Category: News

June 11, 2013 Off

Effective cloud SLAs should cover QA, uptime, availability and more

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Christine Parizo.

As more and more businesses turn to cloud services to replace on-premises applications, they must also negotiate service level agreements (SLAs) with cloud providers. Doing that job well requires that software architects and developers understand exactly what they need in terms of quality assurance (QA) testing, uptime and other core business functionality.

But frequently, experts say, SLA negotiations tend to focus more on price and less on function and enforcement. QA, in particular, gets short shrift. "All too often, they haven’t thought about which things are really meaningful … especially in test coverage," said Matt Johnson, chief marketing officer of Southborough, Mass.-based testing provider uTest. That misstep is particularly common in smaller businesses with less in-house development experience and fewer staffers…

June 11, 2013 Off

Dell Announces A Range Of Cloud Client Computing Technologies

By David

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell has announced a broad range of innovative cloud client computing technologies that deliver turnkey solutions purposefully built to complement and enhance corporate IT environments based on Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp.

When organisations of all sizes are increasingly looking to empower their employees with access to corporate information across application platforms and devices, Dell and Citrix’s new cloud client computing solutions provide customers with powerful tools to work securely and productively. The combination of simplicity, flexibility, and power in Dell’s technology creates an unmatched end-to-end virtual computing experience and alleviates customer pain points from the data center to the endpoint devices, including: the Dell DVS Enterprise – Active System 800 for Citrix XenDesktop, Dell DVS Enterprise for Citrix XenDesktop, Dell Wyse Xenith Pro 2 zero client and the Dell Wyse D90Q7 and Z90Q7thin clients…

June 11, 2013 Off

XO Launches Three Cloud Services

By David

Grazed from ConvergedDigest. Author: Editorial Staff.

XO Communications is launching three new cloud services that leverage its Tier III data centers and its nationwide network: XO Enterprise Cloud, XO Cloud Drive, and XO Cloud Vault.

XO Enterprise Cloud — provides enterprise-grade cloud computing services delivered over a private and secure network environment. Multiple network connectivity options are offered to access the Enterprise Cloud. The service offers multiple computing resource allocation options, such as Shared, Reserved and Dedicated. The XO Enterprise Cloud architecture is designed to provide higher levels of performance and isolation for customers with mission-critical and unique security requirements…

June 11, 2013 Off

IBM Hardware Systems Bolstered for Cloud at Edge 2013

By David

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced a series of enhancements across its systems portfolio that are designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward software-defined environments (SDE). At its IBM Edge 2013 conference in Las Vegas on June 10, IBM announced enhancements to the company’s Smarter Storage line of flash, disk and tape systems, new high-performance computing (HPC) solutions and new capabilities for IBM’s PureSystems line of systems, among other things.

In addition, IBM released its FlashSystem series today. Announced in April, the series of all-flash appliances has been enhanced to deliver less than one-tenth the cost per transaction while using 4 percent of the energy and 2 percent of the space compared with hybrid disk and flash systems, IBM said…

June 11, 2013 Off

Red Hat Unveils Fully-Supported Public PaaS Offering, OpenShift Online

By David

Grazed from Business Wire. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the commercial availability of OpenShift Online, its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud offering, beginning June 11, 2013. Since its debut in developer preview in 2011, more than 1 million applications have been created on OpenShift Online. Responding to customer demand for a supported, enterprise-class public PaaS offering, the new commercial offering will enable OpenShift Online’s users and developers to access Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services.

This new offering makes Red Hat one of the only technology vendors to offer a full family of open PaaS solutions: OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project; OpenShift Online, a commercial public PaaS offering; and OpenShift Enterprise, an on-premise private PaaS product. OpenShift Online enables developers to quickly build, launch and host innovative applications in the public cloud. The elastic, multi-language, PaaS architecture of OpenShift Online automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications so developers can focus on writing the code for these applications for their business, startup, or next big idea…

June 11, 2013 Off

Universal Places Leverages CloudBees Platform To serve up dream Holidays

By David
Grazed from CloudBees.  Author: PR Announcement
 
CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that Universal Places, an online travel agency that serves 9,000 seaside and countryside destinations in Spain and Portugal, has used CloudBees technology to reduce infrastructure maintenance time by 80 percent and scale its server capacity as needed to manage wide swings in seasonal demand.
 
Overall, implementing CloudBees’ PaaS helped Universal Places cut the time it spent weekly on non-development tasks and IT infrastructure from 16 hours to about 30 minutes. This has enabled software developers to focus more time on improving web applications and efficiently managing the agency’s business.
June 11, 2013 Off

Waratek and Push Technology Partner

By David
Grazed from Waratek.  Author: PR Announcement
 
Java virtualization and cloud specialists, Waratek, and data distribution specialists Push Technology, today announced a partnership to combine complementary technology. The two Gartner Cool Vendors* in the 2013 Application and Integration Platforms report, will deliver customers the benefit of both Waratek’s ability to deliver multitenant cloud solutions out of the box with Diffusion’s high performance, scalable and real-time data distribution solution.
 
Push Technology solves the complexity around data distribution by removing redundant data to offer organizations intelligent delivery of real-time data to any device regardless of connectivity or location. This helps to reduce infrastructure requirements while delivering high performance and scalable services to any Internet connected device.
June 11, 2013 Off

Ubiquity Targets Amazon with High Performance SSD Cloud Service Built on OnApp

By David
Grazed from OnApp.  Author: PR Announcement
 
U.S. hosting specialist Ubiquity Servers has launched a new high-performance public cloud service built on the OnApp Cloud platform, and targeted directly at users of Amazon’s cloud. Ubiquity’s cloud service is one of the first to use OnApp Storage, the integrated SAN included with OnApp Cloud v3.0. Ubiquity used OnApp’s new storage system to create an SSD-based cloud hosting service with exceptional performance and resilience, but without the high cost associated with clouds built on legacy storage technologies.
 
Performance was a key factor in Ubiquity’s decision to build a new service on the OnApp platform, particularly the ‘VM-aware’ technology in OnApp Storage, which ensures a copy of a virtual machine’s data exists on the same physical server that hosts that virtual machine. This optimizes I/O for Ubiquity’s customers, and ensures their hosted applications get up to 95% of the raw performance of the drives that store their data. Ubiquity Servers was a key participant in OnApp’s beta program for the new technology, and in tests saw sustained read/write speeds of 1500MB/s and 1200MB/s with just six SSDs, compared with 400-500MB/s using a traditional SAN array.
 
June 10, 2013 Off

Can Dell survive in the cloud era despite killing its public cloud offering?

By David

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Dell has ditched the public cloud IaaS [infrastructure as a service] offerings it built on the OpenStack platform and on VMware’s vCloud suite, in favour of converged infrastructure, private cloud and a cloud partner programme. But will the strategy help the troubled supplier secure a future in the cloud era?

At its Enterprise Forum 2013 event in San Jose, Dell made its biggest storage and server announcement in a long time, which included products such as VRTX, Active Infrastructure 1.1, modular datacentre, Dell Compellent SAN 6.4 and flash arrays…

June 10, 2013 Off

IBM Unveils Big Data, Cloud Enhancements Throughout Systems Portfolio

By David

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM today announced enhancements across its systems portfolio that are designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward Software Defined Environments (SDE). Enhancements to IBM’s Smarter Storage line of Flash, disk and tape systems give clients faster access to business critical information and Big Data insights. New High Performance Computing solutions bring HPC capabilities to mainstream servers to help more clients crunch their ever-mounting volumes of data faster.

New capabilities added to the IBM PureSystems family expert integrated systems are designed to help clients reduce the security risks often faced when deploying cloud solutions, as well as enable quick recovery and restoration after disasters. A new mobile solution based on IBM Worklight server on PureSystems for both Power and x86 was created to accelerate clients’ access to millions of mobile users by allowing mobile applications to be deployed in as little as 30 minutes…