Category: News

Grazed from ProgrammableWeb. Author: Michael Vizard.

One of the things that not many IT people fully appreciate is how much scale really matters when it comes to cloud computing. The more applications that run on a particular cloud computing platform, the more the cost of running those applications is distributed across an increasingly larger number of servers and storage systems. Eventually, a cloud service provider reaches enough critical mass that every new application winds up helping the cloud service provider to drive infrastructure costs down, while at the same time increase overall performance.

This is clearly the case with Amazon, which is now the leading provider of cloud computing services in the industry, so much so that it’s the shadow being cast by Amazon from Seattle, rather than Microsoft, that is being felt most this week at the VMworld 2012 conference…

Grazed from NewsFactor. Author: Michael Liedtke.

Hewlett-Packard Co. used to be known as a place where innovative thinkers flocked to work on great ideas that opened new frontiers in technology. These days, HP is looking behind the times.

Coming off a five-year stretch of miscalculations, HP is in such desperate need of a reboot that many investors have written off its chances of a comeback.

Consider this: Since Apple Inc. shifted the direction of computing with the release of the iPhone in June 2007, HP’s market value has plunged by 60 percent to $35 billion. During that time, HP has spent more than $40 billion on dozens of acquisitions that have largely turned out to be duds so far…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Unsurprisingly, the news coming out of VMworld 2012 so far is heavily tied into the cloud computing realm. One of the first announcements off the springboard was the launch of a cloud storage starter kit developed by Nirvanix and TwinStrata.

Both cloud storage service businesses, Nirvanix and TwinStrata are combining 50 TB of Nirvanix cloud storage with TwinStrata’s CloudArray to provide a “pre-tested, fully integrated cloud storage starter kit” for $48 per year. The two companies are targeting enterprise customers in search of backup, archiving and global collaboration in one solution. Additionally, the companies have crafted a set of SLAs around the offering…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Rackspace is buying Mailgun for its email-enabling APIs, which should come in handy for developers wanting to build and host applications using Rackspace’s shiny new OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure. Terms were not disclosed.

Rackspace fresh on the heels of delivering its OpenStack private cloud, is buying Mailgun, a San Francisco startup that makes it easier for developers to build email services into their applications. Terms were not disclosed…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Splunk is taking its machine data show to the cloud with a new SaaS offering called Storm. It’s essentially Splunk’s flagship software tuned for cloud-generated data, but it plays into a big opportunity for fusing cloud computing with big data.

Log-management expert Splunk has a new product called Storm that lets users search, manage and analyze their cloud computing machine data without having to download a thing. The offering, which became generally available on Tuesday, is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — a cloud-based version of the Splunk software tuned for cloud computing applications and that charges users a monthly fee depending on how much data they’re storing. And it has been a long time coming…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

The news at VMworld that VMware was applying to join the OpenStack Foundation sounded a little like Microsoft asking to join the Linux Foundation. Really? VMware is embracing a stack of open source bits that does much of what VMware’s expensive, proprietary software does? Why would it do that?

The answer lies deep in the nature of OpenStack and in VMware’s vision of its own future.

For one thing, OpenStack is no direct threat to VMware. OpenStack is a framework for managing virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources; it doesn’t do any of the virtualizing itself. True, VMware’s virtualization management products overlap with OpenStack, but downloading and installing OpenStack from the OpenStack.org website would be like going to Kernel.org and downloading and installing the Linux kernel — no one wants to try that at home…

Grazed from InforWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Werner Vogel, the CTO of Amazon.com, wrote a thoughtful blog last week that focuses on how to determine the true value of using its technology, looking at both total cost of ownership (TCO) and the return on agility. The blog stated that customers "struggle with how to account for the return on agility, the fact that they are now able to pursue business opportunities much faster at much lower cost points than before."

It’s good to see this kind of thinking coming from a provider. I find that many vendors are clueless about the business-agility value of their own technology. I’ve written a ton on the value of agility, in the context of both SOA and cloud computing (which are directly related)…

Grazed from Computer Technology Review. Author: Editorial Staff.

Onstage at VMworld 2012, VMware unveiled on Monday a comprehensive solution of cloud infrastructure and management products, expertise and ecosystem support to help customers drive greater efficiency and improve operational agility. The VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 integrates VMware’s virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into a single SKU, simplifying the adoption of cloud era technologies.

“Today at VMworld, VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments,” said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO. “The VMware vCloud Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.”…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Deni Conner.

Quantum on Monday at VMworld 2012 announced Q-Cloud, a new cloud-based backup and disaster recovery service that works with the company’s deduplication appliances and disk-based storage arrays.

Designed for small and mid-sized businesses, Q-Cloud is capable of deduplicating and backing up data to both on-premises equipment and to the cloud. It can back up capacities of 1TB to 1PB of data and achieve a deduplication ratio of 15:1…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

More granular cloud management features will make it easier for companies and service providers to set up group policies and lessen server sprawl in their environments, says Tier 3 CTO Jared Wray.

Tier 3 says its new cloud management tools will give customers more precise control of their workloads and help them keep a lid on server sprawl.

Just because companies want to offload some compute tasks to third-party providers, doesn’t mean they don’t want precise management of those jobs or a way to track and monitor them. The race is on among the cloud service providers to offer the granularity of control enterprise customers need…