Category: News

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn’t working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.  As a result it didn’t grow as much as expected last year.

So it’s regrouping. It’s open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it’s seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

SavvisDirect, the cloud arm of CenturyLink telecommunications, has launched a private cloud service for application development, AppGrid, to give enterprises a secure setting in which to produce and deploy new applications.

Public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services EC2, are already frequently used as a testing site for new software. Test servers can be commissioned, configured to match a production environment and then dismantled when testing is done. In addition, platforms as a service, such as Heroku, bring sophisticated services to developers on Amazon to speed application development.  SavvisDirect is creating an alternative to the public cloud setting. It’s inviting enterprise developers to adopt AppGrid as an off-premises cloud service that is nonetheless an unshared, single tenant environment where sensitive code can be produced, tested and deployed behind secure barriers…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

PCs being what they are nowadays HP went into the Chromebook business Monday. Demand for the kind of ho-hum computing the thing exemplifies is apparently expanding. Acer says that its $199 C7 Chromebook now accounts for 5%-10% of its US shipments. Samsung, which leads in the space, has a $249 ARM-based Chromebook and a more fully featured $449 version. Lenovo will be coming out with a $429 ThinkPad X131e Chromebook later this month.

The $330-to-start HP widget is called the Pavilion 14 Chromebook. The 14 comes from its 14-inch 1,366-by-768-pixel screen, the largest on the market so far.  The 4lb dingus is built on a dual-core 1.1GHz Intel Celeron chip, 16GB of flash storage, 2GB of RAM, expandable to 4GB, with Wi-Fi, Ethernet, a 720p camera, three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port and an SD card slot. HP says the battery is only good for four hours and 15 minutes. Samsung and Lenovo are supposed to do six hours. It ships with 100GB of free Google Drive cloud storage for two years, otherwise priced at $120.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) SmartCloud Enterprise customers not have another add-on offering to increase their security, governance, automation and integration. That’s thanks to enStratus, which announced it has added support for SmartCloud Enterprise to its list of supported clouds.

The list of enStratus’ supported clouds is growing considerably and currently most of the big names, including Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN), Dell’s (NASDAQ: DELL) OpenStack-based clouds, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), HP Cloud Services (NYSE: HPQ), Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Azure and … well, you get the idea. In supporting IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, enStratus aims to bring its technologies to IBM’s customers to extend new capabilities, including:…

Grazed from NetSecurity.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) published the PCI DSS Cloud Computing Guidelines Information Supplement, a product of the Cloud Special Interest Group (SIG). Businesses deploying cloud technology can use this resource as a guide for choosing solutions and third-party cloud providers that will help them secure their customer payment data and support PCI DSS compliance.

PCI Participating Organizations selected cloud computing as a key area to address via the SIG process. More than 100 global organizations representing banks, merchants, security assessors and technology vendors collaborated on this guidance designed to help companies identify and address the security challenges for different cloud architectures and models, and understand their PCI DSS responsibilities when implementing these solutions…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

According to a new report from KPMG, companies need to assume cost reduction in the cloud is ‘a given’ and consequently need to look at more transformational ideas. KPMG’s report, ‘The Cloud Takes Shape’, polled nearly 700 IT professionals and looks at cloud computing as a maturing technology, noting that seven out of 10 IT professionals agree that cloud computing is currently “delivering efficiencies and cost savings”.

Yet the report advocates that organisations need to go further; merely stating that the cloud drives value isn’t telling the full story. “Gaining real cost savings from the cloud is about more than simply moving from fixed costs to operating costs,” says Rick Wright, KPMG US global cloud enablement program leader in the report. “The greatest cost savings – and, more importantly, the transformational business benefits – will come from the longer-term outcomes, such as more efficient processes, more flexible operating models and faster entry into new markets and geographies,” he adds…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Amazon.com had an outage for 49 minutes on Jan. 31, and it cost big — more than $4 million in lost sales. I’m sure many in the cloud computing community where thinking, "Now you know how it feels." According to Network World’s Brandon Butler, "Amazon officials have said that the biggest customer of the company’s cloud division — AWS (Amazon Web Services) — is Amazon.com. AWS has experienced a variety of outages during the past three years, but usually the Amazon.com retail site is not impacted."

For example, an EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Storage) outage in October 2012 affected such customers as Reddit. Moreover, an outage on Christmas Eve 2012 brought down Netflix, but not the video steaming service that Amazon.com provides. In the Jan. 31 case, Amazon.com appears to the affected party…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Vaibhav Tewari, Mehul Nayak and Ritika Srivastava.

Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.

As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function. According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Eric Holmquist.

Companies looking to expand their infrastructure capabilities are increasingly turning to cloud service providers (CSPs), which have proven to be a very cost-effective, highly efficient resource for businesses of all sizes. Cloud-based solutions are used for remote hosting, colocation data centers or full infrastructure outsourcing. As these companies move operations to the cloud, confidence is growing that the technology can be an effective way to not only host data and applications, but also reduce key infrastructure costs.

But as CSPs continue to evolve so, too, does the related cloud computing security infrastructure required to ensure that client data remains safely segregated and accessible only to authorized users. The key to managing cloud computing information security is to understand that it cannot be managed using an 80/20 rule — that is, mitigating the obvious risks and then dealing with the rest as they occur…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

High performance cloud computing company Cycle Computing is no stranger to spinning up massive clusters of servers in Amazon’s public cloud, but this week the company says it recently ran one of its largest jobs ever, one that used 10,598 multi-core instances.

Cycle Computing provisioned Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) servers for a pharmaceutical client to simulate a drug test. It took two hours to configure and ran for nine hours, for a total cost of $4,362. If the infrastructure had been built by the company, Cycle estimates it would have taken a 12,000-square-foot data center and cost $44 million. Cycle says it’s the biggest job the company has performed in terms of the number of virtual machine instances that have been used for a single run…