Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

IBM (IBM) is moving its Watson technology into the cloud to create what it calls a new ecosystem of software application providers, infusing cognitive computing intelligence with application development. IBM will be launching IBM Watson Developers Cloud, a cloud-hosted marketplace for application providers looking to develop Watson-powered apps. The marketplace will also include educational materials and access to Watson’s application programming interface (API).

According to Big Blue, the move was designed to populate a new ecosystem of entrepreneurial software application providers, adding that these business partners, along with IBM, will transform the way both businesses and consumers make decisions. Application providers will be able to leverage two sources of data-driven content for uncovering user data: company data or third-party content by accessing the IBM Watson Content Store…

Next month, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will introduce an open pattern that will enable governments, agencies and businesses to create a secure, hybrid IT environment quickly and cost effectively. Cloud computing expert Kevin Jackson has been named to lead the team that will assist organizations in adopting the process, known as the NCOIC Rapid Response Capability (NRRC), into their operations.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend AWS re:Invent 2013 this year; however, I did get the chance to speak with Matt Gerber, executive vice president of sales and marketing at 2nd Watch.  The company is a global leader in building, deploying and managing Amazon Web Services (AWS) based IT operations, so I was excited to learn a bit more about the company and their latest product news. 

VMblog:  For VMblog readers who may not be familiar with the company, can you give a quick overview of 2^nd Watch?

Matt Gerber:  2nd Watch builds, deploys and manages Amazon Web Services (AWS) based IT operations for enterprise customers.  In particular, we assist customers in evaluating the economics of moving IT operations into AWS, design and build highly reliable and scalable AWS-based enterprise IT platforms, and provide software tools and management services that enable enterprises to deploy, manage and optimize cloud based IT operations infrastructure.  We have effectively moved more than 2 MW of enterprise data center capacity into the AWS cloud as part of 300+ platform and data center migrations.

Jamcracker, the Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) enablement company, today announced the release of the Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) 7.0, enabling enterprise service providers and IT organizations to offer IT as a Service (ITaaS). ITaaS enables IT organizations to act as agile service providers, focusing on meeting the needs and outcomes required by lines of businesses (LOB).

"As IT as a Service becomes the standard business and operations model, enterprises will require the ability to manage the supply chain, including infrastructure services and application services delivery," said Paul Burns, president, Neovise. "With the ability to configure, manage, and bill IaaS services from multiple vendors with a seamless user experience, Jamcracker is ideally suited to change the way we adopt cloud services."

Grazed from BankInfoSecurity. Author: Eric Chabrow.

Computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing new ways to apply encryption when storing or searching data in the cloud, says Paul Royal, associate director of the university’s information security center. This encryption research, designed to address security concerns associated with cloud computing, is highlighted in Georgia Tech’s just-issued Emerging Cyber Threats Report 2014.

The university has developed an application called CloudCapsule that encrypts data on mobile and other devices before its securely transmitted and stored in the cloud, Royal explains in an interview with Information Security Media Group. Encrypting data before it enters the cloud provides protection against cybercriminals seeking to pilfer data and governments demanding keys to decrypt data on servers situated in their jurisdictions, Royal says…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicole Laskowski.

When Aristotle said, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," he could have been talking about crowdsourcing. The concept makes some IT leaders uncomfortable, no doubt, but problem solving — like computing — can be powerful when distributed. CIOs bent on leading the innovation charge need to figure out how social tools can help bring the trend into the enterprise, according to Christopher Sprague, executive partner with Gartner Inc.’s research arm.

The Data MillCity of Boston CIO Bill Oates gets it, Sprague told CIOs at the Society for Information Management’s (SIM) annual conference in Boston last week. Oates introduced a pair of mobile applications that’s changing how the city and its constituents interact. With Street Bump, a handheld device’s accelerometer and GPS help city workers locate potholes and road deficiencies. With Citizens Connect, city dwellers can file a work order — directly with the facilitator of the request — and then keep tabs on its progress…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced it will demonstrate a wide array of next-generation server, storage and networking products for HPC at Supercomputing 2013. These innovative offerings are designed for HPC architects building HPC clouds — environments that must efficiently support a wider range of HPC applications than purpose-built clusters deployed in the past.

The Huawei strategy for HPC infrastructure is to lead the transition from HPC cluster silos to HPC clouds, which host a diverse set of applications and are shared by a variety of users. The Huawei portfolio of products represent a new generation of HPC infrastructure that is more flexible. Huawei servers for HPC can scale processors, GPUs, storage and embedded networks to record-breaking bandwidth. Huawei storage for HPC can simultaneously scale-out, scale-up, scale-deep and scale-in. And carrier-class Huawei networks are designed from the ground up for the future of software defined networking in the HPC data center…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The staggering growth of cloud computing is driving today’s IT infrastructure to new levels of efficiency through greater integration and convergence. The modern cloud computing environment demands performance, resiliency, and scalability. The next generation of converged infrastructure is poised to provide exactly that.

Consider Cisco’s recent acquisition of all-solid-state array vendor Whiptail. This is really exciting news. By integrating flash and SSD-based components into the compute layer, vendors like Cisco are enabling a giant leap in cloud performance through converged storage, networking, and server systems. Let me break down what’s going on…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

Cloud computing is first and foremost an economic model. Many IT innovations, such as virtualization, have originated from the need to improve the economics of IT; cost increases of more hardware, complexity and administrative requirements eclipsed cost improvements gained from server hardware commoditization. Virtualization had the promise to bring this under control, but the improvements have been modest. The reduced friction to deploy has resulted in an explosion of server instances along with the costs that accompany them.

And while virtualization offered to solve the economic challenges of enterprise IT, cloud computing affects the economies of building Web-scale applications. There is little doubt that companies like Google and Amazon wouldn’t have been able to achieve their current reach and margin models if they had continued to leverage traditional large-scale compute techniques. Infrastructure costs alone would have ruined their prospects…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Interestingly, scalability and storage capacity expansion were the benefits cited the least by organizations without plans to implement cloud storage. With businesses increasingly facing the challenge of data storage and running out of storage capacity, adoption of cloud storage technologies continues to grow, according to a report from cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata.

The survey found 37 percent of respondents have been using cloud computing for three or more years, more than a one-third increase over last year’s 27 percent number. When compared to last year’s survey, overall adoption of cloud services has steadily increased across all categories, with use of Software as a Service (SaaS) reaching as high as 62 percent and both cloud storage and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) edging closer to 50 percent adoption rates…