Greenpeace: Cloud Computing Equals Acid Rain
Greenpeace activists are nothing if not determined. If the cause calls for it, they’ll break out the rappelling gear and get down to action—as they did last Thursday at Amazon‘s headquarters in South Lake Union, hoisting an 800-square-foot cloud-shaped banner to protest the dirty energy that Greenpeace says Amazon and Microsoft use to power their cloud-computing services. The banner read: "Amazon, Microsoft: How Clean Is Your Cloud?"
Cloud computing means using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data. Every time you upload a picture, song, video, or anything else, that digital information has to be stored somewhere, and cloud-computing data centers—typically giant buildings with massive computer servers that require loads of electricity to operate—are where it all goes…
Number-munching clouds are godsend for cybercrooks – experts
Cloud computing providers came under fire today from security experts who blamed them for giving cyber-criminals the tools to launch attacks more easily, efficiently and anonymously than ever before.
Speaking at the fourth InfoSecurity Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday, SC Leung – a senior consultant at the city-state’s Computer Emergency Response Team – argued that crooks are making the most of the sudden rise of distributed number-crunching services.
Sears’ new line: cloud computing services
Sears Holdings Corp., known for selling general merchandise, is getting into the business of selling space — specifically, data-storage space.
The Hoffman Estates-based retailer announced today that it has launched MetaScale, a wholly owned subsidiary that will provide data-management services.
Sears sees the venture as a natural extension of the resources it has spent over the past two years building the infrastructure it needs to manage data for its more than 4,000 Sears and Kmart stores…
Xerox throwing cloud computing coming out party
Xerox for the past few years has steadily, and quietly, been building out its cloud offerings. Now officials from the venerable printer and copier company are ready to make some noise about it.
"We’ve done the work, we’ve served our customers and now we’re ready to start talking about it," says Rob Schilperoort, vice president of product management for Xerox Cloud Services, the business unit of the $20 billion company that has been best known for its document management and IT outsourcing (ITO) business units. Xerox boasts an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering that supports multiple operating systems, plus a more traditional hosted collaboration offering.
Schilperoort says Xerox already has more than 85 customers using Xerox Cloud Services…
Google expands its cloud-computing offerings with ‘Drive’
Google expanded the digital world of cloud computing on Tuesday, announcing the rollout of "Google Drive."
The service, which will give users 5GB of free remote storage and additional space for a monthly fee, puts the Web giant in competition with Apple and Microsoft, as well as specialized services like Box and Dropbox, in a space that increasingly looks like the future of computing.
"This is really just the next step in the evolution of Google Cloud," Scott Johnston, group product manager for Google Drive, told CNN. "It’s really letting people live more in the cloud by connecting them more easily with all the devices they have."…
Amazon promises further S3 price cuts as it touts cloud computing security
Amazon has revealed that another price drop for its Simple Storage Service (S3) is on the cards, following the cuts made at the beginning of February.
Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels, speaking at an event in central London on Tuesday, said the 12 per cent to 13 per cent reduction in storage costs offered to customers this year was only the beginning.
"At the beginning of the year, we dropped the storage pricing of S3 and some customers saw a 40 per cent drop in their bill," said Vogels…
Cloud Computing: EMC Reportedly After Flash Storage Start-Up XtremIO
EMC is reportedly hot to buy three-year-old Israeli flash storage start-up XtremIO.
According to Globes on Sunday, EMC is dangling $400 million-$450 million in front of its quarry and closing in for the kill.
Supposedly EMC rivals including NetApp have also been after XtremIO.
One of XtremIO’s founders previously sold Rainfinity to EMC and there are other family ties. XtremIO’s CFO Robin Ren was once director of R&D at EMC subsidiary VMware.
Globes says EMC CEO Joe Tucci, VMware CTO Stephen Herrod and VMware finance VP David Golden have all been in Israel. NetApp’s M&A guy and its EMEA VP also made the pilgrimage, but EMC usually brings a bigger checkbook to such affairs as NetApp can testify…
Hitachi Data Systems Unveils Cloud Enhancements to Help Organizations Increase the Value of Unstructured Data
Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE:HIT) (TOKYO:6501), today announced significant new enhancements to its award-winning object store, Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), and its bottomless, backup-free cloud on-ramp, Hitachi Data Ingestor (HDI). These new enhancements reduce overall costs by enabling organizations to better manage unstructured data growth, ensure content security in shared storage environments and reduce the complexity and inefficiency in traditional, cloud computing and distributed IT environments.
“Organizations are looking for new, innovative approaches to deal with the expansive growth of unstructured content and extract the full value of their data,” said Miklos Sandorfi, chief strategist, Hitachi Data Systems. “Our content cloud approach allows organizations to store billions of data objects and use intelligence layers to index and search the data independently of the application that created it. The data is available across devices, anytime and anywhere. By deploying HCP and HDI, customers will cut costs in managing, storing and accessing data and build a foundation for the information cloud.”…
Cloud computing leads training priorities
The majority of local organisations believe their IT staff will require training in cloud computing and virtualisation in the next 12 months.
This was one of the major findings of the ITWeb/Foster-Melliar IT Training Survey, which ran on ITWeb Online for 14 days, attracting 190 responses.
Besides cloud computing, which was selected by 40.72% of respondents, IT security is the next training priority, at 39.52%. This was closely followed by ITIL (38.32%), networking (32.93%) and project management (26.95%)…
Dell and Internet2 NET+ Services Increase Access to Research Computing and Enable Discovery with Cloud Services
Dell is working with Clemson University to provide more Internet2 institutions and organizations access to high performance research computing technology, responding to the Obama administration’s Big Data R & D Initiative and a continued commitment to the global research community. Scientific research requires intensive computation capabilities to help solve complex, and many times life-saving issues. Dell and Clemson University will support members with cloud-based research computing solutions and services that can efficiently meet these demands.
Dell and Internet2’s NET+ Services program will provide high performance computing solutions and services that support the next generation of collaborative research and simplify research computing from the desktop to the datacenter including:…