Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Configuration automation tools like Opscode Chef aren’t just for DevOps anymore.  They also come in handy for provisioning resources at the speed of cloud, according to attendees at ChefConf 2013 here this week.   "Half the time, our developers don’t know where CloudStack ends and Chef begins," said Joshua Miller, Linux administrator for Edmunds.com, a publisher of automotive information websites based in Santa Monica, Calif. Edmunds uses a plug-in for Chef’s knife tool as a command-line interface for developers to provision resources in CloudStack.

"Developers are spinning up and blowing away systems at a rate of dozens a week and hundreds per month," Miller said. "If the operations team had to handle all that, we couldn’t deliver on it."  Instead, the ops team focuses on improving the integration between Opscode Chef and CloudStack, and other higher-level duties than provisioning and configuring servers, Miller said…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Is cloud computing really catching on in the enterprise? Well, that depends on who you talk to, recent surveys have found.  RightScale, a company that acts a broker between end users and public cloud service providers, released the most recent results of its annual State of the Cloud report and found that about 75% of respondents surveyed were using the cloud in some capacity.

CEO Michael Crandell says his company’s evidence shows the users are becoming more comfortable using the cloud. About a year and a half ago pundits spoke about the technology being in an adolescent stage, he says: "We’re getting to see what the cloud looks like when it grows up now and becomes a young adult."…

Grazed from Quartz.  Author: Christopher Mims.

Amazon is famously reticent about sales figures, dribbling out clues without revealing actual numbers. But it appears the company has left enough hints to, finally, discern how much revenue it makes on its cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Services, which provides the backbone for a growing portion of the internet: about $2.4 billion a year.

In the slides accompanying Amazon’s latest  earnings report, one chart indicates that revenue from “Amazon Web Services, Advertising Services, and Co-branded Credit Cards” totaled $750 million in the first three months of 2013. Let’s unpack that…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

As trends such as cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things generate rapidly increasing amounts of data for organizations and users to process and store, IT functions face an ever-increasing demand for better data storage systems capable of coping with these trends. To help them, Cisco today announced new solutions for storage area networks (SANs) that deliver higher performance, scalability and reliability than other competing systems.

The new solutions include the Cisco® MDS 9710 Multilayer Director, which delivers three times the bandwidth of any storage director in the industry. Cisco also announced the Cisco MDS 9250i Multiservice Fabric Switch, which improves efficiency by performing important storage networking services in the SAN fabric. "As the leading IT service provider inNorway, we look to Cisco as a key technology partner to support us in the process of consolidating and upgrading data centers. We require storage networks to support the next generation services and level of availability our customers demand," said Jo Marius Pedersen, SAN specialist, EVRY…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

Cloud interoperability and portability seems to be a hot topic these days. This topic is one that I have a bit of experience with. Back in 2008, I had the fortune, or possibly misfortune, of starting one of the first groups dedicated to the discussion of Cloud interoperability, aptly titled, “The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum”. For a while this Google group was a popular forum for the discussion of various interop and standardization challenges, but it ultimately faded as politics, personalities and priorities shifted. Five years later, I thought I’d revisit the discussion.

A lot has changed since those early days, Amazon still dominates and many of the early cloud pioneers have long been acquired. In addition, a new crop of players have emerged as serious treats to the incumbent players in the space. The companies who were previously viewed as incumbent are now the challengers in this quickly evolving cloud battleground…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha. Author: Editorial Staff.

Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) are out at each other in a new invisible battlefield: Computer horsepower. Cloud computing has been around for quite a long time (since 1984, at least the concept) but its potential has only recently been discovered. Despite the buzz around the concept, very few people understand the underlying framework, which is ironic since most people have already used it. Simply put, cloud (another word for internet) computing is using other people’s server to run your network/application for your organization, remotely. Prime examples are Gmail and drop box. It essentially reduces the hassle and cost of the end user by outsourcing the entire IT department to the service provider; e.g. Amazon or Google.

Overview

Amazon is the pioneer, providing cloud computing services since 2004, but Google has recently caught on (began last year June). Google has the largest storage capacity in the world, which has made Amazon push harder, especially in terms of pricing. Amazon’s EC2 provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), outsourcing IT needs along with the hardware, while Google’s App Engine provides PaaS (Platform as a service)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

For the last six years Miguel Castillo and his team have built dozens of platforms for connected devices, from connecting garbage cans to adding informatics to solar panels. But in 2012 Castillo realized that he was sick of reinventing the wheel for each machine-to-machine project that Wairbut, his company, accepted. So he and his CTO, Alvaro Everlet, spun out a new company to build a platform of software and infrastructure so others could connect devices without having to reinvent the same wheel they had invented so many times before. They called the startup Carriots, and it’s now in the middle of raising a first round of funding.

Like Electric Imp, Carriots, a Madrid-based company, wants to make it easy for people to build out services for connected devices. Electric Imp provides the cloud service as well as an SD card with built-in connectivity. Carriots provides the cloud service, essentially a platform as a service, or PaaS, for the internet of things…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The Cloud Security Alliance is extending its membership to a new level that serves SMBs and the cloud providers serving that small and medium business (SMB) market segment. Announced at InfoSecurity Europe in London, the CSA SMB Membership and SMB Working Group are meant to provide SMBs with guidance in cloud security.

For cloud providers, CSA plans to work with them through this new membership level and working group to help them understand the cloud security needs of SMBs. However, this kickoff of the new SMB-focused membership and working group is just the beginning, as the first step for the organization will be to create an SMB version of the CSA Guidance documents, as well as cloud security materials that can be readily consumed by SMBs, many of which likely don’t have the IT and security capabilities and knowledge base enjoyed by enterprises…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Simon Sharwood.

NetApp has approached the University of Melbourne’s Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems (CLOUDS) Laboratory, seeking collaboration around the Labs’ research specialties in federated public clouds.

The Reg has learned that senior NetApp employees from outside Australia visited the Lab last February. Now the Lab’s Director, Professor Rajkumar Buyya, has told The Reg those discussions centred on federated cloud functions in the Aneka product offered by a commercial spinout from the Lab called Manjrasoft…

Grazed from PR.com. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudAccess.com, a leader in unified security solutions from the cloud, announced the release of the latest version of CloudIDM/AM which features a unique and seamless integration between enterprise identity management and access control (single sign on/access management) from the cloud.

“We’ve taken the next evolutionary step to integrate the key capabilities of provisioning, multi-factor authentication and role-based workflow management with an advanced single sign on for SaaS and legacy applications and manage it all from the cloud,” said CloudAccess CEO Kevin Nikkhoo…