Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $5 per month, has snagged $5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K.

San Mateo, Calif.-based Backblaze will use the money to staff up and expand its marketing efforts — and attack the masses of people who still do not back up their computers, CEO Gleb Budman said in a recent interview. Backblaze competes most directly with Mozy, now owned by VMware (via EMC) and Carbonite.

Taking outside money was not done lightly. The company was bootstrapped for its first year and a half and then it took in $390,000 in seed money. The company has been profitable since the early days, Budman said…

Grazed from EON. Author: Editorial Staff.

This is the year of accountability for cloud computing. Businesses are demanding that CIOs deliver value from their cloud projects. The acknowledged leader in cloud management, BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC) has been helping its growing base of cloud customers to answer that call with measurable benefits to the business.

“There are few cloud management solutions successfully creating such a reality for customers.”

“Clouds have the ability to enable IT organizations to deliver high-performing business services faster and at lower cost, so the business remains competitive and consequently meets their revenue and profit goals,” said Ronni Colville, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. “There are few cloud management solutions successfully creating such a reality for customers.”…

Grazed from CloudStory. Author: Janakiram MSV.

The most common question that I get to hear from developers is – how do I get started with Cloud Computing? Many developers believe that targeting a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is all it takes to get onto the Cloud bandwagon. While PaaS abstracts the nuts and bolts of the Cloud infrastructure to ease the life of developers, many applications run on raw VMs deployed to run on Infrastructure as a Service. So, it pays to understand the behind the scenes architecture when developing Cloud ready applications. Though .NET and J2EE abstracted the underlying implementation, developers with the thorough platform knowledge fare better in their jobs. Similarly, knowing a little more about the inner workings of the deployment platform will help developers in the long term.

It is just not the understanding of the Cloud platform that will make them ready. Developers need to have a mastery over certain fundamentals concepts. Here are five concepts that the aspiring Cloud developers should focus on – …

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IDC has released results of a study indicating that long-term, moving workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) pays off big-time for some – to the tune of an average five-year return on investment of 626 percent and a cumulative savings of $2.5 million per application.

Although AWS commissioned IDC to analyze the long-term implications of moving workloads to AWS, the market research firm maintains that the analysis was independent and impartial. The goal was to measure the impact of moving applications on developer productivity and business agility, and the new opportunities that businesses could address by moving resources onto Amazon cloud infrastructure services…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Xath Cruz.

In the 1948 play Death of a Salesman, the character Willy Loman, who is a salesman, experiences a downward spiral caused by his inability to adapt to the industry after it has been changed by the war. Nowadays, we are seeing something similar in the real world, as a large number of traditional IT guys are finding that the advent of cloud computing has affected traditional IT landscape.

One of the major changes in the IT landscape is that what was once the job of an IT guy is now outsourced to a different company. According to Gartner research director John Rivard, traditional IT guys now find their positions in danger of being bypassed by the business unless they can adapt and grasp corporate demands. Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda Survey backs Rivard’s statement, as it shows that majority of companies and government agencies will start to rely on cloud services for majority of their IT needs by 2020, which meant that the changes in IT is already underway and people who fail to adapt to it risk being left behind…

Cloud computing and colocation provider FiberCloud announces today that they now support Ubuntu operating systems on both their cloud and dedicated servers. Customers now have the option to choose pre-installed Ubuntu cloud servers, offering more operating system options for open-source servers. Ubuntu comes installed on cloud servers at no additional charge.

The most popular commercially-supported operating system on the web, Ubuntu is considered by many to be at the leading edge in its addition of new features. Ubuntu is also known for its performance and efficient use of system resources.

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