Category: News

Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Brian Deagon.

Founded in 1992, NetApp (NTAP) is the second-largest provider of external data storage systems and software, behind EMC. Besides its data storage hardware, NetApp’s core software offering is Data OnTap, an operating system that helps users manage companywide data operations, including cloud-computing environments. Software now plays a larger role in data management, a trend called software defined storage.

NetApp says Data OnTap is the leading storage operating system worldwide. The emergence of cloud computing — where data is stored and apps reside in the Internet cloud — presents both challenges and opportunities for NetApp. It created a boom in new storage startups that might challenge the company. But it’s also advanced the rapid expansion in data creation in an increasingly digital world. The emergence of flash storage also altered the playing field. Flash is chip-based storage, instead of disk drives…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Eric Basu.

This is the third posting in my cyber awareness series for small to medium-sized business owners. One of the biggest buzzwords being used right now is “the cloud.” So, what is the cloud? There are many different definitions you can find, but for the small business owner it means essentially outsourcing your IT infrastructure (possibly including applications, servers, data storage, etc) remotely. Why would you move to the cloud? The most commonly cited reasons are focused upon the core business and cost savings, but in reality every company should consider carefully any move to the cloud to ensure it is the correct move for them.

For small to mid-size business owners migrating some or all of their systems to the cloud environments presents the usual IT issues, but the problems are compounded by having data stored and managed remotely, by external organizations and often in multiple locations. Among these issues are special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity, and security…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Kevin Benedict.

The middle-class jobs of the past, the jobs you and I could start with and retire from, are mostly gone today. It is much harder to find jobs that require simply hard-work, responsibility and dedication. In today’s world, in order to live a traditional middle-class lifestyle that supports home ownership, cars, a college education and a family, it takes a different mindset and inventory of skills. A set of skills our education system has yet to fully understand and embrace. These are the skills of a digital nomad.

Being a digital nomad means we depend less on company issued laptops, smartphones and tablets, as we desire our own personal tools (BYOD) that can travel with us from job to job and employer to employer. We depend less on companies for our software applications and seek cloud-based applications and services that are tied to us personally, not just our current employer. We seek recognition for our work beyond the four walls of our employer…

Grazed from CIO. Author: David Geer.

As everyone knows, cloud provider Nirvanix recently fell apart, declaring bankruptcy and leaving its customers in the lurch. Nirvanix gave enterprises less than a month to move their data to a new home. To avoid the fate of those customers, follow these best practices for safely moving data in and out of the cloud.

Due diligence: financials first

The Cloud Security Alliance’s February 2013 report, "The Notorious Nine: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013" has identified a lack of due diligence as a continuing threat to cloud computing. When enterprises do look into cloud providers, their view of things is a bit lopsided. "Cloud consumers place too much emphasis on information assurance and privacy, or focus on cost reduction and savings at the expense of investigating the financial health of candidate providers," says John Howie, COO, the Cloud Security Alliance…

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.”…