Category: News

Grazed from The Economist.  Author: Editorial Staff.

FOR years they loathed one another, rarely missing an opportunity to pick a fight. Their rows, full of sarcasm and sniping, occasionally hit the headlines. Then they started meeting discreetly every now and again—and ultimately realised just how badly they needed each other. Now, to the surprise of many, they have told the world about how they were really made to be together after all.

This is the backdrop to events that have caused a stir this week in the world of corporate computing. On June 24th Oracle and Microsoft announced plans to work closely together in the “cloud”—the business of delivering software and services over the internet. The following day Oracle unveiled another partnership, this time with Salesforce.com, a pioneer of cloud-based services such as hosting businesses’ marketing and customer-relations systems…

Grazed from Virtualization Review.  Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Stratus, a provider of hardware and software for mission-critical, high-availability computing, will deliver a solution designed to enable fault-tolerant operations in OpenStack clouds.

The company has watched the evolution of cloud computing and has come to the conclusion that the open source OpenStack effort has the strongest support behind it, said Dave LeClair, Stratus’ senior directory of strategy. "OpenStack is gaining a lot of momentum in the public and private cloud space," LeClair explained. "The OpenStack community is expanding rapidly."…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

The government of Catalonia, Spain, has signed a $67 million contract with HP to transform the government’s data centers to a cloud-based infrastructure in order to operate its compute services more efficiently. The agreement runs for 10 years.

HP will be charged with moving Catalonia’s infrastructure from government-owned data centers to secure, HP-managed cloud infrastructure run by HP Spain in Barcelona, capital of the Spanish state. The 7.5 million Catalans are a recognized nationality within Spain, and will hold a vote in 2014 on whether they wish to be independent of Spain. The state is Spain’s easternmost, bordering both the Mediterranean and France…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: Jason Verge.

RackWare, a company that integrates data center and cloud resources into one scalable managed computing environment, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Partners. The money will go towards beefing up RackWare’s sales and marketing organizations.

“We’re in a unique position for a Series A company in that we already have customers and revenue,” said Sash Sunkara, CEO of RackWare. “We’ll use this funding to grow our sales and marketing teams so we can attack the market with our production-ready Generation 2 product.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Abdul Salam.

Cloud computing with its dynamic scaling feature which allows one to scale, that is to increase or decrease, the amount of resources depending on the demand has become a great boon for IT professionals everywhere. This is especially true for environments with very unpredictable traffic flow, like the whole internet for instance. With traditional servers that were preconfigured to handle a certain amount of load, a website might go down especially when traffic has suddenly surged to levels above the capacity of the server.

This happens when some sort of news or event leads people to a specific web location. The solution in a Cloud context is to allocate more resources, and in this case allocate more server instances. But do the costs of the additional resources merit the possible profits generated by the increased traffic? Or will they actually be enough to accommodate all of the traffic, and even has a margin for more?…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Expedient announced that they have collaborated with industry leader, Intel, on a new cloud computing resource center called "The Cloud Calculator": www.thecloudcalculator.com.  The resource center aids IT professionals by providing research and tools for ensuring the right solution from the cloud and its related infrastructure technologies.  Using industry best practices, the site helps the user design a cloud computing environment and forecasts the total cost of ownership ("TCO").

To help IT professionals determine TCO, the site includes a variety of cloud calculators that span from "building a cloud environment versus buying services" to determining how much storage will be consumed for backups based on your retention policies. There is also an expansive Cloud Computing research library filled with whitepapers, videos and case studies…

Grazed from ChannelPro.  Author: Edward Jones.