Category: News

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

Mario Cruz understands an enterprise CIO’s reluctance to embrace Platform as a Service (PaaS). He used to be one of them. During his more than 20 years in IT, including eight years as CIO of Chicago-based Rewards Network Inc., he’s been around a few traditional data centers and the keeper of many legacy systems.

Now as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of startup Choose Digital, Cruz has harnessed his business to the cloud. He and partner Stephen Humphreys founded the company in early 2011 as a "white label" alternative to iTunes. In essence, Choose Digital is a digital supply chain for music, movies, TV shows, books and games. Their customers, which include United Airlines and Marriott, use Choose Digital’s system to render digital rewards for their respective customer loyalty programs while keeping their own branding and controlling their own user data…

Grazed from UC Strategies. Author: Editorial Staff.

An apology has been released by VMware in light of recent delays in getting users set up on the company’s Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, which is basically a “test drive” for its public cloud infrastructure operating in an anonymous partner’s data center. VMware’s vCloud Team said: “We’d like to apologize to our users for exceeding the target provisioning time for new accounts. For those who are ready to give it a try, we are making room for you.”

Last month, VMware began its free trial of the Hybrid Cloud Evaluation, and sources noted that the following error message appeared after signing up: “We were unable to log you in: Your vCloud service has not completed provisioning. If you recently signed up for service please wait at least 15 minutes for this to complete.” Although a target time was not given for provisioning the service, some would-be users of VMware’s services were still unable to log in after several days. The company noted that the huge influx of sign-ups were responsible for the delay, and the vCloud team said: “To meet that demand we are adding more capacity to get you up and running.”…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond Inc. (Nasdaq:CBEY), the technology ally to small and mid-sized businesses, today announced it is making it easier for existing customers to view, customize, manage and control their cloud computing services through a single portal – Cbeyond Online™, resulting in significant resource and time savings. The new on-demand, self-service functionality also allows Cbeyond’s customers to use the cloud to meet their dynamic business needs and serve their own customers more efficiently.

The Cbeyond Online portal now supports Cbeyond’s cloud service platform, including TotalCloud™ Data Center launched in October, 2012, and TotalCloud™ Phone System, launched in December 2012. Using this portal, all Cbeyond customers now have the ability to view computing, storage, and network utilization and performance reports, add real-time compute, storage and network capacity, as well as make changes to their cloud resources such as provision or resize their virtual machines…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Michael Goodenough.

We all have a lot of “stuff” in our homes, garages and even cars. We run out of places to put our items so oftentimes that means either downsizing what we have or finding new places store it. Computer data is no different. If we run out of space on a personal computer, tablet or server, we often delete old files or transfer data to a storage network.

Primary and Secondary Traditional Storage

Traditional storage is generally broken up into Primary and Secondary storage. Primary storage includes storage area networks (SAN), direct-attached disks (DAS) and network-attached storage (NAS). Primary storage is generally accessed on a random basis, and it acts as support for active applications. Secondary storage is your backup storage, designed to protect your data. Three major types of secondary storage include optical disk, tape media and virtual tape libraries (VTL)…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

We can stop pointing fingers at datacentres for chewing up power because the biggest culprit of energy consumption in the cloud computing ecosystem is the equipment that facilitates wireless access to the cloud, according to the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET). CEET is a joint-venture between the University of Melbourne, communications vendor Alcatel-Lucent, and the Victorian State government.

The proliferation of cloud computing has meant more datacentres are being built to supply cloud services. Datacentres, particularly older models, are often cited as energy inefficient although through new design principles, they are gradually becoming more power efficient…

Grazed from Business Today. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP has announced the availability of its ProLiant Moonshot line of servers , which it says can cut power consumption by up to 89 per cent as compared to its existing servers. These systems are based on 64-bit Intel Atom S1200 processor family. HP Moonshot servers are designed and tailored for specific workloads to deliver optimum performance.

The servers share management, power, cooling, networking, and storage. "With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the internet and predictions for exponential growth, we’ve reached a point where the space, power, and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable," said Meg Whitman, President and CEO of HP…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: John E. Dunn.

Promising Scottish security startup Inquisitive Systems has been handed £500,000 ($750,000) by angel investors to boost development of its innovative ZoneFox system designed to protect firms from the threat of having sensitive IP assets stolen by hackers. Spun out in 2010 from Edinburgh’s Napier University, the latest round has come from the Archangel syndicate, building on top of previous tranches from Scottish Enterprise, which invested £100,000, and £60,000 from seed investors.

The faith being shown by investors appears to be based on the belief that with targeted attacks, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), and economic digital warfare now established threats, ZoneFox is a technology that has matured at precisely the right moment…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Aryaka, a company which offers wide area network optimisation in the cloud, has collated together several pieces of research emphasising the importance of cloud in a modern enterprise. Pooling together studies from the likes of CIO Insight, Forrester and IDC, Aryaka has examined cloud strategies at different points of the enterprise, predominantly assessing the UK market.

Among the statistics cited in the infographic include an interesting summation of the top cloudy growth areas. According to the 1300 people surveyed, IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is predicted as the key growth area in cloud computing by 41% of respondents, followed by management and security (27%) and PaaS (platform as a service (26.6%)…

Grazed from TheStreet.  Author: Chris Lau.

Consumers may be more familiar with cloud service offerings. This includes Google Drive, offered by Google (GOOG), SkyDrive by Microsoft (MSFT), Box.com, and DropBox.  Some of the other big players investors might want to start with are grouped below. 

Networking

1. Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO): The networking giant grew through acquisitions. The company is turning its focus on SDN. UBS argued that innovation in hardware will happen through SDN. Performance, latency, and resiliency are elements that will improve…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Paul Kapustka.

It’s easy to forget that sometimes even in a highly specialized audience — like the one here following enterprise mobility — there are divisions in opinion and in how a common technology, like cloud computing, is viewed. At last week’s Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara, I heard several speakers call this divide out in compelling fashion, and it made me wonder if culture is part of the reason cloud computing still faces challenges in corporate deployments.

Mark Hinkle, senior director for Open Source Solutions at Citrix, called out one clear division in a panel on cloud deployments. When viewing cloud services, Hinkle said, end users will typically gravitate toward a solution that provides fast and easy results. But for enterprise IT, he noted, "the stakes are much higher" for cloud deployments. "There are more things that come into play."…