Category: News

Grazed from Government Technology News.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Many federal managers don’t understand the platform-as-a-service cloud delivery model and how it can help agencies cut development costs by more than 50 percent, according to a new white paper by NJVC and Virtual Global.

The cloud computing arena has been dominated by big e-mail and infrastructure providers selling commodity services, said Kevin Jackson, co-author of the paper and general manager of NJVC cloud services…

Grazed from NewsFactor.com.   Author:  Editorial Staff.

OpenText today announced the expansion of its global alliance agreement with Microsoft Corp. to include wider support for Microsoft cloud computing initiatives. As part of the agreement, OpenText’s newly formed Business Process Solutions (BPS) Group will be delivering a set of process management and case management solutions on the Windows Azure cloud computing platform.

OpenText was among the first enterprise software vendors to add support for Windows Azure with records management and archiving solutions announced over three years ago. More recently, the OpenText M3 modeling suite achieved Windows Azure competency last year. Now, the tighter alignment between the two companies will give customers more flexibility in the way OpenText applications are deployed: fully in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of cloud and on-premise…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Stephanie Overby.

Worries have been steadily growing among European IT leaders that the USA Patriot Act would give the U.S. government unfettered access to their data if stored on the cloud servers of American providers — so much so that Obama administration officials last week held a press conference to quell international concern over the protection of data stored on U.S. soil.

Patriot Act Games
The unease over the reach of Patriot Act provision — which expands the discovery mechanisms law enforcement can use to access third-party data — has been amped up by the sales and marketing efforts of some European cloud providers, seeking to set apart their services as a way to keep corporate data out of the hands of the American government. The most blatant examples are two Swiss companies touting their cloud options as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act," but it’s become a popular topic at negotiating tables across the continent…

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb.  Author: Scott M. Fulton.

Two technologies have made the quantum speed leaps in high-performance computing possible. One is the rapid ascent of commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) processors that made computing speed cheaper. The second is InfiniBand (IB), the switching technology that Sun Microsystems helped evolve into a fabric – the underlying infrastructure of a carrier-grade cloud.

Today, after an on-again, off-again relationship with InfiniBand that stretches back to its very beginning, Intel is back in the networking fabric business in a big way. With as big a message of "we’re back" as you can send, the company has agreed to purchase the InfiniBand production assets, along with many of the employees, of QLogic. Analysts estimate the company to be the #2 player in the InfiniBand switch market with over one-fourth the global market. The deal has a reported value of $125 million…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Paul Mah.

Iomega Corporation recently unveiled the business-centric Iomega StorCenter ix2, a two-bay Network Attached Storage (NAS) that sports an impressive array of capabilities. The expected RAID 1 (mirrored) data protection aside, the StorCenter ix2 also comes with cloud computing and video surveillance abilities that are ideal for SMBs or remote offices.

Under its hood, the StorCenter ix2 NAS runs on EMC LifeLine, a fully-developed Linux operating system Iomega says is typically available only for enterprise-level customers. The StorCenter is also VMware- and XenServer-certified for virtual desktop implementations, works with Active Directory, can be used for iSCSI storage and also comes with native Time Machine support. The device is managed from a Web interface that allows for a setup process that doesn’t require a CD…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks.  Author: Jeff Norman.

SOPA and PIPA, two of the most infamous and polemical pieces of governmental legislation aimed squarely at the Internet’s copyright violators in modern history, have produced ripples of interest that should not go unnoticed by the cloud computing community.

After days of heated protest both online and away from the Web, both the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act have been postponed by Congress. The former bill sought to enlarge the authority of American law enforcement to combat web-based trafficking of counterfeit products and intellectual property, while PIPA would have armed the government with additional power to restrict the activities of websites involved with such activity…

Grazed from SacBee.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

LabTech Software, the only powerful, robust-featured remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution developed by a Managed Service Provider (MSP) for Managed Service Providers, today announced the availability of LabTech Cloud, a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service option for MSPs. Following this introduction of LabTech Cloud, the company plans to roll out more cloud computing-compatible technologies and services to reduce partners’ operational costs and increase profitability.

Service providers who would like to offer remote management services to their clients often encounter barriers to entry with the cost, time and effort needed to establish an infrastructure and datacenter capable of hosting all required software and customer data. With LabTech Cloud, IT service providers worldwide can immediately offer remote management with little effort and investment by simply subscribing to the service and offering it to their own customers…

Grazed from FierceCIO.  Author: Carolyn Carlson.

Service oriented architecture and cloud computing both offer access to applications by way of standard, reusable services, and they both provide hardware independence, location transparency and a chargeback system. Proponents of each might maintain that they are different things, but SOA appears to be transitioning into the cloud, writes Joe McKendrick at ZDNet.

Successful cloud deployment requires an enterprise-wide SOA strategy, according to E.G. Nadhan, who offers five signs revealing the cloud as an extension of SOA…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Colin Neagle.

Having just released its new cloud operating system, Piston Cloud Computing finds itself in a contentious position — and company co-founder Josh McKenty says that is exactly where the company wants to be.

"We’re building a product that’s great for private clouds, and that puts us head-to-head with VMware," McKenty says. "And I’m ready for that fight."

McKenty didn’t mince words when describing his young company’s new product, which it is touting as the industry’s first private cloud operating system based on the OpenStack framework.

"The thing that I want to make sure is crystal clear is that Piston Enterprise OS is an alternative to VMware," says McKenty, a former technical architect with the NASA Nebula team that originally designed the OpenStack framework. "This is an alternative to the proprietary walled garden approach to cloud that VMware has adopted."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NJVC(R), one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense, and Virtual Global, a premier provider of software and cloud computing platform solutions for a variety of industry and federal customers, announce the release of a joint white paper, "Platform a Service (PaaS): What Is It? Why Is It So Important?."

The paper clarifies the confusion surrounding PaaS for IT decision makers in the federal government. The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests PaaS as a component of the Federal Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, but one major challenge exists: Most buyers do not understand what PaaS is, why it is important and how it can help federal agencies cut development costs by more than 50 percent…