management, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Saba’s security team will share its experience in delivering secure cloud solutions to a global customer base of more than 11.1 million subscribers, and collaborate with members to advance and apply best practices.

"As a corporate member of the Cloud Security Alliance, Saba will have ongoing opportunities to exchange knowledge with others who also are committed to enhancing the security of cloud products and their customers’ environments," said Randy Barr, chief security officer of Saba. "Joining CSA, a well-respected industry organization, will allow Saba to contribute through its many committees and industry programs. The learnings and insights gathered through our CSA membership will help us continuously improve our own security and customer privacy programs."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

The National Security Agency’s hacks of top corporate networks and the broad adoption of cloud computing are among my picks for the top enterprise IT trends of 2013. What were the top 10 events, trends, and technologies that changed the enterprise in 2013? While there are lots of candidates, I picked the top one which I think had the greatest impact. Here are my first five trends. I’ll be adding the final five in a later blog and then sorting them out in a 1 to 10 ranking.

The NSA cyber-spying scandal: When the National Security Agency domestic cyber-spying scandal first started to unfold last June it was unclear that the snooping would reach out and touch the world’s top technology vendors. Rather it seemed at first as if the snooping was all about telecom intercepts…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Melissa Busch.

Conflicting international data protection laws may negatively affect the way in which organizations conduct business using the cloud.

For the Sake of the Cloud

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has requested that government officials around the world meet to discuss data protection laws. Variance in laws across geographical locations may stymie the growth of cloud computing, which in turn could have a negative economic influence. According to an article on InformationWeek, as IT managers begin to ease their data into the cloud, they are dealing with conflicting international laws that govern where certain types of data come from and where they are being stored…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Peter Long.

Companies of all sizes store their data on external servers every single day, whether they know it or not. This could be an organization whose employees bring their own devices and use file storage and sharing apps that the IT department isn’t aware of, or it could be a business looking to eliminate IT infrastructure costs and leverage the convenience of the cloud by moving data offsite.

One step that companies and individuals must take in order to use cloud storage is accept the provider’s terms and conditions. However, both organizations and individuals often fail to actually read those terms and conditions prior to clicking the "accept" button, putting companies in precarious positions that leave their data vulnerable to risk. What do you get in the fine print? Sometimes, it’s not as simple — or pretty — as you might think…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Amazon Web Services Inc. awaits new shipments of hardware for its recently launched C3 instances as the demand for cloud computing performance in its Elastic Compute Cloud exceeds supply. The shortage was first noted in a blog post last week by Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) chief evangelist, Jeff Barr, who wrote that it took just two weeks for C3 use in its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to exceed the level that the former fastest-growing instance type achieved in 22 weeks.

"The important takeaway here is the thirst for performance on AWS," said Carl Brooks, analyst with Boston-based 451 Research. The new C3 instances were revealed at the AWS re:Invent conference this year. They provide faster processors based on Intel Corp.’s 2.8 GHz E5-2680 version 2 "Ivy Bridge" technology, double the memory per vCPU of the previous C1 and CC2 lines of instances, as well as solid-state-drive-based instance storage…

Grazed from GreatResponder. Author: Maria Dehn.

Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform’s upgraded version of the scheduler can call services from inside and outside of the Azure platform to run them reliably on the schedule. The upgraded metrics provided deep insight into usage of cloud computing resources with many value added features.

Microsoft announced last week that they have released the preview of upgraded versions of scheduler and monitoring metrics for its well known Azure cloud computing platform. These upgrades are in its preview period and are being offered on very discounted terms. These both features of Azure platform would prove to be very useful for enterprise users to have deep insight into their the usage of their cloud computing resources and managing their schedules and planned tasks in a more effective way…

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Doug Bourgeois.

Cloud computing has been over-hyped. Everybody knows it. Most people now cringe at the sound of the word “cloud” and for good reason. A quick Internet search of the term “cloud computing” returns 392 million hits! That’s a lot of cloud. There is good reason for all this hype. Cloud computing has significantly transformed the information technology (IT) industry.

Much like the transformation from mainframe to client-server computing did a few decades ago, and the Internet after that, cloud computing is changing the fundamentals of IT once again. Unfortunately, the dramatic results in cost efficiency and agility that cloud promises have drawn attention away from the real goal: transforming to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS)…