Category: News

Grazed from SpendMatters. Author: Thomas Case.

Considering the current mess with the Healthcare.gov website and related aspects of putting wheels on the Obamacare bandwagon, I thought I’d bring in my perspective from complex procurement solution implementations. Since this involves the government, I’ll (somewhat ironically) have to label this a conservative (aka old school) software rollout.

In the procurement software provider space, some of the most old-school prospects are the ones in aerospace and defense, financial services, and – drumroll – healthcare. When I say old-school I mean that they often use on-premise software, running on their own hardware – sometimes even inside their own data center, managed by their own people – or in hardened subsections of Level 4 (exceedingly robust) class data centers…

Grazed from Time. Author: Harry McCracken.

Over at ITworld, my friend (and former boss) Dan Tynan has a chilling account of cloud computing gone awry. It begins with his discovery that his Box online storage account had mysteriously gone missing. And the explanation of what happened is downright bizarre:

I had exhausted my support options, so I put on my reporter’s hat and politely asked Box.com corporate to look into this problem for me. At this point, I still held out hope that it was something stupid I had done that caused my files to be mislaid. Perhaps one of my various collaborators had sent a password reset and changed the email address associated with it. Perhaps I had hit my storage limit and missed the emails from Box.com prompting me to upgrade…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Scott Matterson.

TechRepublic ran an article in April of 2013 titled, “Cloud computing and the evolution of the data center.” The article, written by Thoran Rodrigues, looked at how data centers are tied to the cloud computing era, approaching the topic from the standpoint of what might be expected of data centers within cloud computing organizations. What about data centers in regular businesses, however? What lies in store for server rooms in companies that may (or may not) be branching out into the use of cloud computing?

Of course, the answer to this question depends on company outlook and requirements. Of the organizations that elect to utilize cloud services, their involvement may be a little (just using Salesforce to track campaigns) or a lot (no local resources and everything running in someone else’s cloud data center). You don’t have to go “all in” on the cloud, of course – there are private, public and hybrid cloud solutions to mix and match with…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

It’s been a week of controversy surrounding OpenStack and the platform as a service market and it just got more interesting. OpenStack yesterday announced a new project called Solum, backed by eBay, RedHat, Ubuntu/Canonical, dotCloud/Docker, Cloudsoft, Rackspace and Cumulogic. The blog post about it is very light on details. It says the project aims to ease the pain associated with:

• Application development and deployment
• Application lifecycle management across dev, test and production environments
• Portability between public and private clouds…

Grazed from IDEvnews. Author: Vance McCarthy.

By the end of the year, VMware is poised to ship an ambitious range of cloud management offerings aimed to help IT quickly and easily embrace business-facing cloud services. Earlier this month, VMware executives previewed releases for vCloud Automation Center 6.0; VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8; VMware IT Business Management Suite, and VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5. The company also updated the automation and management features of its VMware vCloud Suite 5.5, which it rolled out in August.

“With these cloud management solutions, VMware is pulling out all the stops to support for heterogeneous and on-demand services in a way that IT is more responsive to business needs,” VMware’s Martin Klaus, group manager for product marketing, told IDN…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

At Cloud Connect 2013 in Chicago this week, sessions and keynotes addressed Amazon Web Services, Eucalyptus Systems and Apache Cloudstack. Google App Engine was recognized as a leading platform-as-a-service. But attendees, voting with their feet, flocked to the sessions on OpenStack.

Speakers from newly publicized OpenStack implementers Gap, BrightTag and Argonne National Laboratory talked about their experiences with it. Surprisingly, one OpenStack cloud was initiated on a handful of used servers purchased "cheap" off of eBay. Another implementer warned that moving to OpenStack is a good idea, but you won’t be able to find operations people with any experience with it…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Kurt Marko.

Cloud is quintessential disruptive technology, making up one-third of what CNBC’s Jim Cramer calls today’s "Holy Trinity of Tech": mobile, social, cloud. And finally, years of enterprise IT resistance — fueled by fears tied to security, performance, system management and job security — are crumbling.

The latest InformationWeek State of Cloud Computing Survey found that 40% of respondents use cloud services, up seven points since 2011, with an additional 13% planning to do so by early next year. Only 20% have no plans to incorporate public cloud into their IT portfolios, down seven points from 2011. Similarly, the Uptime Institute’s annual survey of 1,000 data center facilities operators found that 28% use public cloud services, with large companies twice as likely as smaller ones to be adopters…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Internap Network Services Corporation (NASDAQ: INAP), a provider of high-performance hosting services, today announced the results of a Cloud Spectator report, "Performance Analysis: Benchmarks of Bare-Metal & Virtual Clouds," which found that Internap’s bare-metal cloud, AgileSERVER, offers as much as an order of magnitude better performance, consistency and value when compared to similar virtual cloud configurations for Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Rackspace OpenCloud. Cloud Spectator is an independent analyst group focused on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) performance and pricing.

Virtual cloud infrastructure solutions have gained significant interest and adoption. However, as organizations increasingly run more complex, computationally-intensive "fast data" applications in the cloud, performance issues can arise due to processing overhead created by the hypervisor layer and numerous tenants and tasks competing for shared resources…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Let’s get one thing straight – cloud computing is a fundamental change in the way technology is delivered. It packages together some basic technology innovations (primarily virtualization) and delivers them in new ways. The two best (and simplest) ways to think of cloud computing is to use a couple of acronyms from two friends of mine. The first comes from Dave Nielsen, creator of CloudCamp and posits that to be considered cloud, a service must be OSSM, standing for: On-demand,Self-service, Scalable and Measurable (more here).

The second comes from Joe Weinman, creator of the cloudonomics theory and author of the book of the same name. Weinman posits that cloud should be: Cloud – Common, Location independant, Online, Utility and onDemand. You’ll notice that in both those acronyms, the technology part of cloud is only one part…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Joanne Carew.

Cloud computing has the potential to make architects’ jobs quicker and easier, by promoting collaboration and mobility. This is according to Lynn Allen, an Autodesk technical evangelist, who was speaking at the Autodesk University Extension event in Johannesburg this week.

Allen highlighted three main reasons why architects should embrace cloud technology, the first being the mobile aspect of cloud. She noted that it is not unfathomable that architects will be using some type of mobile device as their workstations in the future. The fact that buying trends are shifting from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones further illustrates this shift, she noted. "Mobility and cloud computing allow for storage anywhere, which makes accessing a drawing on site, and storing large files, simpler," said Allen…