Category: News

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

A statement from Terremark, which is providing the backend service for the Healthcare.gov site, gives us a bit of insight into just one of those problems. Despite all the talk about the government adopting cloud computing, it appears that Healthcare.gov isn’t actually using the cloud. Instead, it sounds like it’s running in an old-school hosted environment.

“Since HHS asked us to provide additional compute and storage capacity, our engineers have worked 24/7 to trouble-shoot issues with the site. At the request of HHS’s deputy CIO, we are now undertaking infrastructure maintenance, which should be complete overnight. We anticipate the strengthened infrastructure will help eliminate application downtimes,” Verizon, Terremark’s owner, said in the statement it issued late on Tuesday…

Grazed from EconomicTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Rackspace Hosting today announced the launch of what it said is Asia’s first hybrid cloud powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform. "The new public cloud joins Rackspace’s existing portfolio of private cloud and dedicated solutions to complete the open cloud- company’s hybrid cloud offering to businesses throughout the Asia-Pacific region," the company said in a release.

"Rackspace identifies India as a robust and upcoming market, seen in their decision to launch the first hybrid cloud in Asia powered by Openstack," it added…

Read more from the source @ http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/rackspace-launces-asias-first-hybrid-cloud/articleshow/25010281.cms

Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

As cloud computing goes mainstream, businesses of all sizes are looking for a fast, intuitive and easy way to leverage the incredible power of the platform.

To meet this demand, BMC Software today launched two new programs aimed at making it easier for customers to get from "zero-to-cloud" in as little as 30 days. BMC ZipKit and BMC Express Cloud are designed as a solution bundle that delivers a cost-effective starter cloud to enterprises with a 30-day implementation time, giving the customer a quick cloud project win while providing the foundation of a scalable, long-term enterprise cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Nebula, which produces hardware loaded with a preconfigured version of OpenStack, and GigaSpaces, which supplies an application deployment system, have teamed up to ease the strain of migrating enterprise applications onto a private cloud.

Nebula is the OpenStack company that was co-founded by Chris Kemp, former CIO of NASA Ames Research Center and former CTO of NASA. He was instrumental, along with a team from Rackspace, in founding the OpenStack project. Nebula announced Thursday that it is offering its Nebula One hardware/software systems with both OpenStack and GigaSpaces’ Cloudify system…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Eric Blattberg.

A high-profile legal battle over a $600 million spy agency contract has finally come to an end. IBM has withdrawn the injunctive action it filed after Amazon received a favorable ruling regarding its $600 million cloud computing contract with the CIA.

“In light of the government’s recent submissions emphasizing its need to move forward on the contract, IBM has withdrawn its motion,” reads a statement provided to VentureBeat by an IBM representative. “IBM maintains its position that the [Government Accountability Office’s] findings were appropriate.”…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Jason Cumberland.

Migrating a traditional application to the cloud isn’t always as complex as it appears. Here are three of the most common misconceptions about moving from a dedicated server deployment to a cloud environment.

Myth 1: The cloud won’t support networking for multi-tier applications.

While software-defined networking (SDN) is undoubtedly white-hot in IT, the reality is that it’s still a developing and unproven technology among enterprise buyers. One hurdle is the unforeseen risks associated with new concepts, such as security groups that are usurping traditional enterprise security rules and firewall designs. For companies delivering SaaS or other enterprise applications, clients are likely to be uncomfortable with the security delivered through these designs. Case in point, this August Amazon Web Services’ security group policies resulted in virtual machine connectivity losses, among other glitches. For end-users in industries such as banking, financial services and healthcare, this kind of concept and security risk can be a deal-breaker…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing platform experienced problems Wednesday, as customers were unable to perform management functions or upload files to web sites hosted on Azure. The Windows Azure status dashboard reported issues with using FTP to upload files to web sites, although sites could publish content using Web Deploy or Git. The dashboard also reported widespread management problems for the Azure Compute cloud.

“We are experiencing an issue with Windows Azure Compute that may impact Service Management operations in the North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US sub-region,” Microsoft reported at 6:20 pm Eastern time…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Eucalyptus has updated its namesake software to make it easier for organizations to set up their own, in-house versions of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, letting users run Amazon workloads in private cloud deployments. Eucalyptus 3.4, available now, also comes with a number of new tools to ease system administration management in the enterprise.

The open source Eucalyptus platform allows an organization to set up cloud services that duplicate all of the AWS application programming interfaces (APIs), guaranteeing that any workload running on AWS can also run on a Eucalyptus platform. The point is that users who like using AWS but who are afraid of getting locked into the service can deploy Eucalyptus as an in-house alternative…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

While agility and responsiveness are important factors for any midsize company considering a move to distributed computing, cloud pricing remains the top priority. But in a segmented market where any start-up can purchase servers and start to offer managed services, it is difficult to accurately evaluate cost: What is a unit of the cloud really worth to IT professionals?

Grab a Stopwatch

There is no exact date for the birth of public cloud computing though most experts use 2006 as a solid starting point since it marked the first time that cloud deployments were available to companies and consumers at large. Clouds have since struggled through an adolescence riddled with hype and expectation and have finally matured into a stable market with a host of players from technology mainstays to mom-and-pop start-ups capable of providing national and international compute power. The problem, according to a recent eWeek article, is that no one ever sat down and defined how cloud computing should be measured, let alone priced. The result is a market with providers who charge whatever businesses will bear…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

The National Security Agency broke into secure networks owned by Google and Yahoo, which gave the US spy agency “back-door access” to hundreds of millions of private records, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The report, based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said the NSA infiltrated links connecting data centers of the two web giants around the world, yielding more than 181 million records over a 30-day period earlier this year…