Category: News

August 6, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: SAP to Pay Oracle at Least $306 Million in Damages

By David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Oracle has managed to squeeze a few more bucks out of SAP for its admitted copyright infringement a few years ago.

Oracle won a handsome $1.3 billion from a jury in 2010, but the judge thought that was over the top and cut it down to $272 million. Instead Oracle opted for a new trial, which was scheduled to start August 27.

However, last Thursday – "to save the time and expense of this new trial" – the pair came to a settlement agreement that guarantees Oracle $306 million in damages plus attorneys’ fees or at least $426 million while it goes off and appeals to try to get the whole $1.3 billion…

August 6, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Apple Reportedly Interested in Buying The Fancy

By David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Apple is in talks to acquire Pinterest rival, The Fancy, according to Business Insider. The fast-growing social e-commerce site is backed by Twitter creator and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

The 20-man start-up calls itself "part store, blog, magazine, and wishlist" and actually has things for sale. Business Insider says it is "much farther along in linking its users to transactions" than Pinterest and takes 10% of any purchases…

August 6, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: eBay puts OpenStack to work

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

OpenStack, the open source "cloud operating system," has stirred community excitement and attracted a vendor following, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Red Hat. But until now one thing has been lacking: A high-profile corporate customer willing to talk about its OpenStack implementation.

Today, eBay is announcing that it’s using OpenStack to manage a high-volume dev, test, and experimentation environment where apps are created for eBay Marketplaces. According to Jean-Christophe Martin, Cloud Architect for eBay, the current OpenStack implementation is small, but eBay is looking at extending that footprint as the open source project matures…

August 6, 2012 Off

iCloud breach highlights some hard truths about the consumer cloud

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

The story of the breach of former Gizmodo staffer Mat Honan’s iCloud account took an interesting turn Sunday with news that the attacker was able to call Apple and convince a customer service employee that he was Honan. While hardly the breach of the century, the situation does highlight a couple hard truths about cloud security when it comes to consumer applications.

1. You’re giving up control. This is a good mantra to keep in mind when considering the use of cloud services. The problem isn’t so much security technology as it is about process, policy and, perhaps, business model. Cloud-storage Dropbox, for example, has experienced a couple of high-profile breaches and security issues owing to the company’s seemingly lax policies about how user information is stored and who has access to it. Then, there’s LinkedIn and its questionable password practices.

With iCloud, the problem seems to be the business model: tying hardware devices to cloud software might be a recipe for disaster. If someone steals Google or Twitter account information, the damage is largely limited to those services and whatever is accessible from them. When someone gets access to iCloud info, it’s lights out on your phone, tablet and laptop, too. At least temporarily, you’re giving control over your physical property — not just your digital life — to a hacker…

August 6, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: How NASA battle-tested its Mars rover live stream

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Anyone excited to watch NASA’s Mars rover, called Curiosity, land on the surface of the red planet on Sunday night can all but rest assured that too much demand won’t kill the stream. NASA teamed with an application-testing specialist called SOASTA to ensure the world can keep watching even if demand spikes or servers fail, proving a single implementation of its application stack can handle 25 Gigabits per second of web traffic.

SOASTA tests the traffic load applications can handle by generating cloud-computing-based resources that mimic the traffic generated by potentially millions of simultaneous real-world users. The company also recently tested London2012.com, the official Olympics web site that organizers predict will have to handle more than a billion visits over the course of this year’s event…

August 6, 2012 Off

Move to cloud requires new, different thinking

By David
Grazed from Federal Times.  Author: Michael Hettinger.

The race to bring cloud computing to the federal government has officially begun. In June, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) reached its initial operating capabilities to certify businesses that meet federal cloud services standards — moving government closer to utilizing the cloud to reduce costs and more effectively serve citizens.

But we need commitment to make this cloud computing vision a reality. Specifically, federal decision-makers need to:

Create a comprehensive federal information technology road map

Today, agencies must interpret myriad Office of Management and Budget strategy documents involving cloud computing, shared services and data center consolidation — supplemented by the recent digital government strategy. The result is confusion around prioritization of agency IT initiatives, as evidenced by public comment from the cloud computing industry…

August 6, 2012 Off

Gizmodo Hacking Illustrates Cloud Computing Security Concerns

By David

Grazed from RedOrbit.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Consumer electronics weblog Gizmodo was the victim of a sophisticated cyberattack in which a hacker was able to gain access to one of their social media accounts by first cracking into the iCloud account of a former contributor, various media outlets reported over the weekend.

According to Emil Protalinski of ZDNet, the Gawker Media-owned website had their Twitter account hacked into Friday by a group identifying themselves as Clan VV3. Protalinski said that the website regained control of the account after a short time, but not before its more than 400,000 followers received offensive and racist posts courtesy of the attackers.

As it turns out, the group gained access to Gizmodo’s Twitter account through the Twitter account of journalist and former employee Mat Honan. They also gained access to Honan’s email account, and were able to remotely access and wipe his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook computer, after cracking the password he used for his Apple cloud-computing service account, Forbes contributor Adrian Kingsley-Hughes explained…

August 6, 2012 Off

Apple co-founder Wozniak sees trouble in the cloud

By David
Grazed from AFP.  Author: Robert MacPherson.

Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.

Wozniak, 61, was the star turn at the penultimate performance in Washington of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," monologist Mike Daisey’s controversial two-hour expose of Apple’s labor conditions in China.

In a post-performance dialogue with Daisey and audience members, Wozniak held forth on topics as varied as public education (he once did a stint as a school teacher) and reality TV (having appeared on "Dancing with the Stars").

But the engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today’s personal computer, the Apple II, was most outspoken on the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into remote servers, known as cloud computing…

August 6, 2012 Off

Coraid Aims to Address Cloud, Video and More with ZX-Series

By David
Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Esther Shein.

Ethernet storage provider Coraid has rolled out a ZFS-based set of NAS server heads that are targeted at meeting needs of cloud, video, big data and other high-performance applications. The scale-out architecture of the new ZX-Series can process large data sets by providing throughput and scale to support data growth, the company said.

Capturing, storing and analyzing increasingly larger sets of data stresses the scalability of legacy NAS systems, the company said. The ZX-Series can process large data sets, such as consumer behavior analysis or HD and 3-D video format editing, because it provides the throughput and scale necessary to support data growth, Coraid said…

August 4, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Here’s How VMware Will Own The Next Wave In IT

By David
Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Julie Bort.

If you haven’t given much thought to IT software company VMware it really is time to start.

More than any other company founded in the late 1990’s, VMware has changed everything about enterprise data centers. Nearly every enterprise on the planet uses it (it has 350,000 customers). And it’s not done yet.

Although VMware is a public company, most of its shares are owned by storage giant EMC. However, VMware is arguably the most important asset EMC has. So much so that its CEO, Paul Maritz will become EMC’s chief strategist on September 1 while EMC’s COO Pat Gelsinger will become the CEO of VMware. The move is seen as a step up for both of them with Maritz becoming heir to the EMC CEO throne…