Category: News

August 19, 2013 Off

Improve IT oversight with cloud management services

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

IT departments implement process controls to keep operations running as needed, and best practices, like ITIL, emerged because we need standardized ways to operate our IT practices so they run efficiently, reliably and securely. But, self-service public cloud computing has changed the IT management landscape.

Analysts with a credit card, some data and an interesting problem no longer need to wait for IT to respond to their ticket request for a server and analysis software. A developer who wants to test a new idea can upload source code and data to a cloud provider and be back to coding in minutes, without having to contend with bureaucratic procedures. The democratization of access to computing resources is no doubt a positive factor for businesses, governments and other organizations, but we need to retool our management procedures and governance practices to accommodate the way we work with cloud computing…

August 19, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: VMware Adds Seven Analytics Content Packs to vCenter

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware (VMW) beefed up its analytics capabilities for machine data in its vCenter Log Insight product by releasing seven new content packs from various technology partners. The content packs were developed to enable vCenter Log Insight to consume unstructured data from a wider variety of sources while at the same time providing customers with more valuable insights into their data so they can more precisely and accurately identify and troubleshoot issues in virtual and cloud environments.

"Now our partners can target the broad VMware vSphere install base by augmenting VMware’s analytics capabilities, and customers can go to our marketplace and get up-to date domain or purpose-built content packs for their specific deployments," said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager of cloud management at VMware, in a prepared statement…

August 19, 2013 Off

Jama Software Raises $13 Million To Bring Its SaaS-Based Product Delivery Platform To Enterprises

By David

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ryan Lawler.

Organizations need better tools for managing their product development, and the legacy options that they have today aren’t well positioned for today’s distributed teams or agile workflows. Jama Software offers a cloud-based product that is designed to help teams finish projects faster and also to keep an entire organization on the same page. And it’s raised $13 million to go after that opportunity.

Jama Software provides a SaaS-based platform that helps to accelerate product development within large, globally distributed enterprises. It works by tying together all the requirements and procedures that teams need to move projects forward and putting it together all in one place…

August 19, 2013 Off

CloudCast – Weather Prediction In The Cloud

By David

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

When you can crunch your Big Data on the Cloud with Amazon EMR, for example, why not shift weather simulation on the Cloud as well? CloudCast does pretty much this with their local weather prediction. Cloud’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) architecture is best suited for leveraging third party services for making them accessible on cross platform structures which can be further extended using the capacious capabilities of cloud computing to facilitate both enterprise level users and individual entities. Cloud is now being used for the facilitating people in their daily lives and CloudCast is the best example, a cloud based application that forecasts local weather for the next 15 minutes.

CloudCast originates from the ECE department at UMass as a research project (publication) and claims to successfully deliver localized weather forecast for the next 15minutes to your mobile device. It’s a new application for short-term, localized weather prediction. CloudCast has multi-platform support and its back-end functionality relies on Cloud virtualization, enabling users to get weather forecasts for short spans since the team claims that extremely bad weather incidents are isolated and local. CloudCast is of immense usability keeping in view the disasters taking place around the world and extreme weather conditions resulting in a great number of human casualties and financial losses…

August 19, 2013 Off

Opscode Enterprise Chef cooks up broader cloud computing capabilities around storage and networking

By David

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Opscode has extended the capabilities of its Chef IT configuration and automation platform beyond just compute to cover networking and storage infrastructure in a new release called Enterprise Chef. The firm also announced it is working with Microsoft to better integrate Chef with the widely used Windows PowerShell tool.

Available immediately, Enterprise Chef builds on the existing capabilities of Chef for automating the provisioning and configuration of servers, based on reusable definitions called cookbooks and recipes that are written using the Ruby programming language…

August 19, 2013 Off

3 Things That Could Halt The Growth Of Cloud Computing

By David

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Joanna Zamojta.

In fact, it is expected to grow by leaps and bounds: a recent Morgan Stanley report states AWS revenue is expected to hit $24 billion by 2023. Logic dictates competing cloud hosting providers will also see similar growth. However, things can go wrong. Issues will come up, just like anything else in the tech world, that will not only slow the growth of this infrastructure, but halt it dead in its tracks if these issues aren’t addressed. Here are three issues that could hinder the success of cloud computing, in order to lessen their chances of occurring.

1.False Advertisement
Some cloud hosting vendors are hoping you have no idea what the cloud is all about. In this way, they are able to sell you on their definition of the cloud and how their solution is going to be perfect for your company, without once asking about the applications you rely on. If those who know nothing of the cloud believe these fantasies and sign up for cloud hosting services, there is bound to be an issue that results in failure somewhere along the line. This failure will then be blamed on the cloud, when instead it was nothing more than a compatibility issue easily resolved by having a firmer understanding of the cloud and all of the options available…

August 19, 2013 Off

Whitepaper: Cloud Storage. Solved!

By David

Parallels Cloud Server transforms how you deliver the cloud. Parallels Cloud Server combines Parallels Cloud Storage with Parallels Containers and Parallels Hypervisor to dramatically improve server reliability, performance, and profitability.

August 19, 2013 Off

Nextcast Q&A: Tier 3 co-founder Jared Wray on the future of cloud computing

By David

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: Jeff Dickey.

Jared Wray, founder and CTO of cloud computing startup Tier 3, is helping to build the future of enterprise business.  A serial entrepreneur, Wray is most excited about how cloud technologies help customers move faster and cheaper, allowing for efficient iteration and innovation. His company scored $10 million last year from Madrona, Ignition and Intel Capital, an it continues to grow fast with addition of experienced tech leader Matthew Schiltz as CEO earlier this year.

In this edition of Nextcast, Wray discusses his thoughts about cloud computing, as well as his own entrepreneurial background which he said started from being broke…

August 18, 2013 Off

Is the Writing on the Wall for Cloud Already?

By David

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Theo Priestley.

The IT industry moves in cycles. Much like the fashion industry, trends come and go then return with a bang. It seems that Cloud Computing is about to hit that cycle now and go out of fashion faster than it came in. The NSA and PRISM break out has exposed data security at a global scale that nobody was, but really should have been, prepared for. But it’s also raised eyebrows across the C-level in the enterprise as to whether they want to invest in a cloud strategy now.

An exchange this morning with Ray Wang of Constellation Research revealed that 100 clients think that the US Govt has screwed over every cloud vendor with what’s happening and that on-premise software is back on the menu. It’s hardly surprising, you could tell that the writing was on the wall when Snowden hit the headlines but the turnaround is proving a lot faster. But it’s not just Cloud vendors who are sweating…

August 18, 2013 Off

Executives Increasingly Hedging Their Public Cloud Bets, Survey Shows

By David

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Given the attention and hyperbole given to public cloud computing these days, one can be forgiven for thinking that on-premises computing is destined for the history books.  However, a new survey suggests a resurgence of interest in on-premises computing, via private cloud, is underway — with today’s IT executives opting to mix and match both inside and outside IT resources in new ways.

Computing resources and applications come from enterprises’ data centers, from data centers in other business units, from outside partners and vendors, and from outside cloud-based services. Few executives foresee their organizations relying on one single source — they fully intend to mix and match all available resources for future business computing needs…