Cloud News, Resources and Information
Symform, a revolutionary cloud storage and backup service, today announced two award wins that acknowledge the company’s innovative product and work environment. Symform won "Best Cloud Storage Solution" in the 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Series held in London earlier this month, recognizing Symform’s innovative and disruptive global peer-to-peer cloud storage network. In addition, Seattle Business magazine selected Symform as one of Washington’s ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’ in 2012.
These latest accolades come amid a year of record growth and achievement for Symform, including 100 percent quarter-over-quarter customer growth with tens of thousands of active users across 138 countries, and the company’s recent $11 million Series B funding round…
Google describes how reducing energy use for servers and server cooling works. Image: Courtesy of Google
The cloud is more green than traditional on-premises setups, according to a recent Carbon Disclosure Project survey. But that survey, which Cloudline put to a question in March, did not sit well with readers (see the comments section.)
Now Google is championing the Carbon Disclosure Project, and touting its cloud apps’ energy efficiency as well as their green cred (notably, too, the post was lifted from the Google Green blog)…
Corent Technology, Inc., a disruptive innovator in the Cloud Computing space, was honored as the most innovative cloud technology provider at the 19th Annual TechAmerica Orange County High-Tech Innovation Awards.
"Our ‘Plug & Play’ suite of software products continues to be recognized by our industry peers as a game changer in the Cloud and SaaS space. We are honored to receive this award and look forward to continuing to deliver high value to SaaS and software vendors as well as to global enterprises, which can now gain a decisive competitive edge by delivering their SaaS solutions – on any public, private, or hybrid Cloud – at a significantly lower cost of service," said Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology…
Quest Software said last Thursday that it got an acquisition offer worth about $2.15 billion from an unidentified "strategic bidder."
Reuters claims the unidentified mystery bidder is Dell after talks to buy Quest broke down earlier.
The $25.50-a-share cash offer bests the $23 a share Quest accepted back in March from private equity house Insight Venture Partners. Insight has to sweeten its offer or let it go for a break-up fee of either $4.2 million or $6.3 million…
Can cloud help predict the future? Okay, that’s a loaded question, but there are certainly voices out there making the case that cloud computing provides the processing and big data support needed for predictive analytics. Predictive analytics — matching current datasets against historical patterns to determine the probability of an event occurring in the future — requires a lot of compute power and draws on a lot of data. In other words, a perfect use case for cloud.
James Taylor, automated decision management proponent and author/co-author of two books on the topic, says cloud computing is elevating the art and science of predictive analytics to a whole new level. No longer do such efforts need to be be constrained by companies’ current server and storage capacity — with online, sharable resources, the sky’s the limit. Based on a survey Taylor conducted at the end of last year among 200 business intelligence professionals, 43% have already developed predictive analytics solutions within their companies,and 82% have predictive analytics in their plans going forward. “Separately, predictive analytics and cloud solutions are changing the way organizations do business,” he states. “Together, they open up a wealth of opportunities.”…
It must be getting competitive out there. Amazon Web Services has cut its support prices, expanded free support and added new support features like chat and proactive alerts.
Now all customers will automatically get free support and enterprise support will be based on usage rather than a flat fee, a potential cost saver.
Support levels have been renamed. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum are now Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All plans cover an unlimited number of cases and can be cancelled at any time. There are no long-term contracts. All plans are available worldwide…
Of all of the possible benefits of a private cloud infrastructure, one of the most valuable is flexibility. With a properly designed private cloud infrastructure, the data center environment can fluidly shift with the business. This allows new applications to be deployed to meet business demands as they’re identified, and legacy applications to be removed when the value is no longer recognized.
In order to have an environment capable of this rapid application deployment cycle, an infrastructure must be in place that can handle it. Hardware and software must be properly architected to provide both application and hardware scalability. This requires a rethinking of the design principles that have brought IT to where it is now…
Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.
Active Power, manufacturer of continuous power and infrastructure solutions, will deploy its high efficiency CleanSource UPS (uninterruptible power supply) system at one of the largest collocation data center facilities in China later this year.
The new, state-of-the-art modular data center is owned by a Beijing based IT services provider and located in eastern China. The 1000 kVA UPS system shipped in May 2012 and will be installed later this year. Once deployed, the UPS will provide full power conditioning and protection to the facility’s mission critical server loads against all types of power disturbances…
Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.
AMD, which has been suggestively flitting about ARM for months without committing, finally has – but not in the conventional way.
It’s going to license ARM’s one-core Cortex-A5 smartphone processor and develop an x86 security processor using the A5’s TrustZone technology, which cordons off secure zones where hackers can’t modify the software.
AMD said Wednesday that it will integrate that widgetry into some new APUs – AMD CPU chips with advanced graphics on the same die – using a system-on-a-chip (SoC) design. It expects to have those gismos on development platforms next year. Starting with chips for tablets and thin laptops, the portfolio will expand to all AMD’s chips in 2014 including, at some point, Opteron…
But Deutsche Bank (DB) and National Australia Bank are in the minority of banks actively strategizing about opportunities in the public cloud.
Though Deutsche Bank, of Frankfurt, said it began developing internal cloud computing capabilities in pieces starting about 2002, the external cloud represents its next frontier, and journeying there puts the bank face to face with the primary roadblocks all banks face when they think of moving computing beyond their own perimeters…