Category: News

October 17, 2012 Off

CloudStack strikes back in the battle of open-source clouds

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire.

In case you’ve forgotten in the face of so much OpenStack news this week, there’s more than one open-source cloud in town. And, Citrix-backed CloudStack gained some key vendor support with Cisco and CA signing onto the effort this week. The news comes out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, halfway around the world from the OpenStack Summit in San Diego…

October 17, 2012 Off

IFS launches new RCM Toolkit for cloud computing

By David

Grazed from Plant Engineering. Author: Editorial Staff.

A new reliability-centered maintenance tool from IFS is designed to deliver maintenance data through a cloud-based computing platform. IFS announced the launch of the tool at its global conference in Gothenburg, Sweden.

“The IFS RCM Toolkit is based on IFS’s long experience in asset-intensive industries enabling our customers to secure asset safety, cost effectiveness, and uptime,” IFS CTO Dan Matthews said. “The RCM Toolkit is available with the IFS Cloud in line with our strategy to enable customers to extend the capabilities of IFS Applications with applications in the cloud.”…

October 17, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Keep Old Apps Private, Make New Apps Public

By David

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Onisick.

Private and public clouds have many elements in common, including high degrees of virtualization and automation and a usage-based service model. But that doesn’t mean an enterprise application will run equally well in either environment. Most legacy applications are better off staying in your data center. At the same time, the public cloud should be the first place you consider deploying new applications. Here’s why.

Traditional enterprise applications are better suited to the private cloud. These applications are typically built in a silo-centric fashion and are dependent on the hardware, particularly homegrown applications. Don’t let virtualization fool you; even if the applications are virtualized, they’re still silo-centric. The only difference is it’s now virtual hardware. You’re still working on the outdated model of one application, one OS…

October 17, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Why OpenStack Works

By David
Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

The last two years have been very eventful for Jonathan Bryce. Bryce is the Executive Director of the OpenStack Foundation, overseeing a project that has become highly influential since he helped create it two years ago.

Today at the OpenStack Summit, Bryce took the keynote stage to detail the progress and the path forward for the open source cloud computing platform.

OpenStack was jointly created by Rackspace and NASA. Now there are over 180 contributing companies and over 6,000 individual members. The core OpenStack code base has also grown in the last two years…

October 17, 2012 Off

Green clouds are all about scale

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Katie Fehrenbacher.

Do data centers that run on clean power seem like pipe dreams? Not when companies hit the massive scales of webscale computing. Execs creating business models from green data centers say that it’s the large size of the projects that makes clean power attractive.

Two execs building businesses around renewable energy-powered data centers said at GigaOM’s Structure Europe event in Amsterdam on Tuesday that the key to driving clean power for data centers is scale. Both Tate Cantrell, CTO of Verne Global, and Eirikur Hrafnsson, founder of GreenQloud, run companies that sell green data center services to IT companies across large computing facilities, which are able to aggregate clean power cost effectively over a large scale…

October 17, 2012 Off

TrainSignal Releases VMware vCloud Director Organizations Training

By David
Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

TrainSignal, the global leader in professional computer training, announced the release of their VMware vCloud Director Organizations training course.

These vCloud Director videos provide value to end users who need to set up and maintain vCD Organizations. When vCloud Director is implemented to manage infrastructure in virtual datacenters, the ability to remain agile often depends on scalability via cloud computing. This vCloud training course shows vSphere admins how to construct robust network infrastructures within vCloud Organizations, and how various tools can be used to meet specific needs…

October 17, 2012 Off

OpenStack Summit: Open Cloud Platform Gets Big Push

By David
Grazed from PC Magazine.  Author: Michael J. Miller.

One of the more interesting trends in cloud computing is the emergence of OpenStack, a set of open-source projects to set up public and private cloud computing solutions. This was originally set up by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, but now has grown into a full platform run by the OpenStack Foundation and held its own summit this week.

Troy Toman, senior director for cloud compute engineering at Rackspace and a director of the OpenStack Foundation, said the major projects within OpenStack include Nova, an open-source cloud computing fabric; Glance, for managing server (virtual machine) images; and Quantum, for providing "network as a service" functions. The last one is an API for dynamically configuring virtual networks, effectively a method of software-defined networking (SDN), and is a big part of the latest release of OpenStack, known as "Folsom." (Companies such as Nicira, which is now becoming part of VMware, have been driving this.)…

October 16, 2012 Off

IBM PureSystems – A Bit Of Cloud For Mainframes?

By David

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Peter Judge.

Six months ago, IBM launched PureSystems, new-wave mainframes which combine RISC and Intel servers and promise a new and simpler way to develop enterprise applications. But since that initial fanfare,we have heard almost nothing about the supposedly revolutionary servers.

That doesn’t mean nothing is happening, though, says IBM senior server consultant IBM Tikiri Wanduragala. He grabbed TechWeekEurope last month, to tell us that PureSystems is a response to commodity cloud computing. It might take time to mature, but it is on track. The meeting took place in the run-up to the announcement of new PureSystems tailored for Big Data analytics…

October 16, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Inside Intel, part 1- The Evolution of IT security

By David

Grazed from CSO. Author: Bobby Violino.

Like many other companies, processor manufacturer Intel Corp. is having to evolve its information security focus to meet the changes underway in the technology landscape—particularly with the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications and the rise in cloud computing services.

"We realize the importance of detective controls and building out our security business intelligence capabilities to scale and meet future business objectives around computing," says Alan Ross, senior principal engineer at Intel. "We must have the ability to aggregate, correlate and even visualize many billions of events per day. This type of scale requires investment in many areas."…

October 16, 2012 Off

Cloud security ‘better than in-house security’

By David

Grazed from BCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

Security is one of the main factors preventing companies from switching to cloud computing, particularly cloud storage, as they are worried about how well protected their data will be. But according to Google’s enterprise director of security, the cloud is probably a lot more secure than the in-house systems most firms are currently using.

Speaking to ZDNet, Eran Feigenbaum acknowledged that the exact level of security provided would largely depend on the type of organisation in question and who the cloud service provider was. However, he insisted that in most cases greater security would be offered in the cloud…