Category: News

December 11, 2012 Off

Cloud Valley World 2012 Triggers the Cloud Explosion

By David
Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

According to the Mayans, 2012 is the end of the world. Thankfully, we have not seen doomsday yet. Instead, all kinds of changes seem to indicate that 2012 will be remembered for an evolution of humanity’s history – the tide of "information-ization" represented by cloud computing is affecting our lives and the development of our whole society in an unprecedented way. New technologies such as cloud computing, big data, mobile Internet and wireless networks are coming together, breeding great changes in economic models, business models, lifestyle and the way humans learn and think.

From Silicon Valley to Beijing, this year’s changes in the cloud-computing IT model are penetrating into numerous economic and social fields. From concept to application, from attempt to practice, the cloud has been brought down to earth. What we need to do now is to meet the brand-new future with a more open mindset and an infinite imagination. "Hello, Cloud!" is the theme of Cloud Valley World 2012 ("CVW 2012"), which is also our common call for the blending and interaction between rational thinkers and shackle-breaking doers…

CVW 2012, co-sponsored by Cloud Valley and Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area ("BDA"), will be held at Pullman Beijing South Hotel on December 12, 2012. "Cloud ideas", "cloud products", "cloud capital", and "cloud talents" will get together, and the "explosion point" for China‘s cloud computing will be born here.

I. Bring Together A "Cloud Atlas" of Industry Chain Ideas

CVW 2012 is hosted by the China-cloud Network in cooperation with world-famous scientific and technological blogs GigaOM, Quantified Self, Apache and Itech Club. There are about 20 forums covering topics like cloud infrastructure, cloud life, cloud schema, cloud security, cloud in operators, radio and TV, enterprise platforms and all practical links of medical services, education, and energy industries. Derrick Harris, a Giga OM analyst and well-know technology journalist; Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of Oxford University and authority spokesman of big data; Raymie Stata, former CTO of Yahoo! and founder & CEO of VertiCloud; Amy Gu, general manager of the greater China area of Evernote, and Dr. Zheng Liu, president of Asia Engineering Institute of Microsoft Asia-pacific Research Group will weave the "cloud valley world" together. Edward Tian, Chairman of China Broadband Capital; Steve Chang, founder of Trend Micro; Wenjing Wang, Chairman & CEO of Yonyou Software; Xiaoyu Tong, president of Unicom Institute of Unicom Group; Zhengqing Zhang, CEO of Asia-Linkage Inc.; Hongtao Bie, VP of Tencent TEG (Technology Engineering Business Group); Shiding Lin, Baidu cloud computing chief architect; Dr. Hongyu Yao, CEO of Yoyo Systems, and Yaruan Wang, 360buy CTO, will play a leading role in this two-city CVW to share their ideas on CVW 2012 as well as the changes and opportunities we get from cloud computing and big data, from the perspectives of technology, business and social progress, and present a grand feast of ideas for attendees.

II. "A Tale of Two Cities": Bringing Together Silicon Valley and Beijing

In the course of development from "’Made in China‘ to ‘Created in China,’" cloud computing is driving a revolution in Beijing and Silicon Valley, just like how London and Paris were inevitably connected during the first Industrial Revolution through the era of innovation. According to data from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Economy and Information, the economic impact of the software industry may hit RMB400 billion in 2012, surpassing the software value of Ireland, and world-famous software city Bangalore. Employment in the software and information service industries of Beijing has already hit about 500,000 in the first half of 2012, which is more than that of Silicon Valley. Beijing Cloud Computing CEO Summit 2012 was held in Silicon Valley in June 2012. Beijing and Silicon Valley jointly built up "two cities in a cloud computing era" by bilateral dialogues, bilateral cooperation and exchange. The Cloud Valley World will be a continuation of the idea sharing, innovation assistance and capital cooperation of "A Tale of Two Cities" in order to jointly create a new information industry with complementary advantages and a circulation of ideas.

III. Bringing Together Manufactures, Customers, Upstream and Downstream

CVW 2012 will also create a platform for enterprise interactions as well as enterprise and customer interactions. Furthermore, the whole industrial chain layout and innovative products will be realized through live shows, product launches from cloud infrastructures, operating systems, open source platforms to a Cloud Valley at cloud terminals. Moreover, interactions of industry chain and real-time exchanges will be achieved through participation and sharing of application customers, partners and suppliers. Live shows and interactions will be provided for products and services including the next-generation data center created by Cloud Valley, the cloud base, super high performance cloud servers, the SkyForm cloud platform of Skycloud Technology, the big data platform of Beagle Data, cloud call centers, cloud desktops, cloud training, financial cloud, cloud information, and more.

IV. Bringing Together Funds, Governments and Entrepreneurs

In line with China‘s economic transformation and innovation-driven strategy, China Broadband Capital launched several industrial funds to finance the whole cloud industry chain. At CVW 2012, investment innovation funds for cloud computing and big data will also be released. Bridges for investors and entrepreneurs will be created by "cloud creation startups" sessions so that entrepreneurs in the cloud computing industry can meet and exchange information face-to-face with investors from famous institutions such as CBC, Sequoia Capital, Happy Fund (UFIDA), Sea Silver Capital and Cloud Angel Fund. "20 Big Products of Xiangyun Project" will be held on the site of the conference, and big data products and solutions will be displayed in the demonstration zone for enterprises and governments. The Economic and Information Commission of Beijing will conduct a detailed interpretation on policies on Beijing‘s cloud computing industry and release "cloud computing seminar", "white paper of Xiangyun Project", as well as new initiatives and industrial layout highlights.

V. Bringing Together Fresh Innovation and Cross-border Forces

There will be seminars such as "The Interaction of ‘Two Cities’ of Beijing and Silicon Valley", panel discussions on big data, quantified self, social network, and open source platform, etc., site show and sign sales of Big Data-related books, especially "Cloud Evening Discussion" and "Geek Sharing" Sessions, mysterious guests, cross-border representatives and a Geek elite party will be held so as to share and surge mental power, cloud trend of thoughts, cloud of future, new of economic forms, commercial mode and lifestyle. Thus, it is ensured that venture cloud or applied cloud industry attendees alike can enjoy a banquet of thoughts no matter which industry chain they are in.

As Edward Tian, president of CBC said, cloud is the opportunity to move from "made in China to created in China." For the future of cloud computing, "the greatest enemy is our imagination." Two years ago, cloud computing was a still-emerging technology trend in the field of IT , but now because of an outbreak of rapid changes in technology and business models, "cloud" has made its inroads into our lives. 2013 will be a year of cloud "explosion", and all aspects of cloud computing will gradually be accepted by customers. Therefore, we expect that the CVW 2012 will serve as a catalyst for cloud computing to provide a stage for thinkers, drive practitioners to go faster, motivate innovators, and trigger the cloud "explosion" to benefit the world.

December 11, 2012 Off

A modern software platform for the era of multicore and cloud computing – Q&A with Mark Brewer fromTypesafe

By David

Grazed from Ebedded Computing.  Author: Jennifer Hesse.

Created from the ground up to address multicore and parallel computing, the Scala programming language smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive while retaining full interoperability with Java. Mark explains how Scala-based middleware technology can maximize modern multicore hardware and cloud computing software by raising the abstraction level for building multithreaded applications.

ECD: What are the advantages of using general-purpose programming languages like and Scala for embedded development?.

BREWER: Scala is a general-purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling developers to be more productive while retaining full interoperability with Java and taking advantage of modern hardware…

December 11, 2012 Off

UBM Tech Launches Premier Cloud Computing Buyer’s Guide

By David
Grazed from UBM Tech.  Author: PR Announcement.

UBM Tech’s Network Computing, which for 20 years has connected the dots between architectural approaches and how technology impacts the business, this month launched its Cloud Computing Buyer’s Guide: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Twelve top IaaS vendors — Amazon, GoGrid, Google, IBM, Internap, Joyent, Microsoft, NaviSite, Rackspace, Savvis, SoftLayer and Terremark — are represented. 

What You’ll Find: 

  • In-depth features matrices for each vendor, developed by a top cloud expert, with more than 60 decision points.
  • Matrices are downloadable and provide information on operating systems supported, security, pricing and much more.
  • Links to news, commentary and vendor whitepapers deliver deep dives into each provider…
December 11, 2012 Off

Weather Channel forecasts heavier reliance on cloud computing

By David
Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

During Hurricane Sandy this fall, The Weather Channel experienced its highest traffic ever. Normally the media company — which spans television, desktop and mobile platforms — supports about 90 million Web and mobile users a month. During Sandy, that jumped to 450 million — nearly double the company’s previous high for Web traffic.

Fortunately, The Weather Channel was prepared for the traffic surge. Landon Williams, VP of Platforms and Orchestration, and his IT team had recently architected the company’s real-time radar mapping system to run on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). On normal days, the mapping system runs on about 20 instances, but during Sandy it scaled up to run on 175 nodes in AWS’s cloud…

December 11, 2012 Off

Forrester predicts cloud and mobile convergence

By David

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

Cloud computing and mobile apps will become more intertwined with each other over the next few years, according to Forrester Research. The analyst firm said that mobile apps that don’t call out through the internet to back-end services will diminish in value. Infrastructure and operations analysts James Staten said in a blog post that these back end services will not "live" in a data centre unless "you plan to poke a big hole in your firewall to accommodate an unpredictable flood of traffic".

"More often than not, we are finding mobile applications connected to cloud-based back-end services (increasingly to commercial mobile-back-ends-as-a-service) that can elastically respond to mobile client engagements and shield your data centre from this traffic," he added. Nearly every Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application has a mobile client now, "which is proof of the model as well," he said…

December 11, 2012 Off

Work Shifting, Business Continuity, And The Cloud

By David

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Cloud computing’s inherent property of accessibility is one of the key motivators for its adoption by the general public and smaller businesses alike. Businesses and organizations often have offices for all of their employees. But employees are sometimes not able to come to the office to work due to a family emergency, sickness, transport strike, or an extreme weather event.

Thanks to cloud computing accessibility and services like Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and application hosting, employees can do their work remotely when they are unable to go to the office. All they need is a computer or mobile device that can connect to the Internet. This is what it referred to as work shifting and business continuity. The concept of the physical office itself is becoming obsolete. No one really needs to go to the office unless they need physical files or resources…

December 11, 2012 Off

Competing standards could damage cloud industry

By David

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Meaningful cloud computing standards are crucial to improve the maturity of cloud-based services and bring increased flexibility, security and interoperability, but too many competing standards could wreak damage, warned the Cloud Industry Forum’s independent certification partner, the APM Group. As cloud uptake gathers pace among users, industry bodies and consumers have expressed anguish over the lack of relevant cloud standards and interoperability hindering cloud adoption.

Cloud standards and interoperability would allow IT to move applications and workloads between private and public clouds and from one public cloud to another. It would enable enterprises to select a combination of cloud technologies and avoid vendor lock-in…

December 11, 2012 Off

nCircle Automates Amazon EC2 Security for PureCloud Customers

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Security may not quite be the hot topic it was a couple of years ago, but it’s still top of mind for CIOs and other IT decisionmakers. On Amazon EC2, nCircle is hoping to alleviate some of those concerns with a new free security service designed for its nCircle PureCloud customers.

The new service provides customers with automated cloud security scanning for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) networks within nCircle PureCloud. The vendor’s PureCloud service is a vulnerability management solution that enables customers to evaluate the security of their cloud deployments on Amazon without the need to do manual identification of each machine instance…

December 11, 2012 Off

Will cloud computing kill the storage area network?

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Chris Poelker.

The acceptance of server and storage virtualization has enabled a paradigm shift in how data center infrastructure is purchased and deployed. End user companies are migrating from purchasing separate physical servers connected to storage area networks (SANs) to more modular “reference architectures” which include every component required to run their applications.

Servers and storage were typically sold as separate IT infrastructure elements in the past, usually to different groups within the IT department, and usually under different parts of the IT budget. The move to the cloud has changed all of that. For example, one recent move by a major server and storage vendor enables its storage to directly connect to its blade servers, which may make a storage network unnecessary. You simply purchase the servers, storage and network together as a data center “building block” which converges everything together to make rolling infrastructure a one stop shopping experience…

December 11, 2012 Off

Legal Concerns over Cloud Computing

By David

Grazed from Backup-Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.

A recent Backup Technology blog briefly touched upon the legal concerns that many businesses have when considering a move to the cloud. This post looks to explore those concerns further. Many of the concerns relate to the lack of regulation in cloud computing, which often makes some larger corporations fearful in case something goes wrong with the service. Although cloud computing is picking up momentum, it is yet to be taken up on a large scale by big corporations, who still prefer to use hardware. Two of the reasons that many big corporations give for not moving more of their IT to the cloud is the concerns over responsibility for the service provided and data security. Understandably, lawyers of big corporations are concerned that when things do go belly up, they will not be able to hold the cloud provider responsible, and even more worryingly they may in fact be liable themselves. This is a major stumbling block for many large corporations who would otherwise be quite keen to make a push to the cloud.

There are many calling for tighter regulation of the cloud computing industry, as well as a change to legislation that is better suited to the cloud. As things stand, US law does not empower prosecutors to hold cloud providers accountable for criminal activity facilitated by the cloud. This is not to say that the cloud provider itself did anything illegal, but simply allowed crime to occur by hosting a service for the criminal organisation…