Category: News

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

In the fiercely competitive world of IaaS cloud computing driven by a race to the bottom on prices, service providers are constantly looking for new services that can be outsourced from the enterprise to their cloud data centers. Hoping to ride the wave of mobile computing, cloud service providers’ latest target is mobile application development.

This week Amazon Web Services made it easier for mobile developers to send push notifications at massive scale to all types of end points, including iOS, Android and Kindle mobile devices. AWS enabled the push notification functionality through its Simple Notification Service (SNS), which also supports e-mail, Simple Queue Service (SQS), which is a messaging platform, and HTTP. Amazon’s not the first to be targeting mobile developers, though, as Rackspace and Microsoft have each equipped their clouds with services targeted specifically at mobile developers…

Grazed from CloudPhysics. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPhysics, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, announced $10 million in Series B funding and released its SaaS offering, which automatically uncovers hidden operational hazards before problems emerge as well as identifies radical efficiency improvements in storage, compute and networking with VMware workloads. The CloudPhysics tools give IT more power to understand, troubleshoot and optimize their virtualized systems.

CloudPhysics is opening a Card Store, essentially an app store built on an industry-wide dataset and community. The CloudPhysics user interface is composed of Cards, each of which is a highly focused app to solve a particular IT operations problem. Cards are built by CloudPhysics and members of its user community using the Card Builder feature of the cloud-based service and range across all IT operations use cases from planning, procurement, reporting, analysis, troubleshooting and capacity management…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Tom Kemp.

Historically, IT was one department that handled IT services for an entire company — one department to rule them all, if you will. From email to software to printer problems, they were relied upon for a variety of issues. As technology continues to evolve, more companies are turning to Software as a Service (SaaS) for their business needs. Of course there are various benefits that are associated with this new IT and employee dynamic, but also unintended consequences — a rift in the way IT works.

Gartner says enterprise apps will generate nearly $40 billion in sales for developers by 2016. A stronghold for consumer-friendly photo apps, games, and renegade business apps, the app stores of today are now going through a major renovation as the enterprise-class comes into its own…

Grazed from Basho. Author: PR Announcement.

Basho Technologies, the leader in distributed systems software, announced today the availability of Riak CS 1.4 and Riak CS 1.4 Enterprise. Riak CS 1.4 continues Basho’s commitment to provide cloud storage software that is simple to operate, highly available by design, and compatible with industry cloud standards. Riak CS is used by organizations worldwide to power their public and private clouds.

Riak CS 1.4 introduces formal integration with OpenStack, provides enhanced performance and manageability, includes community requests, and improves performance at scale. Riak CS 1.4 Enterprise significantly boosts the performance of multi-data center replication by allowing for concurrent channels, so the full capacity of the network and cluster size can scale the performance to available resources…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Rebecca Grant.

Tradescape has raised $43 million for its software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to help online businesses handle their finances. The $43 million sum is the first chunk of of a proposed $114 million round. Tradecape works with ad agencies, content publishers, and content creators to manage transactions that start in digital media marketplaces.

Its “financial clearing” technology automates financial reconciliation, clearing, billing, settlement, invoicing, reporting, and auditing. Buying and selling media is a complicated process. Tradescape’s tools helps brands, agencies, and marketers ensure that they stay on-budget without constantly needing to check in with their partners and track campaign performance…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

There’s a growing trend of abbreviating anything you put on the Cloud as (Anything) as a Service or XaaS paradigm and with the increasing deployment of the Cloud based platform in the practical domains, the issues of power consumption and dynamic power allocation have begun to surface. Power aware provisioning of virtual machines for real-time services is the need of the hour and there are many schemes under active R&D with the intention to minimize the power consumption within the Cloud based environments.

Power smart Clouds are not only cost effective but they also are of great utility for the enterprise level Cloud migrations where serviceability and power management is dedicated issue to address. Cloud based Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) schemes are in practice for the smart power aware Clouds. These schemes do not only make the Cloud performance optimized in the real time environments, it also makes it much easier to handle the power complexities of the Cloud…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Infrastructure as a Service providers continue to cut cloud pricing in an effort to lure new customers, but many corporate cloud customers see this race to the bottom as a marketing stunt — and they won’t take the bait. Amazon Web Services cut dedicated instance prices in mid-July, which was quickly followed by a Rackspace Inc. blog post that questioned whether AWS’ dedicated instances are truly dedicated at all, and claimed a price and performance advantage.

Into this fray then stepped another Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, Cambridge, Mass.-based ProfitBricks Inc., whose executives accused both AWS and Rackspace of being less than truthful about gross margins for cloud services. ProfitBricks also cut its own IaaS prices by 50%…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cisco Systems is offering an 802.11ac wireless access point that can be deployed and managed through the cloud, enabling organizations to address the growing number of mobile devices connecting to the network in a faster, more secure and more manageable environment. Cisco officials Aug. 13 unveiled the Meraki MR34, the networking company’s latest offering to support the new 802.11ac wireless standard, which offers three times the speed of the current 802.11n WiFi standard and twice the bandwidth.

"You can fit more devices on the air," Sanjit Biswas, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group, told eWEEK. The 802.11ac standard is gaining momentum as market transitions such as cloud computing and high-bandwidth applications like video, IT mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) are fueling demand for greater speed and bandwidth from wireless networks. In addition, broadband carriers continue to look to offload traffic onto WiFi networks where possible to reduce the skyrocketing demand on their networks…

Grazed from ITPRo. Author: Jane McCallion.

Microsoft has made a number of updates to its Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that it claims will reduce mobile app development time and help deliver high availability. The first of these updates is the general availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs, which have been in testing until now.

According to a blog post by Miranda Luna of the Windows Azure Mobile Services team at Microsoft, Windows Azure Notification Hubs held mobile app developers to rapidly deliver personalised push notifications to Android, iOS and Windows devices around the world…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

GreenQloud, the world’s first Truly Green™ cloud software company powered by renewable energy, today announced the launch of QloudSync, a new cloud storage syncing client at GROW, a conference that focuses on the future of innovation, growth and entrepreneurship by bringing together technology pioneers, influencers and investors who are passionate to finding solutions to solve the problems of today. GreenQloud is a proud sponsor of the GROW Conference and will be onsite for all conference activities.

QloudSync is the newest of GreenQloud’s Truly Green™ cloud computing services to run exclusively on renewable energy, enabling customers to safely and securely sync, store and share data such as photos, videos, e-books and documents without leaving a carbon footprint…