Category: News

Grazed from FinancialWeek. Author: Mitchell Osak.

Many organizations are diving head first into the latest IT game changer, cloud computing (CC). While a comprehensive technical and financial analysis is usually undertaken, few companies thoroughly consider the organizational implications of this strategic move. They do this at their own peril. Cloud computing implementations can go astray when the wrong structures, processes and practices compromised the right technical solution. Managers would be wise to consider whether their organizations are cloud-supportive before redeveloping their infrastructures.

In a traditional IT model, technicians, hardware and software are tied to specific geographies, departments and business units. In most cases, this model fails to maximize operational flexibility and IT asset utilization. A CC architecture, on the other hand, centralizes and virtualizes IT resources, making them available to all users when needed as needed. The result is greater operational agility, lower costs and higher IT scalability…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Linux vendor SUSE has thrown its hat into the already crowded OpenStack distribution game.

Openstack is the open source cloud deployment model that in the two years since its founding has gained considerable attention from some of the biggest tech players in the industry. Companies like Rackspace, through its private cloud, already offer a free OpenStack distribution, while CloudScaling, Piston Cloud Computing Co., Red Hat and Ubuntu each have a distribution or are planning to release one soon.

Meanwhile, companies ranging from Rackspace to HP, Internap and Softlayer are already leveraging OpenStack as the foundation for their public clouds, giving users curious about trying OpenStack another option. "It’s definitely getting crowded," says Forrester researcher James Staten about the OpenStack distributions already emerging in the market…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Paul Krill.

Zend and VMware are announcing an integration between the Zend Server PHP application server and VMware’s vFabric Application Director tool for automating the provisioning of applications to clouds. The partnership allows enterprises to deploy PHP applications to private, public, or hybrid clouds via a drag-and-drop user interface.

To help with deployment, VMware and Zend developed portable deployment "blueprints," which feature a reference implementation to make it easier to provision PHP applications. "Customers can use blueprints to deploy a PHP cluster," said Ido Ben Moshe, vice president of global support and professional services at Zend, in an interview at the VMworld 2012 conference in San Francisco this week…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Microsoft is joining several startups in trying to entice developers to use its cloud as a specialized backend for their mobile applications. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services joins offerings from Parse, Kinvey and Apigee in trying to establish a new infrastructure for the growing mobile ecosystem.

Microsoft just announced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud offering that joins the ranks of Parse, Apigee and Kinvey in establishing a backend as a service designed for the mobile ecosystem. The goal of such a service is to provide a platform for mobile developers that will allow them to worry less about their infrastructure and only about their app…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

Clustered storage vendor Scale Computing today upgraded its scale-out storage cluster to include compute resources dedicated to applications and a hypervisor component that allows storage and memory to be easily managed and allocated.

Scale Computing calls its new HC3 appliance "infrastructure-in-a-box," saying it eliminates the need to buy virtualization software, external servers and shared storage. That can mean significant reductions in both costs and complexity…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With Nodester, the polyglot PaaS provider gets deeper and broader Node.js support and access to even more Node.js developers. Next up? J2EE, Go and Perl support, says Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson.

Appfog, the provider of a multi-language, multi-cloud platform as a service, is buying Nodester to beef up its Node.js capabilities.

Company CEO Lucas Carlson said the deal — terms of which were not disclosed — will give the company deeper and broader Node.js support and access to more Node.js developers…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Michael Brenner.

Cloud computing offers many potential benefits for your organization: flexibility, reduced costs, increased efficiency and productivity, just to name a few. Whether you’re a seasoned cloud-computing pro or are just embarking on your first implementation, it is worth your time to examine the technology that will help you on your journey to reaching the cloud.

Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) gives us some direction. In its What’s Needed for Cloud Computing? Focus on Networking and WAN Optimization white paper, ESG clarifies the definition of cloud computing, helps identify where you are in your implementation, and examines the role of the network in cloud technology…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Michael Otey.

Today many companies are looking into the different cloud computing offerings provided by different vendors. Most of those vendors provide off-site services where the business has little of no control over the servers or the data. Trusting security, data integrity and performance levels to the cloud vendor.

At this past VMworld 2012 I met with NEC’s Bill Michael, Director Cloud Services to discuss NEC’s new Cloud in a Vault service. NEC’s Cloud in a Vault takes a completely different tack on cloud computing by offering a private cloud that’s built entirely according to the customer’s requirements…

Grazed from DigitalHome. Author: Cliff Boodoosingh.

Primus Business Services (NYSE: PTGI) has launched its enhanced PrimusCloud Server to allow Canadian business clients more control over their hardware performance.

The PrimusCloud Server platform provides enhanced levels of end-client management capabilities and has two distinct levels of storage performance – standard cloud and premium cloud.

Primus created a single cloud product that spans the different grades of SAN (Storage Area Network) capabilities, making it easier for customers to control their infrastructure, including all of their networking and server components…

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…