Category: News

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

What do you do if you need more than 150,000 CPU cores but don’t have millions of dollars to spend on a supercomputer? Go to the Amazon cloud, of course. For the past few years, HPC software company Cycle Computing has been helping researchers harness the power of Amazon Web Services when they need serious computing power for short bursts of time. The company has completed its biggest Amazon cloud run yet, creating a cluster that ran for 18 hours, hitting 156,314 cores at its largest point and a theoretical peak speed of 1.21 petaflops. (A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second, or a million billion.)

To get all those cores, Cycle’s cluster ran simultaneously in Amazon data centers across the world, in Virginia, Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. The bill from Amazon ended up being $33,000. USC chemistry professor Mark Thompson needed the cluster to design materials that might be well-suited to converting sunlight into solar energy…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthor Cole.

Cloud architectures come in many forms, but in general they can be broken down into three distinct categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). The difference lies largely in the functionality you hope to derive from the cloud and the degree to which you are willing to move traditional data architectures to either internal or external clouds.

So far, SaaS has proven popular for those who hope to lessen their burden in supplying leading business applications like customer resource management (CRM) or business intelligence (BI), while IaaS has gravitated toward Big Data storage and backup/recovery applications. PaaS has gotten off to a slower start primarily because it centers largely on custom application development and is therefore the most difficult to design and provision…

Grazed from Jelastic. Author: PR Announcement.

Jelastic, Inc., the company that is re-defining the economics of cloud deployment and management, today announced the industry’s first integrated Platform-as-Infrastructure solution for private, public and hybrid clouds. As an industry-first, Jelastic has combined two of the cloud’s most transformative technologies – Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – into a single platform that is uniquely optimized for enterprises, hosting service providers and OEMs.

Jelastic’s Platform-as-Infrastructure solutions integrate the conventional models of PaaS and IaaS, driving superior, new cost savings and increased efficiencies. Today’s implementations of IaaS provide a highly flexible and configurable method for building Infrastructure, but setup can be complicated and difficult to manage. While simple to manage and easy to deploy, many of today’s PaaS implementations are limited in their support of standard applications and lack the critical levels of configurability and flexibility enterprises demand. Jelastic Platform-as-Infrastructure solutions combine the best of both worlds, without any of the inherent limitations…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adam Hughes.

Does an enterprise go with a public or a private cloud deployment? It’s no longer one or the other. Nearly half of large enterprises will have deployed a hybrid cloud by the end of 2017, according to a recent Gartner Inc. study. The growth of hybrid cloud only compounds the use of cloud computing in general, which will account for the bulk of IT spending by 2017, the report noted.

"Hybrid is indeed the cloud architecture that will dominate," said Dave Bartoletti, analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. "We’re seeing over 50% of enterprises prioritizing private cloud in 2013 to 2014, and there will likely be very few private clouds that don’t have a public [hybrid] component." Private clouds don’t provide scaling options and cost efficiencies to the degree that public clouds do, but enterprises also want the option to keep some data behind their firewalls…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

SugarCRM is hoping to gain inroads against its much larger rival Salesforce.com with a revamped user interface it says places emphasis on the needs of individual users, not business managers seeking a wide view of sales activity in their company. This "user-first" design approach includes a few pages from Salesforce.com’s playbook, however, such as collaborative activity streams that seem close in purpose to Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which was announced in November 2009.

SugarCRM is also building in what it calls "contextual intelligence" about objects in the CRM system. For example, if a user is examining a particular company’s customer record, the system might pull in a news article about a recent acquisition the customer made. It will be possible for SugarCRM users to integrate data from internal ERP systems, social networks and information services such as Dun & Bradstreet…

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Rowan Scarbourough.

The U.S. military’s main battlefield intelligence processor, so crucial to the war in Afghanistan, still lacks an element common to civilian computer networks — a cloud. A cloud computing architecture would give intelligence analysts at different locations simultaneous and wider access to all sorts of data, be it satellite imagery or reports on Taliban informants.

In theory, faster, more thorough intelligence products lead to success on the battlefield, such as identifying and disrupting insurgents planting improvised explosive devices — the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Army’s $28 billion “cloudless” processor — the Distributed Common Ground System, commonly called D-Sigs — has prompted congressional criticism. Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and a Marine Corps war veteran, has pressed the Army to turn to commercially available computing products to address the deficiency and, in his words, “save lives.”…

Grazed from ITBusinessNet.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The last couple of years has introduced us to a relatively new phenomena, which has seen some big names in the technology industry taking over various cloud computing firms. It’s been deemed ‘The battle for the cloud’, and as IT companies continue to increase their spend on software and marketing software, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in this ‘battle’.

This June, SAP AG acquired Swiss-based firm Hybris AG, to compete against Saleforce’s market share gain which had left the company falling behind the global cloud computing company in the market. Salesforce had previously acquired ExactTarget, a marketing software film earlier in the month, after they received $300,000 in financial assistance from the Bank of America. Firms such as these seem eager to acquire marketing companies such as ExactTarget and are willing to do what it takes to make it happen…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Agam Shah.

Xerox is offering managed service tools for enterprises that want to reduce the costs of remote printing. Xerox has added features to its Mobile Print app and bundled more security and audit tools so the app can be easily incorporated within existing managed print services in enterprises, the company said Monday. From PCs or mobile devices, users will be able to print documents at remote locations, but the cost and volume of the printing will be monitored by managed-print service administrators.

The features and tools are part of Xerox’s "next-generation managed printing services strategy," said Mike Feldman, president of Large Enterprise Operations at Xerox. The strategy revolves around improving print security, reducing costs, and better utilizing printing and imaging devices in an infrastructure…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

One of the goals of cloud computing is to cut down on the work it takes to maintain a company’s underlying hardware and software infrastructure. Servers are virtualized, and tools like Puppet and Chef make it easier to manage and configure hundreds or even thousands of servers. Everything from application design to storage management is being rethought thanks to the cloud.

Database management systems are no exception. Salesforce.com has been particularly bullish on a database called PostgreSQL, an open source alternative to Oracle’s flagship database products that can also compete with so-called “NoSQL” databases modeled on the mega-data storage systems created by the likes of Google and Amazon. This year, Salesforce hired Tom Lane, one of the core contributors to Postgres, to develop the open source project and build some internal projects for the company…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Kevin Gruneisen.

At its most basic level, traveling along the IT transformation journey from conventional data centers to the dynamic, intelligent environments of cloud computing is an adventure in self discovery that has a way of changing you as much as your technology. You may start out thinking you know who you are and where you are going, but as you dig deeper into cloud computing, your goals will inevitably change as your awareness of who you are expands.

No Leap of Faith Required

The good news is that it is possible to start the journey toward cloud computing one step at a time from wherever you are, and even realize some efficiencies and performance rewards in the early stages. No leap of faith required. Implementing cloud computing is a pragmatic decision that needs to be executed with a painstaking attention to detail and a deep and broad understanding of your organization…