Category: News

Grazed from LinuxInsider. Author: Jay Lyman.

The discussion and debate over open source cloud software’s compatibility with cloud leader Amazon’s proprietary APIs was just beginning when the 451 Group released "The OpenStack Tipping Point" in April. With the advancement of the OpenStack software and community — along with lingering questions about the desired level of compatibility with Amazon’s cloud — the matter is heating up. However, the issue of Amazon cloud compatibility is largely a non-issue.

Enterprise customers are focused on solving their computing and business challenges. They typically center on promptly providing their customers and internal users and divisions with adequate resources and infrastructure; speeding application development and deployment; and avoiding so-called "Shadow IT," which normally involves use of Amazon’s cloud…

Grazed from WHIR. Author: Nicole Henderson.

IT solutions provider CSC acquired big data analytics provider Infochimps on Tuesday for an undisclosed amount. Based in Austin, TX, and Silicon Valley, CA, respectively, Infochimps is a developer of cloud-based big data analysis software for enterprises.

As a wholly-owned subsidiary of CSC, the Infochimps team will report to CSC’s big data and analytics business unit led by Sashi Reddi, VP and GM, CSC. Infochimps will remain under its existing leadership. “At the core of Infochimps’ DNA is our unique, open source-based Big Data and cloud expertise,” Jim Kaskade, CEO, Infochimps said in a blog post. “Infochimps was founded by data scientists, cloud computing, and open source experts, who have built three critical analytic services required by virtually all next-generation enterprise applications: real-time data processing and analytics, batch analytics and ad hoc analytics – all for actionable insights, and all powered by open standards.”…

Grazed from American Banker. Author: Penny Crosman.

AT&T and CSC have agreed to partner to provide cloud computing services to enterprises such as financial services companies. The announcement comes the same week a PricewaterhouseCoopers study of financial services executives found 71% plan to invest more in cloud computing this year and 50% plan to invest in private cloud technology. Also this week, IBM rolled out new Power- and x86-based servers to the company’s Flex System intended to be used in private clouds.

Systems integrator CSC already offers a cloud computing service called BizCloud. It provides virtualized server, storage and networking technology, often installing the popular VBlock configuration of EMCstorage, Cisco servers and switches and VMWare virtualization software…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: David Weldon.

Don’t kid yourself that cloud computing prices are justified, despite recent pricing gouging. That is the claim of cloud hosting company ProfitBricks, which this week lashed out at rivals for misleading customers on their pricing strategies. Andreas Gauger, founder and CMO of the German-based ProfitBricks, blogged this week that his company would cut its cloud services fee in half, making his service as cheap to use as Amazon, according to a report in CloudPro.

Gauger said ProfitBricks is slashing prices for CPU core and RAM, with single-CPU core server prices cut from 5 cents per hour to 2.5 cents per hour. Despite recent reports about Google and Amazon dropping their cloud computing rates, Gauger says those rates are still hiding huge profit margins. "So here is the deal: If I were to sell our product at the same prices as Amazon or Rackshare does, I would have gross margins far higher than the quoted 60 percent to 80 percent," Gauger said…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Randall Jackson.

The issue of data sovereignty is starting to drive business decision making with regard to data held in the cloud, according to New Zealand email security and hosting company SMX. SMX co-founder and chief technology officer, Thom Hooker, said government organisations are particularly sensitive about the sovereignty issue, which is a driver behind SMX’s high uptake among government and local government organisations.

More than half of New Zealand’s local government organisations and around one third of the District Health Boards have now subscribed to SMX’s cloud service. Hooker said data sovereignty is an even more important issue nowadays as businesses begin to move mail servers to the Cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Last week it was IBM. Now CenturyLink has joined the community advisory board that will, in theory, help Cloud Foundry establish itself as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enterprises will use. cloudfoundrylogoThat’s no mean feat. Developers often love PaaSes, which give them an easy environment to build their applications, but big companies often balk at deploying those applications on a third-party platform and bring them in house.

Pivotal, the spin-off partially owned by EMC and VMware, is backing this Cloud Foundry play big time but apparently realizes it needs strong third-party support — including from cloud competitors — to avoid the perception that any one company is big-footing the process…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Midsize firms often turn to cloud computing for increased efficiency, and this move is now proving to help the environment at the same time. A new study shows that the cloud is reducing energy use annually by 80 percent at both public and private companies thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These green traits are proving to be a big plus for midsize firms.

Reducing Dependence

A global green IT association called The Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), recently released a study in cooperation with Harvard University, Imperial College, Reading University, and Microsoft Europe entitled "The Enabling Technologies of a Low-Carbon Economy – a Focus on Cloud Computing." The study, featured in the Cloud Times, found that as more companies utilize the cloud, the U.S. will reduce its energy dependence and save $2.2 billion in energy costs…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

Google Wednesday rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand. The rollout comes just a few months after Microsoft improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling features. Both companies are effectively playing catch-up with leading IaaS provider Amazon Web Services, which already offers such features.

Load balancing is a “critical” feature for any highly scalable cloud deployment, Google engineers wrote in announcing the company’s service today. It allows Google Compute Engine (GCE) to automatically and intelligently route traffic across a collection of servers. This replaces a manual process where new virtual machines (VM) would be provisioned by the user…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Event Announcement.

Returning for its third year, CloudBeat will track the growing maturity of the cloud and identify the hot issues for the next twelve months.  CloudBeat 2013 is held in San Francisco, USA, on September 9-10, 2013.

We’ll cut through the hype surrounding the cloud by gathering real customers who have gone through the pain of adoption and change, and who have compelling stories to tell about the ways in which the cloud continues to transform their business…