Category: News

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Rackspace Hosting is extending its support offerings to include DevOps tools such as Chef to help enterprises automate the management of their clouds. Through its new DevOps Automation Service, Rackspace will provide support for DevOps tools that help enterprises deploy and scale applications running on Linux. The service will soon work with Windows as well, Rackspace said on Thursday. DevOps is a software development concept that aims to smooth out the interaction between development and operations departments.

Although the service can be used by anyone, it fits best when enterprises need to scale up infrastructure quickly or expect to do so in the future. Enterprises can, for example, turn to Rackspace to get help with infrastructure automation using Chef or with monitoring using StatsD, Graphite and New Relic, the company said on its website. Rackspace also offers support for tools used for workflow automation, log aggregation and source control…

Grazed from TomsITPro. Author: James Sullivan.

HP has announced improvements to its HP CloudSystem toolset, aiding in hybrid OpenStack cloud management. The improvements to HP CloudSystem come at a time of increasing demand for hybrid clouds. "Research indicates that 40 percent of enterprises say they are currently in a hybrid environment and 75 percent of IT executives plan to pursue a hybrid cloud delivery model by 2016," according to HP. The new HP CloudSystem interface has a more streamlined management console and deployment process. Improvements also extend public cloud integration. Newly supported platforms include Microsoft Windows Azure and two European based cloud providers, Arsys and SFR.

HP is also introducing the HP Hybrid Cloud Management Platform that provides service automation support for HP Cloud OS with OpenStack and Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). TOSCA is an open source OASIS standard designed to promote portability and cloud applications and services…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Pat Romanski.

Dell on Thursday announced it is expanding the Dell Cloud Partner Program to include CenturyLink and its new CenturyLink Cloud, giving customers added choice and flexibility in their cloud computing pursuits. Through the Dell-CenturyLink alliance, Dell customers globally now have access to a slate of public cloud services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which can be deployed across CenturyLink’s global data center footprint. In addition, customers gain the added benefit of having Dell serve as the single-source supplier through the Dell Cloud Partner Program, providing centralized solution integration, control and direct support.

Jeremy Ford, executive director and general manager, Dell Cloud Services, noted that "CenturyLink’s best-in-class public cloud offerings combined with Dell’s leading end-to-end, scalable solutions and services enable customers to build, control and use cloud-based solutions to drive a competitive business advantage."…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Alex Hamilton.

OpenStack, the cloud computing foundation, has gained Oracle as one of its corporate sponsors following planned integration with the company’s Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The Californian technology corporation will begin integrating OpenStack components into a number of its own products. Solaris, Linux and VM as well as Oracle’s own cloud-based services will all be part of the assimilation. Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said in a statement that the company goal through the sponsorship was to give their customers greater choice and flexibility.

Oracle began to eye integration with Openstack in September this year, joining alongside HP, IBM, Red Hat and Dell, who had already placed their support behind the cloud project. Executive vice president of software development, Thomas Kurian, said the ability to abstract storage is critical to the use of Oracle’s cloud services…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

With other methods of tracking usage and access to cloud services and data already on the market, it was probably only a matter of time before someone aimed to help organizations track the geographic location services that are being accessed. Enter CloudLock, which launched not only its CloudLock Labs "innovation-focused projects" brand, but also GeoFence for Google Apps, the first service being offered under the new brand.

Available in the Google Apps Marketplace, GeoFence for Google Apps provides organizations—or their trusted solutions providers—with the ability to track where their users are accessing data from, what location users are logging in from, and any changes made by admins in their domain. Say "so long" to the ability to log in from sunny beaches secretively (you didn’t really think we believed you were at home sick for a week, did you?)…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud certifications are popping up more and more. Some are vendor-specific. Some are vendor-agnostic. And across those two categories are certificates that cover various categories of cloud technology. Enter Mirantis, the pure OpenStack play vendor, with a new vendor-agnostic certification around the open source cloud platform.

Mirantis Certification for OpenStack is being targeted at systems administrators and OpenStack cloud operators as the first vendor-agnostic OpenStack certification. Whether it’s truly the first vendor-agnostic certification is debatable, but the company is aiming to certify OpenStack cloud professionals on their proficiency to deploy and operate vendor-agnostic OpenStack cloud environments. That’s a good step, and one that could play well in the open source cloud space as it continues to grow and gain traction…

Grazed from AllThingsD. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Dell, the newly private computing company, will later today announce an alliance with the software company Red Hat that will become a significant piece of its cloud-computing strategy going forward. In what one source described as the “closest relationship that Red Hat has ever had,” Dell will announce plans to conduct deep engineering work on Red Hat’s version of OpenStack, the open-source cloud-computing platform.

In a move similar to a broad collaboration they launched around the Linux operating system more than a decade ago, Dell and Red Hat will cooperatively develop an enterprise-grade version of OpenStack based on the latest version, code-named Havana. The announcement will be made at a Dell event in Austin, Texas, later this morning…

Grazed from NetCraft. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing provider DigitalOcean is now growing faster than Amazon Web Services. Our December 2013 Web Server Survey showed a month-on-month gain of 6,514 web-facing computers at DigitalOcean; Amazon, meanwhile, grew by an almost as huge 6,269 web-facing computers. Together, the two companies accounted for more than two-thirds of the internet-wide growth in web-facing computers in December.

DigitalOcean is now the 15th largest hosting company in terms of web-facing computers — a remarkable feat considering DigitalOcean had only 280 web-facing computers at the start of this year. Although Amazon is still the largest hosting company (by web-facing computers) and has nearly six times as many web-facing computers in total, the rapid growth at DigitalOcean may have startled those at Amazon who thought their major competitors were Microsoft Azure and Rackspace…

Grazed from CXO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Public Cloud is reaching a greater level of maturity in India. According to a new Gartner report, around $3.9 billion will be spent on cloud services in India from 2013 through 2017, of which $1.7 billion will be spent on software-as-a-service (SaaS). The overall public cloud services market in India is also set to grow 33.6% this year to touch $404 million, an increase of $101 million from the 2012 revenue of $303 million, said the research firm.

Apart from SaaS that represents the most mature segment in the cloud services marketplace, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, is also expected to grow 33.9% in 2013 to $59.2 million, said Gartner. “The public cloud services market continues robust growth in India through over the forecast period of 2011 through 2017. While SaaS dominates as the largest cloud segment, the high growth rates of IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) make them important markets to watch,” said Ed Anderson, Research Director at Gartner…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

Like all the big enterprise tech vendors these days, Cisco’s got plans to grab a share of the expanding cloud computing market. For the most part, Cisco isn’t selling cloud services directly to enterprise customers (with the exception of WebEx, its Internet web conferencing service).

Instead, it sells the pieces and parts to build a cloud, and it does a brisk business with that. By one account, it sells more cloud computing infrastructure tech than competitors like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC and VMware, according to market research firm Synergy. Now the company is starting to talk about a new product, code-named Cloud Fusion, that it says will protect companies from NSA spying, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Hickins…