Category: News

June 24, 2012 Off

Virtustream Peddles Clouds for All Occasions

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

Virtustream wants to move mission-critical legacy apps to the cloud where they’ll be 60% cheaper to run on-demand especially since they won’t have to be rewritten.

So it’s put out xStream 2.0, an update, which is supposed to move both web-scale applications and legacy applications to a public, private or enterprise-class hybrid cloud take your pick. Stuff, it says, you can’t do on Amazon.

It’s for the enterprise and solution providers…

June 24, 2012 Off

IT security problems shift as data moves to ‘cloud’

By David
Grazed from PhysOrg.  Author: Rob Lever.

The Internet "cloud" has become the hottest topic in computing, but the trend has created a new range of security issues that need to be addressed.

The cloud is associated with things like personal emails and music which can be accessed on computers and a range of mobile devices.  But the US military and government agencies from the CIA to the also use to allow data to be accessed anywhere in the world and save money — and, ostensibly, to enhance security.

Microsoft, , and others are major players in the cloud, which seeks to transfer some of the issues to more sophisticated data centers. Firms like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com offer cloud services for business…

June 23, 2012 Off

Progress Software: the “invisible” cloud is the “performant” cloud

By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Boston-headquartered Progress Software has been going through various reincarnations of itself since the 1980s during which time it has variously been known as a business application infrastructure software company, a data integration specialist and (if the company’s marketing machine pulls it off) a competent player in the new arena of cloud computing.

As hugely sceptical of cloudwashing and the current trend to position "just about anything"-as-a-Service down some level of Internet pipe connectivity as we should rightly remain, the company’s senior architect for SaaS and cloud computing strategy Mike Omerod has recently spoken of the need to diffuse talk of different cloud architectures and focus on what data really needs in order to be "computed" properly…

June 23, 2012 Off

Cloud – The Next Generation of Shared Services

By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Ajay Budhraja.

There has been a push for Shared services adoption across organizations for a while. since such services reduce duplication and can result in cost savings. However there have been challenges to proposing and implementing shared services. Cloud is enhancing the pace to shared services migration and it naturally facilitates the use of shared services since a cloud service can be more easily leveraged by multiple consumers.

Cloud is the true manifestation of a service delivery mechanism and has significantly sped up the transition to consolidation and shared services. Cloud can be termed as the next generation of shared services since it adds the dynamic computing, elasticity, self-service, measured aspects in addition to other aspects for rapid provisioning and on demand access. Cloud solution may offer lower lifecycle costs based on usage and the monitoring aspects can lay out a holistic view of usage, cost assessments and chargeback information. All this information can enhance the ability of the organization to plan and react to changes based on performance and capacity metrics…

June 23, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Vordel Dreams Up the – Drum Roll, Please – API Server

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

Dublin-based Vordel has spun up a newfangled API Server offering the enterprise a single platform to deploy APIs to cloud services and mobile users.

The widgetry builds on its application gateway technologies.

The company sees it as a simpler, more agile way to deploy apps and a quicker way to drive revenue.

The APIs Vordel has in mind are the lightweight REST and JSON APIs used to enable mobile, web and cloud applications; SOAP APIs for SOA; and file-based interfaces for B2B integration.

Architecturally the API Server could replace or stand in front of an application server. It can be deployed in traditional data centers or in an elastic cloud environment, including public, private and hybrid clouds…

June 23, 2012 Off

Cloud hosting company iomart Group wins Outstanding Performance in Business Growth award

By David
Grazed from RealWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

iomart Group plc (AIM:IOM), is proud to announce that it won the award for Outstanding Performance in Business Growth at the Digital Technology Awards.

The judges praised iomart Group’s financial performance, profitability and ability to deliver on its business strategy, describing it as "one of the leading cloud computing and managed hosting companies in the UK."

iomart Group plc CEO Angus MacSween said: "We are delighted to have won this award. Our strategy has been to position the iomart Group and its range of hosting brands to capitalise on the continuing growth in the market for cloud services. This market is still large, fragmented and growing and we see real opportunities to benefit from this over the next few years."…

June 23, 2012 Off

Data Center, Fibre Channel, Ethernet Spending on the Rise–Kind of

By David
Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The data center is evolving pretty much as expected, with bigger, faster pipes driving the biggest growth, according to new vendor market share and forecast reports from Infonetics Research focused on SAN and data center network equipment. But that may not last, according to the consultancy, as virtualization, cloud computing, and the emergence of fabrics and convergence all contend for a bigger slice of the data center pie.

While data center equipment sales in the first quarter surged 17% year over year, that was still a 6% drop from the fourth quarter. Data center network equipment revenue for the first quarter came in at $2.2 billion. Spending through 2013 will be very uneven, as both data center operators and service providers are at different stages in their upgrades, and some are starting to wind down their current investment cycles, said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics…

June 23, 2012 Off

Keen: Big data for little devices

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

The thinking behind Keen.io is pretty simple: No one should have to build their own analytics infrastructure, especially not mobile developers. It’s a long, hard, complex process that’s only made more difficult in an era where developers want to track a lot more metrics than just pageviews. So Keen built an analytics infrastructure for them — well enough to win over the judges at GigaOM’s Structure Launchpad competition on Wednesday.

According to Co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild, mobile developers are an underserved market when it comes to analytics. They don’t necessarily have the tools to build analytics platform in the first place, but there aren’t many places they can turn for products that will do the jobs they require in an analytics product. Whereas there are plenty of web 1.0-style products for tracking pageviews, Wild said, mobile apps need a way to track everything from subscribers to clicks to how many times an app was opened and closed…

June 23, 2012 Off

Google rumored to launch business-focused cloud computing service at I / O conference

By David
Grazed from TheVerge.  Author: Adi Robertson.

Drive may not be the only cloud-based service Google launches this year. According to GigaOm, sources have confirmed previous rumors that Google wants to compete with Amazon in the corporate cloud services market. That means launching virtual servers like those in Amazon’s EC2. Google already has some similar services for developers, including Google Cloud Storage and Google App Engine, which provide data storage and a web app platform respectively.

If it launches a more comprehensive service, these might end up getting rolled into it, but GigaOm says it’s also planning to work with third parties, specifically cloud management services Rightscale and Opscode…

June 23, 2012 Off

Public / Private Cloud – The Emperor’s new clothes or stylish business wear?

By David
Grazed from The Register.  Author: Tony Lock.

‘Cloud Computing’ has been on the lips of every IT vendor marketing manager for the past two or three years and Reg readers have always been forthright in telling us what is happening in their organisation compared to the hype. While some vendors think ‘Private Cloud’ to be a contradiction in terms, Reg readers disagree, with many having a good grasp of the solution architecture as well as generally accepting the term itself.

But while public and private Cloud have coined much of the column inches in the press, more recently it is clear that some attention is now being paid to hybrid clouds. In this approach organisations make use of services running inside the enterprise on their private cloud systems and combine these with resources hosted outside the business in public cloud farms. As you’d expect, when we asked readers of the Register to tell us how they see things shaping up here, they filled us in…