Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

"I can’t tell you how excited I was to get the call to come speak here," said Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate VP for cloud and enterprise engineering, Tuesday as he faced the Oracle OpenWorld audience filled with several thousand potential Windows Azure cloud users. No Microsoft executive had ever made an OpenWorld keynote before.

Oracle and Microsoft, for the last decade, have bitterly vied to see which would be the dominant database on Windows: Oracle or SQL Server. The stakes grew higher as Windows Server became more strongly entrenched in the enterprise data center. At some point, both decided neither was ever going to own the market outright. At the same time, the rise of Amazon Web Services showed what had been brewing while they grappled with each other. If some database users were finding a home on AWS, they potentially weren’t using either Oracle or SQL Server. It might just be time for a strategic re-alignment…

Grazed from Barron’s. Author: Tiernan Ray.

The fervor for disruption has become a fever. Last week I noted that cloud-computing software companies such as Salesforce.com (ticker: CRM) and Workday (WDAY) are the new stock-market darlings because they are disrupting the traditional businesses of Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) and the like.

But the market’s appetite for everything cloud is rapacious, and those current darlings will have to soon make way for a flood of new stock issues. Some of the new players are essentially building the cloud itself: They’re building the infrastructure that is allowing computing work to move off of the server computers stored in an enterprise’s own data center, and instead be run at the facilities of a telecommunications operator or a hosting provider…

Grazed from ExecutiveBiz. Author: Mary-Louise Hoffman.

VMware has unveiled a series of updates to its virtualization software portfolio that will work to help enterprises manage workloads in multiple cloud computing-based platforms, Network World reported Tuesday.
Brandon Butler writes the company updated its vCloud Automation Center that is built to automate information technology services delivery.

Version six of the automation tool is built to work with Red Hat OpenStack in addition to Microsoft‘s and Amazon‘s cloud infrastructures, according to the report. Butler reports vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.8 incorporates analytics technology that is designed to help users monitor configuration issues in cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and VMware…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.executivebiz.com/2013/10/vmware-updates-multi-platform-cloud-mgmt-products/

Grazed from F5. Author: PR Announcement.

F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) announced today it is joining the OpenStack Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor. By supporting the rapidly emerging and popular OpenStack cloud software, F5 is demonstrating its commitment to evolving standards-based cloud platforms and providing customers with greater choice and flexibility in deploying public and private cloud solutions.

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that helps organisations manage compute, storage, and networking resources in private and public cloud environments. Service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions around the world use OpenStack to power demanding production workloads…

Zadara Storage, Inc., provider of enterprise-class private cloud storage by the hour, today announced that its Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) service is now available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EU (Ireland) region through a new relationship with eircom, Ireland’s largest telecom services provider. eircom is an AWS Direct Connect location in Ireland with unparalleled access into the AWS Cloud directly from its state of the art data center in Dublin. The Zadara Storage VPSA can provide customers of both eircom and AWS EU with access to and use of private block- and file Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) services at hourly rates. In addition to AWS customers, customers of eircom colocation and fiber circuits now can take advantage of Zadara’s award winning enterprise Storage as a Service (STaaS) solution.

"European organizations big and small are ready for a transformative solution like Zadara’s".

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Carl Weinschenk.

In a way, the emergence of cloud computing is really what unified communications was about all along. Or, more precisely, doing all the heavy lifting in a place logically “above” the enterprise itself fits in perfectly with the concept of unified communications because it avoids the silos and boundaries at the lower levels.

The best may be yet to come. ARN, in a story about the UC environment in Australia, describes the impact of the cloud and Microsoft Lync on the overall UC environment. The story focuses on Frost & Sullivan research that says premise-based UC grew 2.4 percent last year and now is worth $698.5 million. It calls that growth moderate, and suggests that the pace was partly a result of organizations waiting to judge the stability of cloud-based approaches…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

After first allying with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to build the servers for its next-generation cloud platform, Verizon today revealed it has enlisted NetApp to provide the storage. According to Tom Shields, director of service provider marketing for NetApp, the Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage platforms will be the first live instances of the hybrid storage cloud technology called Clustered Data OnTap that NetApp previewed last month.

Chris Drumgoole, senior vice president of global operations for Verizon Terremark, says Verizon chose NetApp because, for the foreseeable future, most cloud computing deployments in the enterprise are going to be of a hybrid nature. Clustered Data OnTap will provide customers with a way to holistically manage storage across their own and Verizon data centers…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Heather Clancy.

Backupify is building on its success with cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery services for Google Apps and Salesforce.com by opening up its application programming interfaces (APIs) so that other software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers can create similar solutions.

The Backupify Developer Platform, which has been in a beta test since earlier this year, is designed to let SaaS providers add backup features to their services in a matter of hours without requiring custom code. The backups are encrypted to the level of Backupify’s own services…

Grazed from IDG. Author: Brandon Butler.

The latest code release of OpenStack’s cloud computing platform named Havana is packed with features that organizers say appeal directly to enterprise audiences. OpenStack is a turning into a broad project with more than a dozen open source components. While it started with basic compute and storage functionality, it’s grown to support virtual networking, identity and access management, and now new to this week’s release are tools to help better manage and deploy clouds.

Havana’s release has two major new components, and updates to a variety of others. One major new project is code-named Heat, which is an orchestration platform that allows users to more easily provision OpenStack-based clouds. Using Heat application developers can feed templates into the program and it will automatically deploy the resources. It can launch applications, create virtual machines and it automates the entire process, they say. It also provides cross-compatibility with Amazon Web Service’s orchestration platform named CloudFormation, which means AWS templates will work in OpenStack environments…

Grazed from ChannelPro. Author: Editorial Staff.

New research states that more than two thirds (69 percent) of customers questioned believe that cloud computing is as secure as, or more secure than, on-premise IT. This is a higher figure than a year ago when only 54 percent of those surveyed believed this to be the case, demonstrating that confidence in cloud services is increasing.

The Claranet survey, which polled 300 IT decision-makers from a range of SMBs, and enterprises, found that 73 percent of respondents were using some form of cloud service, up from 62 percent in 2012. While adoption rates have shown healthy increases across all businesses, regardless of size or vertical, the most significant growth was found in the midmarket where 81 percent of organisations are now using cloud services, up from 65 percent in 2012…