Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Cloud computing is the trend that isn’t going away. As the world grows, so does our need for real time collaboration, sharing documents and storing data easily, as well as access to information from any device. Cloud computing can be delivered 1 of 3 ways: software, infastructure, and platform as a service. Last time we discussed the in’s and outs of who, what, and why’s of software as a service (SaaS), now we’re going to cover infrastructure as a service.

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

Defined by SearchCloudComputing, infrastructure as a service is a “model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.”…

Grazed from PCBDesign007. Author: Dr. Raul Camposano and Steven McKinney.

A cloud is typically defined as a set of virtualized resources, most commonly software, platforms, and infrastructure that can be accessed through the Internet. Cloud computing can be private, meaning that the resources are in-house, or they can be public, where a company offers cloud infrastructure as a service. To be useful, clouds tend to be large, providing the illusion of unlimited resources and are often associated with service (as opposed to licenses or capital goods) as a business model. One example is software as a service (SaaS).

A commonly held view is that the cloud is shifting the computing paradigm: Simply put, large-scale commodity computing (millions of servers) virtualized and delivered through the Internet is better than smaller computer centers, regarding cost of ownership, scalability, performance, and utilization. As a result, the cloud is being adopted widely across consumer and enterprise applications. We use cloud-based applications every day with e-mail, search, social media, and gaming. Every time you pick up your smartphone, the apps rely on sourcing data from another location over the Internet, which is cloud-based. Indeed, the cloud plays a role in our daily lives, but how can it be beneficial to electronic design?
At first glance the advantages of the cloud for designing integrated circuits, packages, and boards may seem obvious:…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

While working for NASA as a cloud architect, Joshua McKenty helped to build the Nebula compute project and start the OpenStack open source cloud platform. McKenty has since gone on to found Piston Cloud computing, which launched its first public release in September of 2011. Piston is now updating its OpenStack solution in a 2.0 release that aims improve and ease the management of cloud deployments.

"We are still the better, faster, easier way to get up and running with OpenStack," McKenty told Datamation. McKenty’s vision for an enterprise OpenStack company has been greeted by an influx of $12.5 million in venture capital. Among Piston’s investors is networking giant Cisco Systems. "When we said we were an OpenStack company, people assumed that what is in our product is OpenStack and that’s it," McKenty said…

Grazed from RenewEconomy. Author: Giles Parkinson.

The fact that cloud computing services use wireless networks does not mean they need less energy. In fact, it could be that the opposite is true. According to a new report prepared by Melbourne’s Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) suggest that energy requirements for data networks (WiFi and 4G LTE) will surge more than five fold in the next three years, and will consume more than 10 times the amount of energy of data centres.

The report – The Power of Wireless Cloud – warns that industry has vastly underestimated energy consumption used by services such as Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook, Zoho cloud office suite, and many others. It says urgent action is required to curb spiraling energy consumption and CO2 emissions. It says these networks will likely consume 43TWh by 2015, but it could be as high as 51TWh. That compares to 9TWh in 2012…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Relying on cloud computing strategies to free up dollars and time that can quickly be re-invested in product and service innovation emerged as the highest priority for respondents in a recent Rackspace survey. While cost reductions were significant, the greatest contributions were seen in investments in innovation (48%), new product & service development (45%), and boosting sale efforts (38%).

Rackspace recently commissioned a study with market research firm Vanson Bourne, who surveyed 1,300 organizations in the UK and the U.S., including 1,000 Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and 300 enterprises with 1,000 employees or more. The methodology included coverage of Financial Services, Retail, IT/Technology, Manufacturing, Business and Professional Services, Media, Logistics, and Mobile Telecommunications sectors, with a further small representative group from other sectors…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Piston Cloud Computing Tuesday released version 2.0 of Piston Enterprise OpenStack, a pre-configured cloud operating system based on the OpenStack project and loaded into a Piston cloud key memory device. The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.

Not every enterprise network administrator is going to want to plug such a device into the heart of the his cloud network, lest someone one day exploit the practice and inject malware into the heart of his cloud. But Joshua McKenty, co-founder and CTO of Piston and a veteran of both the NASA Nebula project and Netscape 8 browser development, said Piston wanted to bring a foolproof, non-fragile version of OpenStack to market that installed without complications…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rachel King.

A big theme at SugarCon 2013 this week is enabling a mobile workforce, and it would make sense to enable that demographic with some helpful apps. Thus, SugarCRM has unveiled its HTML5-powered mobile app today, designed to offer access and updates in real-time about campaigns, deals, contacts, and CRM records.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation described a little bit about the infrastructure under the hood, explaining that the app offers an integrated experience with Sugar’s browser application while also trying to take advantage of native iOS functions…

Grazed from IT-TNA. Author: Steve Wexler.

Swiss-based Kaseya, a vendor of on-premise and cloud-based IT systems management (ITSM) software services, has announced a set of free and subscription Software-as-a-Service services. The company has also retooled its SaaS bundle, Kaseya Essentials, with new capabilities and is making it available as a free trial. Kaseya has 10,000 customers, evenly split between SaaS and on-premise, but there are another 5,000 unpaid SaaS users using free or trial solutions.

According to TechNavio, the network management services market is expected to reach $2.7 billion this year, driven primarily by organizations becoming cost conscious. ‘Network management services have been providing efficient infrastructure management at much lower costs when compared to in-house network management. With several vendors providing comprehensive solutions, end users now have the option of end to end service support for networks. Moreover these services are offered through SLAs thereby ensuring quality network management services.’…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

ActiveState(R), whose software enables developers and enterprises to innovate from code to cloud, today announced the release of Stackato(R) 2.10, the next evolution of the company’s groundbreaking private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology for the agile enterprise. Enterprise cloud leaders like HP, ExactTarget, and Mozilla use Stackato to get to market faster, be more productive, save money, and innovate.

Highlighting this Stackato release is a new Oracle DB add-on, allowing enterprise developers to easily create and deploy applications that depend on an Oracle back-end, without IT assistance. Additional updates include more efficient log-streaming (with Logyard), improved security, an even better web management console user interface, and upgrades to PostgreSQL, Perl, Node.js, MongoDB, uWSGI, and the Mono add-on for .NET applications…