Category: News

Grazed from Federal Computer Week.  Author: John Moore.

Cloud computing has managed to make the world’s already colossal appetite for data storage even more voracious.

Last year, IDC, an IT market research firm, cited public cloud-based service providers, from Amazon Web Services to YouTube, as the most significant drivers of storage consumption in the past three years. The government sector contributes as well: IDC noted that the private clouds of government and research sites compare in scope and complexity to their public cloud counterparts.

The so-called big data problem has surfaced in the past two years to rank among the primary IT challenges. Technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework and NoSQL databases have emerged to take on the challenge of very large — and unwieldy — datasets…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

As most mobile computing applications are dependent on services in the cloud, it’s only natural that the applications running across these platforms would start to become almost indistinguishable.

That’s exactly the goal that the folks at Appcelerator, providers of the Titanium integrated development environment (IDE) for building mobile computing applications, have in mind with the launch of Appcelerator Cloud Services, which developers using a new release of the Titanium IDE can now use to host run-time instances of their applications…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Doug Bonderud.

The IT landscape is currently dominated by a single albeit misunderstood revolutionary force–cloud computing. Experts agree that cloud solutions are the likely future of the market and that the function of IT professionals will be altered at a fundamental level and their role in crucial business decisions increased as cloud technology becomes more robust. But along with the potential for significant games comes the specter of what is known as "cloud sprawl"–unrestrained growth of a public or private cloud without clear direction or control by the company that owns the data. Now, midsized businesses are looking for ways to stay in charge without sacrificing the agility of cloud solutions.

On the Way Up 

According to a recent Techworld article, the number of enterprise and midmarket companies using public cloud infrastructe-as-a-service (IaaS)–to cite just one example of cloud adoption–is on the rise. In a 2011 survey, only 17 percent of respondents said that they were using these services, but that number has now jumped to 27 percent. Twenty-four percent of those asked said they had plans to implement a cloud solution at some point during 2012, but the numbers aren’t all on the upside; while Gartner’s Lydia Leong says, "Public cloud IaaS is rapidly becoming an accepted technology approach to doing business," 28 percent of midsized and enterprise businesses have no plans to head skyward just yet…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Ciara Byrne.

London’s Notion Capital  just raised a $100m new fund focused on cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) startups in Europe. The fund is expected to reach $150 million by the time it closes in the next few months.

Investments from Notion’s previous fund included on-demand business services supplier Star and “Skype for invoicing” Tradeshift, which also received seed funding from Paypal. Tradeshift is already valued at $137 million after 2 years in business. A typical investment single investment from the new fund will be in the $1-3 million range, but the fund is prepared to put up to $15 million into a single company over the course of several rounds…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today at the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

 

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft’s private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds."…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Gary Hilson.

Enterprises deploying cloud computing infrastructures using OpenStack now have another configuration tool at their disposal thanks to Puppet Labs. The Portland-based company unveiled one of the first OpenStack implementations suitable for enterprise-class production deployments at this week’s OpenStack Summit in San Francisco. The company’s IT automation software is aimed at system administrators, designed to help them launch and support cloud computing infrastructures.

Puppet Labs collaborated with OpenStack community members Cisco, Morphlabs and eNovance to develop OpenStack configuration modules for its products, Puppet open source and Puppet Enterprise, to provide enterprise-ready IT automation for OpenStack’s compute, object storage and image service capabilities. These modules are already available for free download from Puppet Forge, the company’s online marketplace…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), world leader in massively scalable storage, today announced the availability of the DDN NAS Scaler 1.1, the latest update to the company’s highly-scalable, feature-rich unstructured data storage platform.

Introduced in April 2011, NAS Scaler enables customers to create a customized blend of capacity, throughput, and IOPS to align with specific applications, a breakthrough that eliminates both system and namespace sprawl and the costly over-provisioning found in other NAS systems. NAS Scaler 1.1 marks the introduction of VMware integration and data deduplication features, along with major enhancements in disaster recovery and multi-protocol file access capabilities to enable enterprise organizations to start small and then scale their Big Data applications with ease…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Aspera, Inc., creators of next-generation software technologies that move the world’s data at maximum speed, today announced that its patented faspTM transport technology will be demonstrated as part of numerous partner solutions at NAB 2012. Aspera enables a growing ecosystem of partners in the areas of cloud computing, network-attached storage and digital media production and delivery, where leading technology suppliers bring high-performance transport capabilities to their products, systems and services by building upon the Aspera platform.

A pioneer in the enablement of high-speed data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, Aspera has now unlocked the cloud for big data with its industry-leading high-speed transport solutions. Amazon Web Services and Aspera offer combined solutions for high-performance storage, processing and distribution in the cloud, allowing media companies large and small to take full advantage of integrated media workflows at scale on AWS. Microsoft selected Aspera to enable Aspera high-speed transfer with Windows Azure Media Services. Video encoding pioneers, Sorenson Media and Zencoder provide cloud-based services that rely Aspera for big-data movement to and from remote infrastructures in order to offer massively scalable video encoding to their customers. And, online file sharing leader YouSendIt is taking advantage of the Aspera transport platform to deliver enhanced file transfer speeds for large files…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

TELUS AgilIT is a flexible, on-demand, enterprise-class Cloud offering designed specifically for business needs

TELUS today announced the launch of the TELUS AgilIT Virtual Private Cloud, an innovative service that enables businesses to take full control of their cloud environment. The first of TELUS’ AgilIT cloud offerings, and unlike other cloud infrastructure services, TELUS’ Virtual Private Cloud service provides organizations of all sizes access to computing resources on-demand with a powerful, full-featured portal that enables 24×7 remote access to view and manage their cloud.

"TELUS has taken a quality-based approach to cloud computing by providing customers with secured, guaranteed capacity of computing power while maintaining the flexibility to create, change or suspend their computing jobs as required through a centralized view of their cloud infrastructure," said Tony Krueck, vice-president of Business Products & Services at TELUS. "This allows businesses to respond with greater agility to market demands, develop new applications faster, and contain IT costs by subscribing to computing capacity only as needed."…