Category: News

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In his new book, Cloudonomics, Joe Weinman explores many of the areas being impacted by the cloud computing phenomenon, offering compelling value propositions. He spells out, extremely thoroughly, the business cases and cost justifications that go behind cloud computing efforts.

He also provides 28 business areas where cloud does and doesn’t make business and financial sense. (And, amazingly, manages to categorize all points in terms starting with the letter “C.)” A senior VP at Telx and formerly with A&T, Weinman is highly regarded as a thought leader on the emerging art and science of cloud economics…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Katie Fehrenbacher.

In the first announcement since SeaMicro was acquired by AMD, AMD has detailed its new server tech, which is optimized for big data and cloud computing. The new platform improves performance by moving storage closer to the computing center.
AMD.SeaMicro.servers

In the first announcement following AMD’s acquisition of low power server startup SeaMicro earlier this year, AMD on Monday announced a new server platform based on the SeaMicro tech that’s optimized for big data and cloud computing. The newly-announced “SM15000? server tech supports 5 petabytes of storage and brings storage closer to compute, making the system faster and more resilient…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GoDaddy, the massive Web hosting company, went down for several hours on Monday, taking an untold number of websites with it.

A person affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous — named @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter — claimed responsibility for the outage.

"I’m taking godaddy down bacause (sic) well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now," that person wrote in response to questions from a technology reporter at tech blog Mashable…

Grazed from The Atlantic. Author: Raul F. Chong.

We are in an age when jobs like "data scientist" are not far from reality. The convergence of two key technological areas — cloud computing and big data — are having far reaching implications that indeed are changing the world.

It’s leading to the discovery of new drugs to cure diseases; predicting weather patterns more accurately (even predicting earthquakes?), finding better ways to use and save water, and so on. These are many of the ideas and projects that IBM has advanced with its Smarter Planet initiative, which has cloud computing and big data technologies at its core…

Grazed from ZDnet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

For all the enormous, color-coded, multi-tabbed spreadsheets, and the number crunching, and the analysis, it has been suggested that much of today’s strategic planning is contaminated by bias, judgement and opinion. And it most definitely is not scientific.

The authors, in the article Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy, suggest that there is a correlation between the size of the spreadsheet – with larger being better – and the comfort level that executives have in their process…

Citrix today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Beetil, a privately-held cloud-based service desk technology provider. Beetil helps technical support professionals provide exceptional customer assistance and streamline technology costs through the delivery of easy-to-use, yet powerful incident tracking, end user self-service, configuration, change management and release management functionality.

The acquisition enables Citrix to expand the capabilities of its market-leading, cloud-based support product line, Citrix GoToAssist, with the addition of an integrated IT service desk solution. As a result, Citrix has the ability to offer support professionals an essential set of cloud-based services from a single platform for remote support, monitoring and service desk management.

Nasuni, a provider of enterprise storage to large, distributed organizations, today announced the addition of mobile access from Apple and Android devices. End-users can now access their corporate files with the simplicity and convenience that they’ve come to expect through their use of consumer-oriented cloud storage services, while providing enterprise IT with the security, integration and control required to safeguard mission-critical information and systems.

“Enterprise IT no longer needs to fear that their end users will circumvent existing security policies in order to access their files from mobile devices,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. “The challenge for IT is to deliver convenient access to data without jeopardizing security. Mobile access needs to be an extension to the existing storage and security infrastructure. It should be a feature of the infrastructure rather than another application IT has to manage. We are extending the capabilities of our storage controllers to handle mobile devices. Our goal with this release is to delight the end-users while not asking IT to change their security perimeter.”

Nexenta Systems, the leading supplier of enterprise-class OpenStorage solutions, and Cirracore, a leading supplier of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, today announced that they will jointly demonstrate Cirracore’s Enterprise Private Cloud Appliance integrated with NexentaStor storage software at the 2012 Intel Developer Forum, Nexenta Booth #118, taking place September 11-13, 2012.

The Cirracore Enterprise Private Cloud Appliance is a platform built upon the Intel® Modular Server that businesses trust to handle critical computing needs while maintaining regulatory and governance compliance. Cirracore offers a robust cloud platform as a service in a secure, redundant, and carrier-neutral environment that offers fast, secure network access to the world’s top performing Tier I carriers. Built upon ZFS technology, NexentaStor combines with Cirracore’s Private Cloud Appliance to provide an elastic compute and storage model with no upfront capital requirements. NexentaStor, which is optimized for the Intel Xeon E5 Server Platform, allows OEMs and VARs within the Intel/Nexenta ecosystem to deliver the ideal storage platform for compute density with maximum I/O capacity for ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. VMware vCloud Director provides a simple Web interface to manage and configure virtual servers bundled with graphical analytics and performance monitoring software.

Only a standardized approach to the cloud-delivered service environment will enable a breakthrough in interoperable seamless service integration into devices, warns global networking standards group, the UPnP Forum. This announcement comes during the IBC in Amsterdam, where a focus is being placed on the pioneering applications and technologies that are driving the future of device interoperability.

"Currently there is a real lack of standards for cloud service delivery and combined with the proliferation of next-generation services, many users are left flipping between a multitude of applications or frustrated at the lack of support on their platforms. The lack of certified standards makes it difficult, if not impossible, for manufacturers to innovate the user experience and provide seamless services to the end consumer," says UPnP Forum President and Chairman, Dr. Alan Messer.