Did NASA ditch OpenStack for Amazon?
If folks were given to reading tea leaves, they might read a lot into a recent blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cureton in which she discussed IT reform at the U.S. space agency.
She mentioned a few specific cloud computing efforts, including a project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that uploaded 250,000 photos of Mars onto Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform as a service. The resulting Be A Martian initiative served up more than 2.5 million data queries, “proving that the cloud can be a terrific way to reach and engage the public,” she wrote.
She also said Amazon Web Services played a big role at NASA:..
Centralizing healthcare big data in the cloud
Can the medical community make better use of big data, government regulations and the cloud to improve service and save lives?
There is a lot of buzz going around about big data and cloud computing, but there is also a lot of confusion about how to incorporate them for an advantage. Cloud computing is all about providing services over the network, and big data is all about analyzing lots of data to gain insights and find trends. Government regulations are all about protecting the data and forcing the owners of the data to save it, just in case…
Peer1 powers up UK-based GPU cloud
Peer1 Hosting has launched a GPU-backed cloud service designed for high performance computing workloads.
The HPC Self Serve Cloud became available to buy on Tuesday, Peer1 announced at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London. It has enough scalability to let customers provision up to 50 physical servers in 15 minutes and gives them the option of using Nvidia GPUs.
When asked why a company would go for Peer1 rather than cloud king Amazon Web Services which launched its GPU service in 2010, Mike Bainbridge, a solutions engineer for Peer1, told ZDNet UK he thought the company was "a lot more flexible" and noted that Peer1 is in talks with a major UK university to run chemistry analysis workloads on its cloud…
AWS now stores 1 trillion objects in S3
Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3) now hosts more than a trillion — yes, a trillion — objects for its cloud computing customers, proving once again that AWS is the king of the cloud.
To get a concept of how big a trillion is, Amazon’s Jeff Barr in a blog post announcing the new peak calls on the following examples: “That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our Galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.” I recently heard TED founder Richard Saul Wurman discuss the national debt by noting that in order to reach a trillion-dollar debt, you’d have to lose $1 million a day every day for about 2,739 years…
Five Signs Your Cloud Computing Security Is Out of Control
There is almost universal agreement that cloud computing is a good thing. It can simplify administration, help control cost, and even expand the capacity of technology teams to deliver services. However, even with all the many benefits of cloud computing, the cloud can introduce challenges. Computerworld reports that many technology leaders are beginning to realize that software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption is reducing their control of enterprise data.
According to Computerworld, technology departments are discovering that they cannot control access to popular cloud applications like Salesforce, Box, and GoogleApps because in many cases, the department that purchased the application handles provisioning. The articles goes on to identify five signs that signal IT has lost control of security for cloud applications:..
Telcos and the Cloud: Brave New World?
While the IT world drives out cloud computing and gradually evolves its systems architectures onto cloud infrastructures, Big Telco is making some interesting moves of its own. While the consumer business is being attacked on all sides with cratering voice revenues, an imbalance between wireless data costs and revenue generation, and new over the top competitors (Facebook, Google, etc.) — the enterprise market offers some real hope. And cloud offers a real and diverse opportunity.
Telcos have existing relationships with IT departments and the larger the telco and the larger the enterprise, the deeper the relationship. Already there are quasi-cloud offerings such as software as a service, hosting, and even data center management services offered by the carriers. In those instances where the relationship is that deep, cloud becomes, in part, a formalization of the relationship, and in part an extension of strategic intent…
Interxion Launches Eucalyptus-Based Cloud Test Lab
INTERXION HOLDING NV, a leading European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data center services, announced today at Cloud Expo East that it is launching a new Cloud Test Lab based on Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus Systems provides the most widely deployed, on-premise cloud computing platform for web 2.0 businesses, enterprises, and government organizations. This Test Lab is developed for enterprises and systems integrators looking to deploy private and hybrid cloud environments, a topic that Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos and Interxion Director Cloud Segment Vincent in’t Veld will discuss during the Cloud Expo East session "The World According to Cloud" on Tuesday, June 12 at 1:35 p.m.
The Eucalyptus-based Cloud Test Lab is located at Interxion’s Frankfurt Data Center Campus and provides a free, turnkey, proof-of-concept environment combining industry-leading software, connectivity, systems and colocation capabilities. Test Lab users will be able to create Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments to rapidly build, develop and trial cloud services with best-in-class performance guarantees…
Wipro unveils India’s first major cloud computing platform
It’s finally here – the first major global Cloud-based platform rolled out by an Indian IT services major.
Wipro Technologies, the fourth largest Indian IT services provider, announced it was expanding its Cloud platform by offering a global-level Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product.
IaaS is the basic level of Cloud offering. On top of IaaS is built higher levels of Cloud products such as Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Business-Process-as-a-Service (PaaS, SaaS and BPaaS.)…
Risk management for cloud computing deployments
When you consider the recent trends and studies on cloud computing, it’s clear that after the Internet, it’s the turn of cloud computing to shape the future of computing. The question is no longer “To cloud or not to cloud”, but more of “when will the shift happen” and “what processes will shift to the cloud”. In this series of articles, we will endeavor to perform a complete cloud risk management exercise.
As part of a risk management exercise for cloud computing, it’s important to rank the positive information security benefits from utilizing cloud infrastructure. Since the largest risks lie on public cloud fronts (unless mentioned otherwise), all references are only to public cloud infrastructure…
Former Apple chief urges firms to adapt to cloud computing era or face extinction
Businesses must adapt to the huge growth of cloud computing services in order to ensure they do not fall by the wayside, according to the former chief executive of Apple, John Sculley.
Speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, Sculley, who oversaw Apple for 10 years between 1983 and 1993, said the huge growth of cloud computing is causing technological innovations on an exponential scale, far beyond the predictable Moore’s law of innovations.
"Businesses have to adapt to changing environments in order to survive. There are many examples of corporations that were great in one era but not in another. Kodak was a great firm in one era, but now it’s bankrupt," he said…