Category: News

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing integration is easier than ever, according to new research that found more businesses are confident about the adoption and use of cloud services within their information infrastructures.

Less Concern

Both business and IT professionals don’t have as many concerns as they had in the past about integrating the cloud with their operations, according to Saugatuck Technology’s "2013 Global Cloud IT Adoption, Use and Benefits Survey," featured in Information Management. Half of respondents reported being concerned about security and privacy issues…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Dan Worth.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said it is “inevitable” that business of all sizes will eventually move to the cloud. Writing in a blog post the Google chief said that, while only a few years ago cloud computing was greeted with doubt, it has now fully established itself as a legitimate way to run a business.

“In 2010, the suggestion that a company could move all of its employees to the cloud was often met with scepticism. People relied on desktop computers and Exchange servers because that was what they’d used in the workplace for the past two decades," he said…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Del Lunn.

With the adoption of cloud computing, and more specifically cloud storage, on the rise, companies can now easily look to reduce the cost and complexity of their applications and associated data. The economies of scale and shared infrastructure allow service providers to deliver cloud-based storage at a very low cost, compared to traditional on-premise storage platforms.

Currently, the popular cloud storage use cases tend to be infrequently accessed data scenarios such as archiving, backup, DR, and offsite data protection. But what happens when a company decides it wants to move its data and applications back to the on-premise storage platform? Del Lunn of GlassHouse Technologies talks us through the biggest challenges…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: John Martin.

What can the experience of managing IBM mainframes teach us about designing storage for public or private cloud computing? Plenty, it turns out… In my previous post, Designing Cloud Storage? Ditch the LUN!, I pointed out the challenges of using LUNs for virtual and cloud storage environments that need to scale.

That post, and my thinking around storage management in general, were both influenced by a nine-year-old blog post by John Tyrrel: The Next Step In Virtualization. When Tyrell wrote that, the next step in virtualization was to ditch the LUN, virtualization was still pretty cutting edge. Yet, here we are, almost a decade later, and we’re still using LUNs as the storage container for most server virtualization infrastructures…

Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Cloud computing services providers backing the OpenStack software standard aim to build momentum with the upcoming release of Havana, an upgrade aimed at speeding up OpenStack adoption by the biggest companies.

Due this month, Havana is expected to iron out some of the technical issues uncovered by enterprises that have been testing OpenStack in data centers. Cloud services providers rent servers and storage to enterprise customers via the Internet cloud. Open-source software licensed freely, OpenStack connects data centers to cloud services…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Datadog, the SaaS-based monitoring and data analytics platform that provides a unified view of IT infrastructure, announced today monitoring for auto-scaling Amazon Web Services (AWS), HP Cloud and OpenStack cloud environments. Modern cloud infrastructures adjust to application demand by auto-scaling. It guarantees IT resource capacity, for applications, but has also created difficulties for legacy monitoring tools which require system administrators to continuously update these systems manually.

Additionally, legacy tools have not been built to monitor collections of servers working together as a single unit. The modern cloud environment requires aggregated data analysis and automated monitoring adjustments that instantly reflects the infrastructure that is being monitored…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Carol Sliwa.

Open source, software-based OpenStack Block Storage, also known by the code name Cinder, takes a different approach from the traditional block storage products that enterprise IT shops are intimately familiar with. Ashish Nadkarni, a research director in the storage systems practice at Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp., likened OpenStack Block Storage to storage virtualization from vendors such as Hitachi Data Systems and IBM in its ability to provide an abstraction layer to integrate third-party arrays and pool storage resources, but in an open source format.

In this interview, Nadkarni also explained the provisioning model, hardware options and the role OpenStack Block Storage plays as part of the open source OpenStack cloud computing and management platform…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela and Dina Bass.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT:US) unveiled price cuts for Web services, seeking to catch up to market-leader Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN:US) in cloud computing. Starting Nov. 1, Microsoft will offer discounts for its Windows Azure cloud service, as well as annual payment plans for customers signing long-term contracts, said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise chief who has been named as a possible replacement for retiring Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

The world’s largest software maker has pledged to match its rival’s prices for public-cloud products that let customers store and run applications via the Internet. Amazon, whose Web Services unit was the early entrant, is more than five times bigger than rival providers combined, when measured by cloud-computing capacity usage, according to researcher Gartner Inc…

Grazed from Replicon. Author: Vivek Gopalpuria.

SaaS is a modern business model for application software. A vendor who is invested in on-premise, hosted, and SaaS models cannot commit to providing all the benefits of a true SaaS model due to conflicting revenue models. Their resources are going to be spread thin supporting multiple versions rather than driving innovation.

Additionally, if the vendor makes the majority of their revenue selling on-premise software, it will be very difficult for them to fully commit to a true SaaS solution since the majority of their resources will be allocated to supporting the on-premise software. Even if they do support multi-tenancy, their SaaS customers may have to wait several years for a new version if the hosted solution is constrained by the release schedule of the vendor’s on-premise product…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe Weinman.

Cloud computing products and services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace as well as companies ranging from AT&T to Zuora are clearly gaining traction, growing at a 36% CAGR, according to one recent forecast. As cloud computing becomes pervasive, customers will need to determine how various cloud components from various companies will work together to meet business objectives.

The IEEE—”the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology,” and the one that standardized Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)—has brought together industry and academia to help develop Intercloud standards as part of its Cloud Computing Initiative and today announced an effort intended to test those standards under real-world conditions.(Disclosure: I am the chairman of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed executive committee)…