Category: News

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

In a world awash in data, where complexity is on the rise and the pace of innovation has never been faster, the need to streamline new application development is driving demand for a relatively new form of cloud computing known as Platform as a Service (PaaS). This was the finding of a new study released today by the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Center for Applied Insights. In response, IBM is today announcing the general availability of a new PaaS offering for the fourth quarter to help organizations build and deploy their own software applications quickly and effectively by renting IBM’s PaaS cloud computing platform of integrated middleware, monitoring, networks, servers and storage.

IBM’s survey of more than 1,500 IT decision makers from 18 countries found that forward looking IT leaders are blazing the trail with early adoption of PaaS for business advantage – citing big data as the #1 reason among several strategic initiatives they were targeting. The study also showed that nearly 20 percent of respondents are currently using PaaS, although more than half recognize the opportunity…

Grazed from ScrippsNews. Author: Steve Alexander.

Cloud computing — using remote data centers over the Internet instead of buying computers — has been quietly creeping into companies under the noses of corporate executives. Departments are using it without permission by putting it on company charge cards, and employees widely use some common cloud applications such as Google Docs or Salesforce.com, said Bill Martorelli, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

"Corporations really need to reconcile themselves to cloud computing," said Martorelli. "But they also have to find the balance between empowerment of employees and corporate control."…

Grazed from Penguin Computing. Author: PR Announcement.

Penguin Computing today announced the immediate availability of its Ultimate Data X1 (UDX1) system. The UDX1 is the first server platform offered by a North American system vendor that is built on the ARM-based EnergyCore System on Chip (SoC) from Calxeda.

The UDX1 brings new levels of efficiency and scale to Internet datacenters. With a five Watt power envelope per server the UDX1 is ideal for I/O bound workloads including “Big Data” applications, scalable analytics and cloud storage. The UDX1 offers a drastic reduction of TCO for high-density, low power computing environments. Workloads that have been processed by racks of conventional systems can now be handled by a group of servers in a single physical unit. The UDX1 features a modular architecture that can be configured with up to 48 Calxeda EnergyCore server nodes, with four cores per node. The system includes an internal 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch fabric for node-to-node connectivity and provides up to 144TB of hard drive capacity…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Within the data center community, server sprawl was an issue many administrators had to face and address. Virtualization helped consolidate many of those systems to create a leaner infrastructure. After a little while VM sprawl became the new challenge. With improved management and controls, managers were able to regain some virtualization real estate by tackling the VM sprawl issue, although many will insist that this issue still persists.

Now, with more WAN utilization, better underlying hardware components and more organizations moving to some kind of a cloud model, the IT industry is experiencing a new type of challenge: Cloud Sprawl…