Category: News

Grazed from InfoStor.  Author: Pedro Hernadez.

Huawei, a Chinese provider of IT and telecommunications systems and services, is looking to help high performance computing (HPC) organizations cloudify their workloads with its new storage systems.  The company’s OceanStor storage line is now home to the new flagship 18000 series. The high performance systems help organizations bring the capacity-maximizing benefits of the cloud to their HPC environments, according to Huawei Enterprise USA’s COO, Jane Li.

Li argued in company remarks that "HPC cluster silos are giving way to HPC clouds." IDC’s data backs her up. In an email to InfoStor, a company representative cited IDC research revealing "that the proportion of sites exploiting cloud computing for part of their HPC workloads rose from 13.8 percent in 2011 to 23.5 percent in 2013."…

Grazed from CITEWorld. Author: Andy Patrizio.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of the Internet retail giant, recently announced Amazon Kinesis, a fully managed service for real time processing of high volume data streaming in to Amazon’s Web-based repositories. The intro was made at the Re:Invent conference held in Las Vegas. Amazon Kinesis allows a customer to store and process terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of sources as the data is coming in.

This allows developers to create applications that act on real-time data, such as Web site traffic, marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, or logs. Kinesis is capable of accepting any amount of data, from any number of sources, scaling up and down as needed. The client library handles load balancing, coordination, and error handling, doing the background work, so the developer only needs to focus on processing the data as it becomes available…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Janel Ryan.

Each week I spend considerable time reviewing research papers, articles and blogs about technology. And I’m sick of reading about cloud. While cloud gets loads of press, it’s a nascent technology. Few companies are using cloud extensively. So, let’s not talk cloud. Let’s talk about something more intriguing – server virtualization. Server virtualization is a mature technology that the vast majority of enterprises actually use today. Your organization has a lot to gain by building on your existing virtualization technology and taking advantage of all the latest capabilities.

What is virtualization and what are its benefits?

Virtualization technology, in computing, refers to the creation of a virtual (rather than a physical) form of something, whether that’s a virtual hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or network resources. Over the last decade, server virtualization on the x86 platform has been driven by the desire to gain both cost and operational efficiencies. Migrating physical servers to virtual machines and consolidating them onto far fewer physical servers lowers monthly power and cooling costs in the data center…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

FrontRange, the only provider of Hybrid IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named HEAT Cloud Service Managementas a 2013 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner for the third consecutive year presented by Cloud Computing Magazine.

“We are thrilled to be selected for TMC’s Cloud Computing Excellence Award for the third consecutive year,” says Kevin J. Smith, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Business Unit, FrontRange. “This award is a validation of FrontRange’s continued commitment to providing its customers with the most innovative, high-quality products available in the ITSM market.”…

Grazed from WHTC. Author: Paul Sandle.

German business software group SAP may speed up a shift towards providing its products over the internet in order to tap demand for so-called cloud services and take advantage of Germany’s reputation for data privacy, it said on Friday. SAP and rivals such as IBM and Oracle are dashing to meet surging demand for cloud computing, which allows clients to reduce costs by ditching bulky local servers for network-based software and storage in remote data centers.

With the cloud services market forecast to grow 18.5 percent this year to $131 billion worldwide, according to research firm Gartner, competition is fierce and software firms face a challenge to adapt. "We have a situation now where we see the move to the cloud, particularly in certain markets like North America, happening even faster, and this is a great opportunity for us to revisit whether we should accelerate the move to the cloud," SAP co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said at a Morgan Stanley investor conference on Friday.

Grazed from BankInfoSecurity. Author: Eric Chabrow.

Attempts to shame China haven’t been effective in stopping that country from pilfering intellectual property from the computers of American companies, a new report to Congress says. The report from the U.S.-China Economic Review Commission, issued Nov. 20, points out that China hasn’t changed its behavior despite widely covered reports this past year from security firm Mandiant and the Defense Department about the Chinese targeting American companies and military contractors over the Internet to steal intellectual property and trade secrets (see 6 Types of Data Chinese Hackers Pilfer and DoD Outlines China’s Spying on U.S. IT).

"It is clear naming and attempting to shame will not be sufficient to deter entities in China from emerging in cyber-espionage against U.S. companies," the report says. The commission says mitigating the problem will require a multifaceted approach, including linking economic cyber-espionage to trade restrictions, prohibiting Chinese firms using stolen U.S. intellectual property from accessing U.S. banks and banning U.S. travel for Chinese organizations that are involved with cyber-espionage…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Brian Prince.

Concern about the security of cloud environments has impacted the adoption of cloud services since their inception. But an initiative recently launched by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) may help protect cloud infrastructure by developing more secure networks.  Dubbed the Software-Defined Perimeter (SDP), the initiative is a collaborative effort between security vendors and members of the CSA’s Enterprise User Council. The vision is to develop a framework of security controls that takes some of the pain out of network security.

According to the CSA, the Software-Defined Perimeter leverages known security concepts such as federation, Secure Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Transport Layer Security (TLS), and geo-location in a bid to control and manage connectivity from any device to the cloud infrastructure…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Robert Lawson.

Small and midsize businesses of all types are investing in cloud computing operations in one way or another. But why? According to the Indiana Star, businesses have discovered that their customers demand a more streamlined approach that is integrated with their expectations. Internal operations also flow with less disruption. Employees find that data can be accessed much more quickly and more easily. Many businesses, however, still find it wise to be selective about which information, if any, is stored virtually.

Efficiency of Operation

As Forbes journalist Louis Columbus pointed out in the Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecasts Update for 2013, time to market, more flexible IT support for business strategies and faster response to competitive conditions are the secret ingredients to the success of the cloud. Businesses want systems that keep pace with their strategies. The Roundup cited data from studies done by Gartner, McKinsey and Company and others. Gartner predicted that the bulk of spending by 2016 will be on cloud computing platforms and applications…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Marie Alonso.

Sit back, relax and listen to the tale of Dropbox, an online storage service that scored more than 200 million content-loving consumers in five years. Recently, it was reported that the colossal cloud storage leader is looking to raise an additional $250 million at a valuation of $8 billion.

A valuation of $8 billion? That’s sky-scraping territory! According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Dropbox has always had a flair for the dramatic. Evidently, the company’s San Francisco offices are quite decadent, but why shouldn’t they be? Dropbox, founded in 2007 by innovative young minds Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, deserves to treat itself, in my opinion. It has garnered attention for raising an inconceivable—some may say even preposterous—$257 million in funding during its five-year ascent to greatness…

Grazed from LiveMint. Author: Moulishree Srivastava.

More enterprises are interested in investing in bring your own device (BYOD)—permitting employees to use their personal mobile devices including laptops, tablets and smart phones at work—and mobile technology than investing in big data analysis and cloud computing, which are touted as the next big thing, according to a survey conducted by International Business Machines (IBM) Corp.

The survey that included chief information officers (CIOs), chief marketing officers (CMOs), chief technical officers (CTOs) and other information technology (IT) decision makers said that while 57% of the respondents are planning to invest in BYOD and mobile technology for their companies, 47% of them are interested in investing in big data analytics and cloud computing…