Category: News

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: Barney Jopson.

Amazon’s cloud computing service is being used to operate Nasa robots on the surface of Mars, Netflix’s video streaming service and the Guardian’s dating website, as the retailer’s little-known IT business rapidly expands.

The six-year old cloud business remains overshadowed by Amazon’s vast online store, but clients and analysts say the company’s various cloud-computing services are replacing a growing number of in-house IT functions and dominate the sector.

“We continue to see equally rapid growth across all of our [cloud] services as we have in the past,” Adam Selipsky, vice-president of Amazon Web Services, told the Financial Times. The number of files in the Amazon cloud nearly tripled to 762bn last year…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Last August the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas a registry that it hoped would serve as a place for prospective cloud users to go to easily inspect and compare cloud vendors’ security controls. But to date, only three companies have submitted their cloud security data, making the registry of limited use.

The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) is designed to index the security features of cloud providers using a 170-point questionnaire that end users are then able to peruse. Soon after the CSA announced STAR, big names such as Google, Intel, McAfee, Verizon and Microsoft all agreed to take part. So far though, Microsoft is the only one of that group to have followed through…

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

EMC Tuesday confirmed a report that it had bought 22-year-old privately held web development house Pivotal Labs for its agile development methodology and its widely used Pivotal Tracker tool.  How much EMC spent buying the San Francisco-based software consulting operation wasn’t disclosed. It did say it paid cash.

EMC imagines tuning datasets in its newly available Greenplum Chorus, which adds a Facebook-like social collaboration tool to Big Data for the data science team, and rapidly building out insightful Big Data applications using modern programming environments such as Ruby on Rails complements of Pivotal. Pivotal worked on Chorus’ development with EMC last year…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Rob Dutt.

IT departments looking at standing up private cloud environments in a hurry, and without some of the complexity usually associated with cloud infrastructure, would do well to take a look at Piston Cloud from Piston Cloud Computing.

In a new Information Week Report on the Piston Cloud OpenStack Environment, Kurt Marko finds that “its unique setup process can enable enterprise IT teams to build a private cloud in an afternoon, with commodity gear."…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Doug Dineley.

"If you build it, they will come" may be a line from a baseball fantasy, but it describes what really happened in the world of cloud computing. One late summer day in 2006, online bookseller Amazon.com quietly made a portion of its excess data center capacity available to curious developers over the Web. Within hours, hundreds of developers had jumped at the chance to spin up some servers simply by opening their browsers and typing in their credit card numbers. Today, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is the foundation for countless tech startups, and Amazon counts its business customers in the hundreds of thousands…

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

Zumbox, the American digital mail start-up, has changed its overseas strategy. Rather than try to involve the local postal operator – as it has once with New Zealand Post – it’s going to go it alone.

It’s starting in Australia where its wholly owned licensing arm, Zumbox Software Inc, has just climbed in bed with two big publicly traded mail outsourcers to create a joint venture called Digital Post Australia (DPA) that will offer consumers a way to get their paper mail electronically…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Justin Lee.

Cloud computing technology owes a lot to the various open source projects that continue to propel the technology forward, along with helping to create a greater awareness — both within and outside the IT industry — for cloud capabilities.

OpenStack, in particular, has been one of the greatest contributors to cloud computing. Since Rackspace and NASA launched the open source cloud project two years ago, the community of developers and cloud computing technologists have continued to improve on the open standard cloud computing platform for both public and private clouds…

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

Xoreax, a 10-year-old Israeli software acceleration house, says it can employ the idle PCs and servers cycles in a corporate network SETI-like to create a so-called private processing cloud – Windows-based, of course – that’s got the heavy-duty commute of a virtual supercomputer.

It seems it’s a matter of accelerating time-intensive computational processes.  The company’s new signature IncrediBuild-XGE, an agent-based distributed computing solution, is supposed to let ISVs and application developers create this virtual cloud environment.

They can reportedly add features to it while tickling the processing…

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

Little six-month-old ClearStory Data, which calls itself a self-driven data exploration service, came out of stealth mode Monday with an undisclosed amount of seed money from Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and some relatively eminent private parties.

Those personal investors include Andy Rachleff, founder of Benchmark Capital and CEO at Wealthfront; Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, senior VPs at Walmart Global e-Commerce and co-founders of Junglee and Kosmix; Tim Howes, co-founder of Rockmelt and ex-CTO of Netscape, and Nitin Donde, a one-time executive at EMC, 3Par and Aster Data…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix Systems today announced upcoming opportunities for global entrepreneurial companies to contribute to the next wave of innovation for mobile workstyles via the Citrix Startup Accelerator, its Silicon Valley-based seed investment initiative. The IT landscape is in a period of dramatic change, shifting expectations of IT and computing capabilities and providing an opportunity for entrepreneurs to contribute their ideas. Startups have always challenged the norms and assumptions in computing and in business. As the exceptions of the PC Era – mobile users, personal devices, and wireless access – become the assumptions of the Cloud Era, staying close to new thinking is important to Citrix as it continues to help shape the future…