Category: News

Grazed from The Age. Author: Quentin Hardy.

June 2012 may well go down as the month the tech world entered a new era.

On June 11, Apple showed its next operating system for iPhones and iPads. It offered maps and speech recognition, plus music and movies on iTunes, all tied via the internet to Apple’s "cloud" of servers.

A week later, Microsoft, known better for software, demonstrated the Surface tablet, its answer to the iPad. The Surface interacts with both the web and Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, called Windows Azure…

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently pubished the report, Guides on Implementation of Cloud Computing Infrastructure Projects in China, which proposes roadmaps for Chinese enterprises in constructing cloud computing infrastructures. The report is based on IDC’s in-depth surveys on the current status of China’s cloud computing market. It aims at offering suggestions to enterprises and organizations that are constructing cloud computing infrastructures that will help them to deploy cloud platforms rapidly and successfully.

IDC believes that the implementation of cloud computing infrastructures involves not only the integration of software and hardware, but also the transformation of businesses’ IT strategies. Therefore, users should evaluate cloud computing projects before implementation and cooperate with experienced IT consultancies or service providers to ensure that their plans take the management pattern of cloud computing centers into consideration and includes future operations. The cloud computing platforms should be expected to truly benefit the enterprises.

FortaTrust, a leading provider of dedicated and cloud computing services, has announced its Free VPS Program. “This program is designed to provide Technology Professionals with the opportunity to become familiar with our VPS Cloud Servers in a production environment, and have the ability to use them at their discretion for their internal operations,” said Octavio Diaz, FortaTrust’s Director of Industry Relations.

The Free VPS Program for Technology Professionals:

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DynamicOps, Inc., a provider of cloud automation solutions that enable provisioning and management of IT services across heterogeneous environments – VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, multiple hypervisors and Amazon Web Services. Terms of the acquisition were not announced. The acquisition is scheduled to close in Q3 2012 subject to customary closing conditions.

“As IT organizations evolve from builders to brokers of services many seek to provide access to diverse cloud resources in a controlled, managed fashion,” said Ramin Sayar, vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Cloud Management, VMware. “DynamicOps’ multi-cloud and multi-platform capabilities help to strengthen VMware’s position as the infrastructure and management vendor of choice for cloud computing.”

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: Greg Bensinger.

Amazon.com Inc. on Saturday restored service to its cloud computing operations after electrical storms cut service to some customers including Netflix Inc. and Instagram. But Amazon waited until Monday to tell the world that those operations were fully back up.

In a statement Monday, the Seattle company said thunderstorms affected several of its datacenters on the East Coast on Friday night. But while “several of our datacenters had their utility power impacted,” Amazon said “in only one of them did the redundant power not operate correctly.” The power outage “ended up impacting a single digit percentage” of customers, Amazon said in the statement.

Amazon added that it restored service to most of its customers on Friday night, with the remainder restored on Saturday…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Bert Markgraf.

Proprietary models for cloud computing are a major barrier for midsize businesses considering moving data and applications to the cloud. It takes substantial resources to configure business functions to work in a cloud-based environment and companies must be able to move if there is a problem with one supplier.

Open source cloud platforms address this fear of lock-in by offering transparency and open structures at a basic level. This means that companies could transfer from one cloud supplier to another using the same open source platform, but it doesn’t mean that other open source platforms would be compatible. The key for a midsize business wanting to avoid lock-in to preserve its investment in cloud development is to choose an open source platform that will be adopted widely.

Sun BurstThree open source cloud platforms were represented at last week’s GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco. OpenStack, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus representatives participated in a debate on the respective merits of their cloud technologies. InformationWeek reported on the discussions…

Grazed from DABCC. Author: Editorial Staff.

Recently VMware’s first certification around cloud computing quietly went into beta. Let’s learn more about this new certification option, the VCP-Infrastructure as a Service (or VCP-IaaS) certification…

Top 10 Must-Knows for the New VCP-IaaS

As this certification is still in beta, as of today, we don’t have a lot of official information yet but here’s what we do know:…

Grazed from Dow Jones. Author: Editorial Staff.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) this weekend pulled the plug on one of its rare missteps, MobileMe. On Saturday, the company shut down its much-maligned cloud-syncing service, preserving account holders’ data for a limited time so they might migrate to its new cloud service iCloud.

The closure brings to an end Apple’s first foray into cloud computing, one that, at the time it debuted, threatened to tarnish the company’s brand…

Grazed from ChannelPartners Online. Author: Editorial Staff.

The chief objection to the adoption of cloud computing is security. End users are concerned that cloud service providers do not have the security infrastructure, policies and procedures necessary to adequately safeguard data and respond to security incidents. As trusted advisers, channel partners need to understand their concerns and be able to reassure customers that their business-critical applications are safe in hosted environments. To help partners do that, this issue will identify risks and ways to mitigate them:

Top 7 Threats to Cloud Computing
To help organizations in making educated risk-management decisions regarding their cloud adoption strategies, the Cloud Security Alliance, has compiled a guide to the top cloud computing threats…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Colleen Miller.

Consumer use of cloud computing will ramp up over the next few years, according to research firm Gartner, Inc., which recently predicted consumers will store 36 percent of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. This compares with a mere 7 percent of consumer data housed in cloud storage in 2011. Consumers’ increasing desire to share content and use multiple devices is driving this trend, Gartner said.
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“Historically, consumers have generally stored content on their PCs, but as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras,” said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This is leading to a massive increase in new user-generated content that requires storage. With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices.”…