How to Pick Cloud Contenders Among Pretenders
Grazed from Wired. Author: Patrick Kerpan.
Infrastructure is the most basic level of cloud computing. A cloud provider offers you, as a cloud application owner or user, the ability to run your business application without managing the underlying physical resources of CPU, storage, network and memory. Public/private cloud IaaS is multi-tenant access to the physical resources ) where you can launch virtual machines (VMs) as needed in the cloud.
Cloud commoditizes the infrastructure — hence Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or the difficult to pronounce, “IaaS”. Regardless of deployment model or provider, you should have access to infrastructure and the ability to purchase VMs. So now that you’re shopping for infrastructure, what should you look for in a cloud provider?…
Mellanox(R) Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX) (TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced ConnectX-3 Pro, the industry’s first network adapter IC and card with hardware offload engines that support virtualized overlay networks commonly used in cloud infrastructures. With hardware offload support for VXLAN and NVGRE, ConnectX-3 Pro enables cloud providers to build large-scale infrastructures with industry-leading performance and dramatically lower CPU overhead, thus reducing cloud application cost and increasing cloud ROI.
Gazzang, the Linux data security company, today announced its software-based data security solutions are enabling health care organizations to confidently move sensitive data into cloud and big data environments. The cloud computing market in health care is expected to grow to $5.4 billion by 2017(1) , due in large part to the performance gains, inexpensive storage, elasticity and data sharing capabilities delivered by the cloud.
Today Bitium announced a $2.4M seed round for the first Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) operating system. The round was led by Mike Hirshland of Resolute VC and features an all-star list of investors including Alex Bard (Desk.com); Michael Lazerow (Buddy Media); former SVP of Strategy for Microsoft, Hank Vigil; Rob Glaser (Real Networks); seasoned SaaS entrepreneurs Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics) and Sean Ellis (Qualaroo); and Southern California funds Double M Partners, Social Leverage and Karlin Ventures.
ActiveState(R), whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, today announced it has been named a Gartner Research "Cool Vendor in PaaS" for 2013. In its "Cools Vendors in PaaS, 2013" report released yesterday, the global research firm profiles ActiveState and its flagship cloud middleware technology Stackato(R), the private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for the agile enterprise.
Midokura, a global startup focused on network virtualization, today announced the general availability of MidoNet. MidoNet virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms, such as OpenStack. First introduced last Fall to the U.S. market, this solution has been in development for three years. MidoNet is a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution specifically designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Midokura’s approach not only adds automation that significantly reduces the human cost (OPEX) of managing the network, but also impacts the overall economics of cloud computing (CAPEX) by simplifying network requirements.
The OpenStack Summit is "going enterprise" according to the opening keynote session that featured cloud user case studies from Comcast, Bloomberg, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Hubspot. Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) Senior VP Jim Curry said this is "the year of the user" for OpenStack. Next up is a Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) keynote. The overall big theme: OpenStack is more than a developer movement; it’s also ready to help enterprises and cloud services providers (CSPs) that want to make money, according to keynote speakers. Here’s a keynote recap.
The latest news in the cloud computing sector comes from none other than Microsoft. It has been reported that Microsoft has tied up with Cloud Cruiser, maker of the chargeback and billing analytic system, to give Windows Server 2012 and the System Center Management system its own billing and chargeback capabilities which will enable it to be used on Microsoft Azure’s Cloud services.