Category: News

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

Amazon Web Services has filed a complaint against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenging the need for and scope of corrective action taken by the Central Intelligence Agency in following recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office. GAO made the recommendations to the CIA in June in sustaining a bid protest filed in February by IBM after the CIA awarded AWS a contract worth up to $600 million over four years to build a private cloud for the entire intelligence community.

Taking the issue to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims – the final destination for some of the most contentious procurement cases – could help AWS avoid another bid protest from IBM if the CIA were to again award AWS the cloud contract, potentially expediting a resolution…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Increasingly, enterprises are adopting private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments while avoiding the security and latency issues associated with publicly hosted settings. As a result, organizations are also reevaluating how to optimize their future application delivery models. To help facilitate this effort, WSO2 and SUSE will jointly present a webinar on how IT professionals can efficiently address modern enterprise challenges and changing business demands using SUSE Cloud, the first enterprise OpenStack distribution, and WSO2 Stratos, the most complete open platform as a service (PaaS).

The one-hour technical session, “SUSE Cloud and WSO2 Stratos – Bridging OpenStack and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center,” is being held twice on Wednesday, July 31: 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PDT for the Americas and 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. GMT for Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit http://wso2.com/library/webinars/2013/07/suse-cloud-and-wso2-stratos-bridging-openstack-and-paas-to-deliver-the-service-oriented-data-center…

Grazed from TheHostingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to Gartner, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will reach sales of $22.1 billion in 2015. This number reflects the growing adoption of cloud-computing applications in business operations. It also illustrates the expansion of SaaS providers into the market.

Not all SaaS providers are created equal. That’s why it’s important that large companies conduct due diligence when selecting one for their operational needs. “Depending on the role they will play within your enterprise, a SaaS application could be a critical component in your business processes,” said Stephen Booze, CIO of Appointment-Plus enterprise scheduling software. “Selecting an inadequate service could have dire circumstances, internally and externally, as well as financially. “It’s imperative for enterprises to research SaaS providers before making their selection.” Here are four things to look for when choosing an enterprise SaaS provider:…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Many enterprises are now planning to move a significant portion of their infrastructure to the cloud, says Dave LeClair, senior director of strategy at Stratus Technologies, a specialist in high availability solutions. A recently released survey conducted by Stratus, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research found that 75 percent of firms are now reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform, and the worldwide addressable market for cloud computing will reach $158.8 billion by 2013, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.

"Enthusiasm for the cloud continues to grow, moving beyond historical concerns such as security," LeClair says. "But, what is also clear from this year’s results is for cloud adoption to continue accelerating beyond its current pace, companies are going to be looking to vendors to enable always-on infrastructures that support their more critical business applications in this new environment…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

Practically since OpenStack was started there has been discussion about whether it should fully support Amazon Web Services’ APIs. Doing so would make it easy to port applications between an OpenStack cloud and AWS. It would also let businesses easily build hybrid apps that run internally on an OpenStack cloud and on AWS.

Cloudscaling’s Randy Bias has been vocal about his support of fidelity with AWS. But in a blog post this morning he contends that given the continued strong growth of AWS, the need is now urgent. He basically argues that there’s no hope for OpenStack in the public cloud market so it would do well to support interoperability with AWS and Google Compute Engine if it wants to hold on to the private cloud market…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Emergent, LLC, an award-winning small business and IT solutions provider, today announced its focus on enabling the use of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for the Intelligence Community (IC). Utilizing Red Hat’s PaaS offering, Emergent delivered a streamlined solution focused on application delivery, scalability and control of the infrastructure.

OpenShift’s automated provisioning and systems management allows for growing load demands to be met and scaled quickly, and Emergent’s partnership with Red Hat has enabled the IC to adopt OpenShift PaaS on both a private cloud and a FedRAMP certified cloud for mission focused applications, therefore allowing for higher performance and lower cost of operations…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Anthony Savvas.

The networking impact of cloud computing is potentially critical to any organisation, with staff accessing databases, applications and other material over the internet from a corporate network or from other alternative remote locations. Whilst the cloud can be used to store company data and deliver applications without the overheads of dedicated in-house servers and other hardware, the third party hosting the data or applications is not usually responsible for the network links from the customer to its facilities.

Companies therefore have to plan how they connect their corporate networks to third party cloud providers to ensure they have enough affordable and reliable bandwidth to serve their users’ needs. They must consider cost, service level agreements, security, network back up/failover to the cloud provider, network management, and any specialist "network to the cloud" service offerings on the market…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

One of the biggest barriers in OpenStack right now is deployment. It’s complicated. That’s why companies like Mirantis and eNovance that help businesses build OpenStack deployments are getting millions in investments. It’s why most of the marquee enterprise OpenStack deployments you hear of are at huge organizations that have the staff – or the deep pockets to hire a team of consultants – to build their OpenStack clouds. And it’s why companies like Puppet and Opscode have a big presence at OpenStack events, where they have a growing base of customers that use their products to help with deployment of OpenStack clouds.

That all could change. OpenStack now has an official program around TripleO, a project apparently largely funded by HP to develop tools that make it easy to deploy OpenStack. I suspect this isn’t welcome news for some of the third party tools designed to ease deployment, although it’s possible the two tool sets can work together…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Ajubeo, a national provider of high-performance virtual datacenters and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), today announced that its cloud-based Graphics Virtual Desktop now features NVIDIA GRID, the industry’s most powerful GPU technology for the cloud. The addition of NVIDIA GRID technology contributes to a 35 percent or larger reduction in desktop total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to traditional hardware-accelerated workstations.

Additional corporate and end-user benefits include accelerated time-to-market, faster loading and rendering of large files, and improved end-user experience and productivity. Ajubeo Graphics Virtual Desktops featuring NVIDIA GRID technology are available for immediate purchase and will be delivered from the company’s primary cloud hub datacenters in Denver and New York…