Category: News

Grazed from InfoStor.  Author: Henry Newman.

Today I woke up to find that Microsoft’s 365 has some issues for users worldwide, but not me as I’m not using 365.  It seems like it’s case of “another day, another high reliability cloud down.”  Clearly, vendors either have very poor test procedures and plans or they do not have an adequate test environment.  This is not a surprise to me, given the size of installations, the complexity of the configuration and the cost of maintain a test environment. 

This might be a reason to not go to the cloud.  I have not seen that testing procedures and infrastructure listed as a reason to not deploy to the cloud, but the more I think about it, it makes sense to me that it should be a factor.  So what do Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the other providers have for systems, configuration and workload generation that will give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the cloud?…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

However big and ambitious you think Amazon’s plan to run the world’s computing may be, you should probably think bigger.  In a startling talk Thursday evening, a vice president who oversees the internal engineering of Amazon’s global computing system described how Amazon is building its own specialized computers, data storage systems, networking systems, even power substations and optical transmissions systems. In every case, he said, Amazon Web Services had developed ways to make its computers run cheaper and more efficiently than standard commercial products.

“We’re changing everything everywhere,” said James Hamilton, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon Web Services. “All of our engineers are focused” on reducing the costs of computing. He was speaking at Amazon’s second annual gathering of A.W.S. customers, partner companies and analysts, an event that drew 9,000 people…

Grazed from Investors.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Shares of Citrix Systems (CTXS) and VMware (VMW) were down for a second day following Amazon.com‘s (AMZN) announcement that its Amazon Web Services unit will enter the desktop virtualization market to boost its cloud computing business.

VMware’s virtualization software is widely used in corporate data centers to increase the flexibility and capabilities of computer servers, but it’s also moving onto desktops. Citrix has focused its virtualization technology in desktop PC environments.  AWS said in a blog post Wednesday that it plans to offer Amazon WorkSpaces, a desktop virtualization product. Analysts expect AWS virtualization platform to be ready in the first half of 2014…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading, vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, announces a preview of next-generation Bright Cluster Manager® at SC13 featuring support for Hadoop clusters, OpenStack clouds and more. Now, in addition to its leading HPC cluster management capabilities for datacenters and AWS clouds, Bright provisions, monitors and manages Big Data clusters and private clouds making it an even more comprehensive management solution.

Big Data

Using your choice of leading Hadoop distributions, Bright Cluster Manager provisions, monitors and manages Hadoop clusters. It employs Bright roles to make it easy to configure Hadoop services such as HBase, YARN and ZooKeeper. Bright collects metrics and performs healthchecks for Hadoop that target HDFS, JVM, job and network activity. Bright integrates with MapReduce and YARN to manage Big Data workloads efficiently, and ensures high availability of vital Hadoop services…

Grazed from FierceHealthIT. Author: Susan D. Hall.

Advances in big data and cloud computing are providing more democratic access to the reams of information the government collects, federal officials said at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association annual health IT conference in Bethesda, MD. Before, data would be shipped to researchers on encrypted hard drives. Now any vetted research institution can access the same data through the cloud, reports the Federal Times.

With better tools and improved access through the cloud more scientists and researchers will be able to use the data in productive ways, said Mike Tartakovsky, the chief information officer and director of the Office of Cyber Infrastructure and Computational Biology at the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance and enterprise computing solutions, today announced the immediate availability of Scyld HCA™, its new HPC Cloud Appliance. This appliance turns any HPC Linux cluster into a fully managed HPC hybrid cloud environment, which adds the ease of use and automation of a public cloud to an existing HPC cluster and has the added benefit of seamless hybrid access to Penguin Computing on Demand (“POD”) to support burst out compute and storage capability.

Scyld HCA™ is a fully integrated solution (software, hardware and managed service) that combines the flexibility and ease-of-access typically associated with a cloud based solution with the performance of “bare-metal” computing. Built on open standards including OpenStack and Ceph, Scyld HCA™ provides virtual login host lifecycle management, object and data storage, user and group administration, metering and reporting, authentication, a Web-based portal, and an interactive Web GUI for hardware and workflow management…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Gilad Parann-Nissany.

The cloud computing industry is currently experiencing tremendous growth. Studies predict that by 2014, 60% of server workload will be virtualized and the total size of the industry will be $150 billion (up from $48 billion in 2008). Alongside this growth, cloud computing has also seen an increase in criminal activities in the cloud.

Cloud computing faces many of the same threats as the physical workplace. Attackers use tactics such like social engineering or working from the inside. They take advantage of employees’ use of social media and downloading of applications on company computers to send attacks over the web. They continue to take advantage of email with increasingly sophisticated viruses that bypass anti-virus tools. Hackers focus on targeting specific organizations with valuable data – attacking in a planned and professional way. All of these threats affect the cloud, the data center, and personal devices…

Grazed from Webopedia. Author: Vangie Beal.

If you’re looking for a solid cloud storage provider, here’s 5 to try. Cloud storage basically means "the storage of data online in the cloud," wherein a company’s data is stored in and accessible from multiple distributed and connected resources that comprise a cloud.
Today businesses of all shapes and sizes use cloud storage, not only because of lower costs (you don’t need to purchase, manage and maintain expensive hardware) but cloud storage can provide the benefits of greater accessibility and reliability; rapid deployment; strong protection for data backup, archival and disaster recovery purposes.

5 Cloud Storage Service Providers to Try

If you’re looking for a solid cloud storage provider, here’s 5 to try:..

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Sean Gallagher.

Apparently even the government can have too much cloud capacity. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has announced that it is putting the brakes on a $450 million commercial cloud-computing contract because of a lack of demand from within the Department of Defense.

In a notice posted by the DISA to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the agency’s contracting officer Scott Stewart wrote, "Initial indications are the demand will not require a contract with the ceiling estimated in [the] draft solicitation. We are currently revising our acquisition strategy."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author:

Microsoft definitely doesn’t want developers to eschew its cloud, that’s for sure. Redmond’s latest additions to its arsenal of cloud-based resources are aimed squarely at developers, and while a new version of Visual Studio (2013) is part of that mix, there’s an entirely new offering: Visual Studio Online. Formerly branded as Team Foundation Service, Visual Studio Online is a Windows Azure-hosted development environment designed to work as an online complement to Visual Studio’s desktop tools.

Most of the features offered through Visual Studio Online ought to be familiar territory, both for Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers. The hosted source control system, for instance, works with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Version Control system, but will operate transparently with Git as well — a nice tip of the hat to those who already have projects managed with Git and don’t feel like scrapping it in favor of a Microsoft solution. Likewise, Visual Studio is the preferred software client for working with projects hosted in Visual Studio Online, but Eclipse and Xcode are supported too…