Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

One hurdle to corporate adoption of PaaSes is customer concern about being locked into one vendor’s platform. A new Cloud Foundry app will let them, in real time, see which of several Cloud Foundry PaaSes will run their workloads.

Cloud Foundry wants its Platform-as-a-Service to be the basis for a wide array of PaaSes going forward — a sort of super Paas foundation. And so far, it’s got some promising partners in that effort: AppFog, Uhuru, ActiveState, and Tier 3 all offer PaaSes based on Cloud Foundry…

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Ken Klika.

When it comes to ‘the cloud’, defining specifics can be challenging as there are many nuances in terms of how technology services can be delivered, but one thing remains consistent in that organizations can choose to leverage the power of cloud computing in order to move their business forward or can surrender market to more nimble competitors.

The reality of today’s market is many of your competitors will be new entrants leveraging new ways and approaches to doing business enabled by IT. More importantly, if you aren’t prepared to address the cloud computing wave with your clients, you’ll soon be left behind…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Robert Shaw.

Cloud computing naysayers have long cited security and privacy as their number one concerns. While more and more companies are adopting cloud services, many corporations and small businesses are still hesitant to embrace the cloud because of concerns about lax security and hacker attacks.

Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon claim to have extremely strong security and have never reported a major security breach. But smaller companies like Dropbox and Zappos have, but the breaches were typically due to internal programming bugs. The question is, should consumers believe that their data is safe with major cloud players? Can cloud computing giants really deliver on their security promises? The answer, in most cases, is a resounding yes. The largest U.S. data centers are almost always certified by the federal government under programs like FISMA and SAS 70 Type II certification. Cloud companies that hold these designations have implemented physical and cyber security measures…

Grazed from TI. Author: PR Announcement.

To most technologists, cloud computing is about applications, servers, storage and connectivity. To Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) it means much more. Today, TI is unveiling a BETTER way to cloud with six new multicore System-on-Chips (SoCs). Based on its award winning KeyStone architecture, TI’s SoCs are designed to revitalize cloud computing, inject new verve and excitement into pivotal infrastructure systems and, despite their feature rich specifications and superior performance, actually reduce energy consumption.

To TI, a BETTER way to cloud means:

• Safer communities thanks to enhanced weather modeling;
• Higher returns from time sensitive financial analysis;
• Faster commuting on safer highways in safer cars;
• Exceptional video on any screen, anywhere, any time;
• More productive and environmentally friendly factories; and
• An overall reduction in energy consumption for a greener planet…

Grazed InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

In what could be one of the biggest cloud computing contracts to date by number of users, the Department of Veterans Affairs will move 600,000 users to Microsoft cloud email and collaboration services. The five-year, $36 million contract will first see 15,000 VA employees move to Microsoft’s government community cloud collaboration offering, Office 365 for Government, with the rest of the agency’s 600,000 users to follow over the remainder of the contract period. The agency will use Office 365 for email, calendaring, instant messaging, web and video conferences, Office collaboration tools and SharePoint.

Instead of working directly with Microsoft, VA has signed on with HP Enterprise Services, which will act as the systems integrator and provide disaster recovery services. However, VA has a long history as a big Microsoft shop. In July, for example, the agency signed a five-year enterprise agreement giving the agency access to a broad array of Microsoft products and services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Rohan Pearce.

Commonwealth Bank CIO Michael Harte today told participants at a Sydney event organised by Amazon.com’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that data sovereignty and security have been used as unjustified excuses to stop businesses moving to the cloud.

"The favourite [excuses] I used to hear when I talked to the big household names in infrastructure equipment was, ‘It doesn’t look very secure Michael. You can’t do that. And there’s data sovereignty; you’d want to look very, very carefully at that. And this on-demand pricing — no we just can’t do that we’ve got rules saying specifically we can’t."…

Grazed from Sustainblog.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

The astronomical growth in computer data along with the migration to cloud computing technologies has contributed to the proliferation of large data centers. These facilities consist of big buildings housing thousands of computer servers. Extensive power and cooling systems are required to run the facilities. The largest facilities process data for the likes of Google, Facebook and eBay.

Historically, much of this data processing has been accomplished locally in corporate IT facilities. In recent years, many companies have outsourced IT infrastructure and software applications to cloud based service providers that run large data centers. The benefits to these companies include lower costs, increased flexibility and enhanced processing power…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: John Omwamba.

The web has brought out hardware machinery spot-on to cloud-based applications. Some of these servers are so scalable in magnitude, mindboggling in performance and high-end in gigabytes capacity, that they even sound a little alien. Suddenly they are here and those who only thought of them as data processors without a name can now identify with them, courtesy of cloud computing platforms. Intel, through its Tyan partners, is an example of companies that have enabled this to happen through its cutting-edge processing units. These can be discussed under the following headings.

GPU equipment

The Graphics Processing Unit is one of the biggest server products. It allows users to combine the three-dimensional and high-end qualities of videos and graphical interfaces with the core processing power of the Central Processing Unit (CPU). The result is a great chain of reactions. The server becomes at once fast for remote clients to remit and retrieve encrypted data across the cloud infrastructure. It also comes up with a modular system that helps to optimize capacity by users and thus reduce costs. Furthermore, its scalability is beyond question quite high, meaning virtual businesses that start small can expand within the server environment without any need to move to new hardware. Finally, the particular Tyan-Intel combination comes with a double-edge capacity that stores data, doubly, for a rainy day…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: George Moon.

Google’s innovative Cloud SQL database has received several upgrades, most notably to storage, speed, and location choice. The upgrades include enhancements for speedier read and writes, more storage, and the choice of running instances in either the U.S. or Europe, InfoWorld reports. Google enhances products often and with purpose, so these latest upgrades, it could be argued, are an attempt to gain more ground in the cloud computing market.

Cloud ComputingIn a blog post, Joe Faith, product manager for the Google Cloud SQL, wrote that storage would increase by 10 times to 100GB, the size of instances has been increased to 16GB RAM, faster writes via optional asynchronous replication, EU datacenter option for Premier customers and integration with Google Apps Script…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Cloud services are where the action is for enterprise IT companies right now, and Citrix, which bought the open source, cloud-computing platform Cloud.com for upwards of $200 million in 2011 (getting a killer domain name in the process), wants to be at the vanguard of that trend. It’s now preparing to launch a new service at the domain, which will simply be called “Cloud” (minus the dot-com). It has put up a placeholder at Cloud.com with a sign-up for “early access and pleasantly infrequent updates” for what it is describing as a “new Cloud on the horizon.”

It’s not clear at this point whether this will be a completely new product (one guess from TNW is a new home for Project Avalon), to compete against the likes of VMWare, Amazon, Oracle and Salesforce. On the other hand, it could simply be a relaunch of the services that existed at Cloud.com before the old page was taken down…