Category: News

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cosentry, the region’s leading provider of secure cloud computing and data center services, has announced an industry first with the release of their new Ion Cloud Services. This industry breakaway technology allows clients to automatically provision enterprise class, secure virtual private data centers with Cosentry’s Vblock supported infrastructure.

“There are a number of industry offers that might appear similar at first glance” Said Dustin Trager, Director of Cloud Services for Cosentry. “But behind the flashy provisioning software, they don’t actually have a solid infrastructure or a true automatic zero-touch configuration. With Ion Cloud Services you get both, in addition to an orchestration layer that makes provisioning your Virtual Private Data Center take minutes, not hours. We know that this service is going to make waves in the industry, but it’s what our clients have been requesting.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Rackspace(R) Hosting RAX -2.51% is cementing its position as the open cloud company by working with Digital Realty Trust to bring a bigger UK datacentre facility online to serve an expanding European customer base. "We have hired an additional 300 UK ‘Rackers’ in 2012 and increased our total server count by more than 10,000 over that same past year period," said Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director, International at Rackspace. "Our customers are aligning their IT functions to take advantage of the open cloud and I am resolutely pleased to be able to move forward with an expanded datacentre. The age of the open cloud has arrived and our market success and subsequent expansion is testimony to that fact."

This energy-efficient datacentre expansion facilitates Rackspace Hosting’s leadership position as an open cloud company, delivering open technologies worldwide. January 2013 saw an agreement signed to build up to 10-megawatts of UK datacenter space with a strategic construction plan designed to bring a total of five "data halls" online in stages…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Emma Johnson.

The recent years where computers were on hype made way for faster and more productive operations; further when they became a household and a business necessity. They were a different kind of a giant leap for mankind indeed. Daily activities such as checking on your children to reviewing your business’ monthly sales were made convenient with the onset of software that are centralized on easing our most demanding tasks.

However, before you can marvel at their convenience, you first have to accomplish the overwhelming mission of handling the technical aspects of these devices that only experts can really manage. Realizing this hardship that users experience, innovations were pushed through, and the fruit was a breakthrough called Cloud computing…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

In enterprise computing, vendor lock-in is too often a fait accompli. Vendor lock-in happens when, for example, a particular company — such as IBM, Microsoft or Cisco Systems — becomes the dominant vendor behind a particular technology and develops products that capture the advance with proprietary elements. That prevents its customers from leaving and ensures that only proprietary vendors can continue to capitalize on the technology.

With IBM it was the mainframe. Microsoft for many years dominated end-user computing with its Windows operating system, and Cisco has become the dominant enterprise networking vendor in the Ethernet era. With the advent of cloud computing, however, customers can avoid lock-in by taking back some of that decision-making power. The cloud is a highly standardized environment, with new standards being added all the time — such as the DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format 2.0 (OVF) — allowing translation between the proprietary virtual machine formats…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: James Staten.

We all know the conventional wisdom about cloud computing: it’s cheap, fast and easy. But is it really that much cheaper? Or is it simply optics that make it appear cheaper? Optics can absolutely change your perception of the cost of something. Just think about your morning jolt of coffee. $3.50 for a no-foam, half-caf, sugar-free vanilla latte doesn’t seem that expensive. It’s a small daily expense when viewed by the drink. It appears even cheaper if you pay for it with a loyalty card where you don’t even have to fork over the dough and the vanilla shot is free. But what if you bought coffee like IT buys technology? You would pay for it on an annual basis.

That $3.50 latte would now be about $900/year. For coffee? How many of you would go for that deal? That’s optics and it plays right into the marketing hands of the public cloud services your business is consuming today. But optics aside, is that $99/month per user SaaS application just another $20,000 per year enterprise application? Is that $0.25 per hour virtual machine just another $85 per year hosted VM? No, it’s not the same. Because the pricing models are not just optics but an indication of the buying pattern that is possible. If you buy it the same way you do traditional IT, then yes, the math says, there’s little difference here…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there’s an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS). Enterprises are prioritizing how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated. From legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, integrating legacy systems of record to cloud-based platforms will accelerate through 2016.

I’ve seen this in conversations with resellers and enterprise customers, and this trend is also reflected in Gartner’s latest report on public cloud computing adoption, Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update Published: 8 February 2013. Below are the key take-aways from the report:…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Omni Erel.

There are numerous startups of all varieties of purpose and goals. We have seen great successes and great failures. We have seen a lot of money being made on fabulous exits, but also seen a lot of money lost as well. Things are changing for startups, and in turn, they are changing for investors as well. What affects how startups must work affects how investors must forecast chances of success, and which ponies they want to back.

Of course, with progress, change is inevitable and ubiquitous, but the past couple of years have seen the steepest change in this industry’s history. What is this culprit? Cloud computing. To appreciate the change, and what aspects it is wrought upon, let’s first talk for a minute about the classic challenges faced by startups…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

As cloud computing sweeps through organizations, executives’ confidence that they can effectively deploy it and measure its results is waning. That’s the finding of a new survey conducted by The Open Group, an industry consortium. In 2011, the association reports, 55 percent of those surveyed felt that cloud return on investment (ROI) would be easy to evaluate and justify, although only 35 percent had mechanisms in place to do it. In the latest survey conducted at the end of 2012, the proportion that thought it would be easy had gone down to 44 percent, and only 20 percent had mechanisms in place.

Perhaps it’s a result of cloud becoming so tightly interwoven with the business that the potential results may be more far-reaching than a single process or two. Or, perhaps, cloud adoption and usage is expanding deeper into business operations at a faster pace than can be measured. In fact, the survey also finds that the types of metrics being employed are expanding beyond simple cost reductions. While cost continues to be the primary cloud ROI metric, there has been a surge in adoption of quality of delivered results and speed of operation, and utilization of resources as metrics as well…

Grazed from USAToday. Author: Mark Ververka.

Cloud computing is exploding and growing faster than a swirling funnel crossing the Oklahoma plains. The next generation of computing lowers information technology costs while increasing corporate profits at the same time. And what’s not to like about that? That one-two punch was revealed in a study obtained by USA TODAY conducted by England’s Manchester Business School. The study, which was commissioned by San Antonio-based hosting company Rackspace, is expected to be released Wednesday.

The Manchester study indicates that cloud computing allows U.S. businesses to slash their information technology costs by about 26%. What’s more, 62% of those same American companies say that deploying in the cloud improved their bottom lines. "The results are finally showing what we’ve known all along," says Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates. "It’s not just about moving workloads from your data center to our data center."…

Attunity Ltd., a leading provider of information availability software solutions, announced today the imminent release of an optimized data loading solution for Amazon Redshift, AWS’s new data warehouse in the cloud. Attunity’s offering is being designed to provide a high-speed, scalable and fully-managed solution designed to move data from enterprise databases into Amazon Redshift quickly, easily and affordably. The new Attunity solution is expected to be available for customer preview in March 2013. Amazon Redshift customers can find more information and pre-register here.

Data warehousing has long been a critical enabler for business intelligence and growth, used by many enterprises to enable Big Data analytics. Amazon Redshift brings to market an innovative approach to data warehousing, leveraging cloud computing to enable significant reductions in the total costs of owning and operating a data warehouse. While organizations look to capitalize on these potential gains in agility and cost, they face the challenge of moving large amounts of information from their on-premises data centers into Amazon Redshift in the cloud. Attunity’s solution will be designed to simplify this process, leveraging high-performance database replication, ease of use, and high-speed data transfer technologies.