Category: News

June 13, 2012 Off

Numerix and GreenButton Partner to Accelerate Financial Services Cloud Enablement of Derivatives Valuation & Risk Calculations

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Numerix ( www.numerix.com ), the leading provider of cross-asset analytics for derivatives valuations and risk management today announced a partnership with GreenButton to provide Numerix clients with seamless, secure, on-demand access to cloud computing resources. Enabled in the latest release of Numerix CrossAsset XL, a flexible Microsoft Excel-based platform for pricing any derivative or structured product, clients can offload their compute-intensive calculations to any cloud provider including Microsoft Windows Azure via GreenButton’s intuitive interface. End users can now immediately leverage cost effective cloud resources to respond to market dynamics and regulatory pressures with consistent and more timely analytics.

Regulatory pressures and business requirements demand that both buy-side and sell-side firms generate faster, more frequent and accurate pricing and risk analysis. At the same time, firms need to assess trading and risk management decisions from a consistent, enterprise-wide, cross-asset point of view. Together these factors combine to necessitate a myriad of increasingly complex and compute intensive pricing and risk calculations. Thus many firms, particularly hedge funds, asset managers and insurance companies, are now in need of customizable cloud-based solutions to meet their unique business requirements and demand for more compute power…

June 13, 2012 Off

Startups Show How to Extend Devices Using the Cloud

By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Phil Keys.

Love it or hate it, the buzzword “cloud computing” seems to be stuck in the technology industry lexicon (anyone interested in a betting pool on whether it will last longer than “Web 2.0?”). At its basics, cloud computing represents the ability for software developers to cheaply and easily use the resources of masses of servers sitting somewhere in a data center (essentially supercomputers) to do something interesting or useful. One of the areas I’m particularly interested in is the promise of cloud computing to extend the capabilities of what are often called embedded devices.

Unlike the more powerful general purpose computing device such as the personal computer or, more recently, the smartphone, embedded devices are typically things like cars or thermostats which are only given a limited amount of computing power and memory to accomplish specific tasks. As embedded devices become increasingly connected to the Internet, there are some real interesting possibilities around extended the capabilities of extending the capabilities of these limited devices by connecting them to cloud computing…

June 13, 2012 Off

SPEC Forms Cloud Benchmarking Group

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new group to research and recommend application workloads for benchmarking cloud computing performance.

The group functions under SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG) and is working in cooperation with other SPEC committees and subcommittees to define cloud benchmark methodologies, determine and recommend application workloads, identify cloud metrics for existing SPEC benchmarks, and develop new cloud benchmarks.

Current participants in OSGCloud include AMD, Dell, IBM, Ideas International, Intel, Karlshuhe Institute of Technology, Oracle, Red Hat and VMware. Long-time SPEC benchmark developer Yun Chao is a supporting contributor. The group collaborates with the SPEC Research Cloud group, which is working on gaining a broader understanding of cloud behavior and performance issues…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud experts puzzled by Oracle’s approach to cloud computing

By David

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stuart J. Johnston.

Oracle’s latest public cloud vision continues the company’s lock-in approach that leaves experts skeptical, if not outright cynical about the company’s cloud strategy.

Oracle Corp.’s cloud platform was re-introduced by CEO Larry Ellison during an hour-and-a-half presentation last week where he appeared to laboriously read off of slides and largely rehashed last fall’s launch of the company’s cloud initiative.

Given that the Oracle Cloud remains highly proprietary, it’s no surprise that it primarily appeals to existing Oracle customers. Non-Oracle shops don’t see value in the cloud offering and wonder why the company would take such an approach…

June 13, 2012 Off

How to make the right choice with cloud IT services

By David

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Danny Bradbury.

With all of the conflicting messages on cloud services coming from technology companies, it can be difficult to work out what is actually best for you. What are the pros and cons of the different models?

‘Beware of the false cloud," said Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, recently, taking aim at rival cloud service providers and their "fundamentally misnamed" solutions. But while such sniping is not unusual among cloud providers, who all use different definitions to cast their own narrowly focused "cloud" products in the best light, most customers just want something that gets the job done cheaply and safely.

For the purest definition of a cloud, turn to the National Institute of Science and Technology (Nist). It defines the cloud as a shared pool of computing resources that can be configured, provisioned and released quickly and easily, without the help of a service provider. The cloud is "elastic", which means services, such as processing power or storage, can be scaled up or down very easily depending on user need…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Stoneware Announces Availability of webNetwork 6.1

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Stoneware, the leader in Unified Cloud computing, announced that webNetwork version 6.1 is now available and shipping. webNetwork 6.1 is a significant release that provides customers a platform to deliver files, applications and reports whether those resources reside in their private data center, the public cloud or on a local device, and delivers them all through a secure browser-based webDesktop.

"webNetwork 6.1 marks a milestone in the journey toward the Unified Cloud," said Rick German, CEO of Stoneware. "The ability to deliver IT services through the cloud is a unique feature that has no equal in the marketplace. Unifying private cloud, public cloud and device resources will lead to a better user experience, while minimizing the burden on overloaded IT staff. This solution delivers the vision VDI failed to provide, through the cloud, without the expensive overhead and at a significantly lower cost."…

June 13, 2012 Off

Salesforce: concept of private cloud is fundamentally flawed

By David

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Sophie Curtis.

Saleforce.com’s chief scientist has slammed the concept of private cloud, claiming that the whole point of cloud computing is that resources, costs and risk are shared between multiple parties.

Speaking at the Cloud Computing World forum in London today, JP Rangaswami said that cloud provides the scalability and flexibility that organisations need to survive in the modern age. However, organisations that choose to adopt private rather than public cloud will miss out on the benefits.

“Whenever anyone uses that phrase to you, just ask them who are you sharing costs with. If all the costs you’re sharing are just with you, you’re just kidding yourself, it ain’t a cloud” said Rangaswami…

June 13, 2012 Off

Trust lawyers, not techies, when it comes to the cloud – Minefield of privacy and data laws – so tread carefully

By David

Grazed from The Register. Author: Joe Fay.

CIOs thinking of shifting to the cloud or kicking off a flagship big data project would be better off talking to their lawyers than their techies before starting to leaf through glossy corporate presentations.

Mark Webber, partner and head of technology at law firm Osborne Clarke, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum today, said that while the cloud and big data are the buzzwords du jour, CIOs’ plans are still governed by UK and EU data law passed in the mid-1990s. Personal data will be covered by whatever "promises" were made at the time it was collected.

"Sometimes the simplification of technology can complicate the legal analysis and cause more legal problems than with a traditional solution," he said…

June 13, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Amazon taps MapR for high-powered Elastic MapReduce

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Amazon Web Services already has a winner with its Elastic MapReduce Hadoop service, and now it’s turning up the heat by adding MapR’s Hadoop distribution as an option. Just over a year after launching, MapR has made a name for itself in the Hadoop space by offering proprietary storage that it says can outperform Apache’s Hadoop Distributed File System by up to 20 times. A lot of cloud computing users running or considering running Hadoop workloads on Amazon’s platform might soon be a lot happier.

To be clear, this isn’t Amazon just supporting MapR on Elastic MapReduce, but actually offering MapR as a managed service. Instances running MapR’s M3 edition will be available at no additional cost (like the standard Amazon instance) while instances running MapR’s “enterprise-grade” M5 edition will come with what MapR VP of Marketing Jack Norris described to me as a “nominal” hourly cost…

June 13, 2012 Off

RightScale Survey Reveals Hybrid Cloud Driving Multi-Cloud Strategy

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Companies of all sizes view cloud computing as a strategic business opportunity. With the increase in the number of cloud infrastructure providers, businesses are now able to choose from a variety of options to align their cloud strategy with their specific business needs. RightScale(R) Inc., the leader in cloud management, today announced results of a new market study of over 600 companies to uncover how businesses are approaching cloud computing and what priorities they set for implementing their cloud strategies.

"Cloud infrastructure now dominates as the architecture for ‘the new IT’ — and companies big and small enjoy an unprecedented variety of options for deploying the best cloud solution to meet their business needs," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "No one-size-fits-all approach will work for everyone, which is why it’s important to choose a platform that will allow you freedom of choice now and into the future as you decide where and how to leverage infrastructure-as-a-service cloud providers."…