Category: News

A new venture from a recognized technology visionary promises to get employers and employees alike to fall back in love with information technology (IT). By harnessing the power of cloud computing, Jonathan Lieberman and Miami-based itopia are simplifying the way companies purchase, utilize and maintain the systems and equipment that have become the lifeblood of today’s businesses, dramatically reducing the costs and complexity associated with traditional office IT infrastructures.

With itopia’s "desktop as a service" (DaaS) offering — the itopia Cloud Desktop solution — companies will no longer have to spend countless hours and dollars keeping their desktop computers and servers up and running, installing software upgrades and security patches and backing-up data because itopia does it for them, seamlessly and all at once, across the entire enterprise. Costly servers and PCs are replaced by inexpensive thin clients and all software, computing power and data storage resides in a secure and private cloud infrastructure housed in itopia’s state-of-the-art data centers. With the itopia platform, users can access their "real work computers" from any device, anytime, anywhere, and a lost or stolen laptop no longer means lost or stolen data. Enabling workshifting and mobile workforces has never been easier.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), the leader in massively scalable storage, today announced a dramatic step forward for cloud storage in the enterprise with the release of Web Object Scaler (WOS) 2.5, the latest version of its massively scalable, geo-distributed cloud storage appliance. With the newest version of WOS, enterprises can now enjoy robust enterprise CIFS and NFS connectivity, unparalleled data protection with cost efficiency and the scalability and performance to power the world’s largest private and hybrid cloud applications.

As organizations deal with an unyielding amount of data growth on a global scale, conventional approaches to content and information storage have proven incapable of efficiently or easily scaling to meet today’s data-driven business objectives. DDN WOS peer-to-peer cloud storage technology resolves many of the scalability and management challenges introduced by conventional storage while providing acquisition cost economy at less than 13 percent of the price of traditional storage.*

From the Strata + Hadoop World event in New York City, Cloudera, the category leader that sets the standard for Apache Hadoop in the enterprise, today unveiled the industry’s first true real-time query engine for Hadoop. This major evolution to the company’s Platform for Big Data, Cloudera Enterprise, makes this the first Big Data management solution that allows batch and real-time operations to be performed on any type of data — unstructured and structured — within one massively scalable system. This new approach of creating a single, centralized Big Data platform dramatically improves the economics and performance of large scale data management in the enterprise. For the first time, organizations can process data at petabyte scale and, on the same system, interact with that data in real time to deliver "speed-of-thought" insights.

"Mainstream enterprise adoption of Hadoop will inevitably raise expectations," said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst for Ovum. "Enterprises have grown accustomed to interactive querying and on-the-spot analytics with their existing data warehousing and BI infrastructures and will expect no less of Hadoop. With a real-time query capability powered by its new Impala engine, Cloudera is striving to level the playing field in performance and accessibility with massively parallel SQL platforms."

• KINECTed VDI enables users to securely access their applications and data from any device, anytime, anywhere with increased security and control
• CapEx reductions and mobile workforce enablement among the benefits of KINECTed VDI
• KINECTed VDI joins the flexible, comprehensive suite of cloud services provided by ViaWest

ViaWest, one of the largest privately held data center, cloud computing and managed service providers in North America, announces the addition of KINECTed Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) service, powered by Dizzion, to its portfolio of KINECTed Cloud™ products.

FatCloud launches today, introducing a new IT development and management platform that delivers .NET applications in less time and at lower cost. The company behind the eponymous cloud-enabled application platform, backed by invention company Elevator Labs, also makes its public debut after nearly five years of team- and product-building.

Built to leverage .NET and the Microsoft ecosystem, FatCloud eradicates conventional IT development barriers and accelerates application time-to-market by providing a platform for scale-out processing, data management, and availability/redundancy. FatCloud takes care of an application’s back-end plumbing, so companies of all sizes can empower their IT and focus on accelerating their business strategy, product innovation and growth.

FatCloud uses Microsoft’s standard Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) stack, so developers already know many of the key concepts central to FatCloud, allowing .NET staff to be up and running in hours, not weeks. This preserves existing IT investments and reduces development time and costs, allowing any company to seamlessly leverage and integrate FatCloud’s enterprise-grade power.

Appsecute, the cloud application management company, today announced a set of tools to allow developers and operations staff to collaborate on applications deployed to the cloud.

"Our Cloud Application Management Tools enable a new way of doing operations that is inclusive of developers, rather than shutting them out," said Tyler Power, founder and CTO of Appsecute.

A key part of this vision is the use of Platform as a Service. PaaS delivers big reductions in the time to market and cost of running cloud-based applications, by eliminating most of the operational work and providing a ‘self-service’ interface for developers.

RightScale Inc., the leader in cloud computing management, is helping software vendors accelerate the process of bringing software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to market. Over 100 SaaS providers, from enterprises to startups, rely on RightScale to deploy and manage single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS applications for their customers in cloud environments.

As a result of growth in SaaS adoption, software vendors are looking for ways to deliver SaaS solutions. SaaS providers use RightScale to leverage cloud environments to bring their SaaS offerings to market, including:

• New SaaS products developed specifically for cloud environments.
• Existing SaaS solutions migrating from traditional data centers to cloud environments.
• Traditional on-premise software being offered as SaaS solutions in the cloud.
• Demo and trial environments for traditional on-premise software.

On Friday, we like to step away from some of the news and headlines of the day, and instead hit the water coolers and have a bit of fun.

Here’s another laugh about the cloud from Scott Adam’s Dilbert strip.

Virtustream, Inc., the leading enterprise class cloud solutions provider, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service,”ⁱ which examined 15 vendors whose cloud compute solutions address scale-out cloud hosting, virtual lab environment, self-managed Virtual Data Center (VDC) and turnkey VDC.

According to Gartner, “Service providers are increasingly using dynamic physical and logical isolation mechanisms to create ‘private’ infrastructure within a shared, multitenant capacity pool. This allows economies of scale while enabling customers to meet a broader range of security and compliance requirements.”

Grazed from TechWeek Europe. Author: Peter Judge.

Everyone is out there selling the cloud like there’s no tomorrow, so it’s tempting to think the technology is all done. But there are people out there who say that is not the case. The cloud is still scaling up, and it’s not always a hundred percent clear how services will be operated, as more and more users turn to public shared resources for more of their IT.

The dream of cloud activists seems to be a shift away from in-house IT , and long term outsourcing deals, running on stable hardware in known locations. Instead, resource locations will be flexible, and customer processes will be running in an increasingly ad hoc, transitory way, on different providers’ services…