Category: News

Grazed from Wall Street Journal.   Author: Chris Boulton.

The term “supercomputing” suggests computing that comes at a great deal of cost and is reserved for massive companies. But in this age of cloud computing, where vendors host software on their servers and provision it to end user customers, supercomputing need not always come with super costs.

That’s the lesson learned from Cycle Computing, which used a computing cluster comprised of 50,000 computer chips to test drug compounds for less than $5,000 an hour for less than three hours, reports the New York Times’ Steve Lohr…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Ariel Dan.

Today, with enterprises migrating to the cloud, the security challenge around protecting data is greater than ever before. Keeping data private and secure has always been a business imperative. But for many companies and organizations, it has also become a compliance requirement and a necessity to stay in business. Standards including HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI DSS and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act all require that organizations protect their data at rest and provide defenses against data loss and threats.

Public cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than as a product, and is usually categorized into three service models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS). When it comes to public cloud security, all leading cloud providers are investing significant efforts and resources in securing and certifying their datacenters. However, as cloud computing matures, enterprises are learning that cloud security cannot be delivered by the cloud provider alone. In fact, cloud providers make sure enterprises know that security is a shared responsibility, and that cloud customers do share responsibility for data security, protection from unauthorized access, and backup of their data…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Bob Thomas.

The lack of secure cloud computing has been one of the biggest issues facing companies that want to move their operations into the cloud, but which are concerned about the deployment of sensitive data into the perceived unsecure environment of cloud computing.

Three companies, LynuxWorks, Inc., TransLattice, and Fritz Technologies Corporation, which are already known for providing solutions to data-sensitive customers like the government, have announced their collaboration to produce a secure cloud platform. The S.E.C.U.R.E. (Secure, Enterprise, Cross-Domain, Unified, Resilient Environment) platform is ideal for creating cloud deployments in highly sensitive environments…

Grazed from Daily Finance.  Author: Anders Bylund.

It’s been nearly six years since Amazon.com (NAS: AMZN) had the brilliant idea of monetizing its oodles and oodles of surplus computing power.

The e-tailer built up a truly epic computing infrastructure to support its core operations, but much of that hardware had a lot of downtime. While still requiring electric power, man-hours of server maintenance, and data center cooling, the servers would often sit unused. Why not rent out idle servers by the hour instead?

The idea was an instant hit, and Amazon’s cloud-computing services have come a long way since then. Management routinely holds up the collection of data-mangling products, collectively known as Amazon Web Services or AWS, as an example of a fast-growing Amazon operation. These days, Amazon pumps millions of dollars specifically into building out the AWS infrastructure, which now is separate from Amazon’s general operations…

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

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, decked out in dark Armani duds for the trial of his landmark case against Google and Android, testified Tuesday that he had considered buying RIM or Palm to compete against Apple and its iPhone.

Ultimately he decided that RIM was too expensive and Palm wasn’t competitive enough and a separate "Project Java Phone" that Oracle had started was a "bad idea."

Google’s lawyer claimed that because Oracle failed to develop its own product it’s going after Google and Android to get a piece of the action.

Google CEO Larry Page, widely reported as uncomfortable on the witness stand and unable to make eye contract except with the ceiling, testified that he couldn’t remember much of anything…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Rick Blaisdell.

Cloud computing has definitely revolutionised the IT industry and transformed the way in which IT Services are delivered. But finding the best way for an organization to perform common management tasks using remote services on the Internet is not that easy.

Cloud management incorporates the task of providing, managing, and monitoring applications into cloud infrastructures that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location or of the system that delivers the services. Monitoring cloud computing applications and activity into requires cloud management tools to ensure that resources are meeting SLA’s, working optimally and also not effecting systems and users that are leveraging these services…

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon and Salesforce are odds-on to join the UK government’s G-Cloud and start serving civil servants with hosted computing, storage and ERP from May, reports the The Register.

The companies have been in talks to join G-Cloud, with government officials driving the programme having to reassure the firms’ legal people on their obligations under the G-Cloud’s terms and conditions.  The duo had passed on G-Cloud 1.0 which launched in February, over concerns about their legal obligations and responsibilities on things such as data audits.

Newly named G-Cloud leader Denise McDonagh revealed the development during a UKAuthority.com webcast on Thursday in response to The Register. McDonagh, who is also head of IT at the Home Office, was named on Friday as the successor to incumbent Chris Chant, who is retiring from the civil service after just 18 months in charge of G-Cloud…

Grazed from Channel Insider.  Author: Michael Vizard.

As many solution providers continue to evolve into cloud service providers many of the server vendor relationships that many of them built their businesses on are being reevaluated.

The primary reason this is happening is that if customers are buying a service they generally don’t care much about the specific IT infrastructure that enables it. For the service provider that makes it a lot more feasible to work with custom system builder distributors such as Super Micro, as opposed to buying commercial systems from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell or Oracle.

Of course, the major server vendors would strenuously argue that modern servers come with higher levels of IT automation that make them much easier to manage. As such, they are ideal for cloud computing environment because they allow each IT administrator to holistically manage more servers, storage and networking resources…

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

Microsoft – for reasons that haven’t been plumbed enough to satisfy skeptics – has set up a wholly owned open source subsidiary. Given history that’s an unusual step.

It’s called Microsoft Open Technologies and it’ll be run by Jean Paoli, an XML standards expert whose interoperability strategy team will form the nucleus of the new subsidiary.

Figure about 50-75 people and a board composed of Microsoft people. Paoli will be president.  He’s credited with calming the ISO brouhaha between Open Office XML and the competing OpenDocument contingent.  His new domain is supposed to advance Microsoft’s investments in openness, he said in a blog posting, including interoperability, open standards and open source. Through it Microsoft should get out code more quickly and ensure compatibility…

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

Rackspace, which wants to be the "Linux of the cloud" mimicking the now billion-dollar-a-year Red Hat, said Monday that it’s "drawing a line in the sand against cloud providers."

Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the "Linux of the cloud" because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story.

Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010…