Training Course helps build and use private/hybrid clouds.
Nimbula, the Cloud Operating System Company, today announced the launch of its first hands-on Cloud Computing training course, "Building and Using a Cloud with Nimbula Director". This course will teach students how to build and administer private and hybrid cloud solutions.
Nimbula Director is powerful cloud software that works out of the box and can be used to implement a number of business enabling cloud use cases, such as deploying a private cloud in minutes instead of weeks or months…
Testing the Edge of the Cloud
Although federal researchers were generally upbeat about the agile capabilities of cloud computing, they found that shifting their niche data sets for scientific experiments to virtual environments might not hold the same savings seen in other industries.
The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) recently released its final report on the Magellan project, which investigated the performance, usability and cost roles cloud computing can play in midrange computing and data-intensive workloads. Over the last two years, the Magellan project particularly probed how the cloud could address the unique big data needs for research by the federal energy department’s Office of Science.
A cloud infrastructure testbed of more than 8,000 CPU cores and 1.4 petabytes of storage were deployed at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. With that infrastructure in place, researchers evaluated the performance of cloud models for IaaS and PaaS, virtual software packs, and MapReduce and Hadoop…
Joyent Secures $85M in Venture Funding to Fuel Global Growth and Continued Innovation
Joyent, a global provider of cloud computing software and services, today announced it has completed an $85 million funding round, with European group Weather Investment II providing the majority of the round. Weather II was advised by Accelero Capital, an investment and management group. Both Weather II and Accelero focus on telecommunication and related media and technology companies that clearly hold promise in the rapidly and profoundly changing telecom and enterprise markets worldwide.
Telefonica Digital, the growth arm of global telecom leader Telefonica, is also participating as a strategic investor. Cloud-based services are a key focus area for Telefonica’s new Digital unit, and Joyent’s technology expertise in this area will help Telefonica enhance its product offering.
Existing Joyent investors include El Dorado Ventures, Epic Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global…
How 8 Distributors Are Tackling The Cloud
CRN talked to top executives at eight IT distributors to find out how they are approaching cloud computing and carving out their own roles within the evolving technology landscape.
Here’s a look at their game plans:
Arrow Electronics
Arrow Electronics’ Enterprise Computing Solutions group launched its cloud computing services initiative in the summer under the Arrow Fusion brand with data center monitoring and management, Security-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and business continuity and disaster recovery solutions…
Enterprise Hadoop: Big data processing made easier
It’s been a big year for Apache Hadoop [1], the open source project that helps you split your workload among a rack of computers. The buzzword is now well known to your boss but still just a vague and hazy concept for your boss’s boss. That puts it in the sweet spot when there’s plenty of room for experimentation. The list of companies using Hadoop in production work grows longer each day, and it probably won’t be long before "Hadoop cluster" takes over the role that the words "crazy supercomputer" used to play in thriller movies. The next version of the WOPR is bound to run Hadoop.
The area is flourishing as the core project attracts a wide collection of helper projects that organize the workload and make it simpler to manage a collection of jobs to run at particular times. There’s HDFS, a standard file system that can organize the data spread out around the cluster; Hive, a data warehousing layer for making sense of this data; Mahout, a collection of routines for trying to learn something from said data; and ZooKeeper, a tool for keeping all of the balls in the air. At least a half-dozen or more other open source tools live in a stable orbit around Hadoop…
The cloud is forked
Enterprises are adopting two types of cloud. One is less risky but inherently flawed. The other offers greater rewards but very few so far have succeeded with it.
There’s a huge variety of different definitions of cloud floating around. Some are just plain wrong, while others are only valid in specific circumstances — cloud strategies that are right for certain organisations at certain times aren’t necessarily right for others (or even for the same organisation later on in its evolution). It’s tough for any enterprise decision-maker to figure out the right path…
Cloud services are vying for government business
While many people are still trying to figure out what “cloud computing” really means, various businesses specializing in cloud services are going after the U.S. government’s business. Companies like Box and Amazon Web Services are looking to pick up federal government business by providing extra security and specialized “cloud areas”.
According to TechCrunch the federal government is a $70 billion market. One of the biggest cloud storage companies, Box, is going after that market this year. It currently provides cloud services to “77% of the Fortune 500”. In pursuit of that goal, the company is beefing up its security in order to lure federal government storage contracts its way. The company already provides services to several state and local governments…
2 hot cloud apps
In our daily working with computers, it’s not uncommon to come across software that provide such obvious benefits that it becomes hard to live without them. Of late, with cloud computing, this has also become the case with web services. Below are some utilities that will make your life simpler:
Use Ifttt to build bridges between different services
We are well-versed with the concept of ‘events’ and ‘responses’ . When a phone rings, we pick it up; if the oven’s timer goes off, we check on our baking. The Web service ‘If This, Then That’ (IFTTT) now brings this concept of events and responses to the internet…
EMC leads backup appliance market: report
IT services vendor and solutions provider, EMC, has taken a solid grip on the worldwide Purpose Built Backup Appliance (PBBA) market, according to a new report just released, which shows the company captured 62 percent share of the market in the first half of last year, more than three times the share of its nearest competitor. And, more Australian companies have been quicker to embrace PBBA solutions than their counterparts in other Asia-Pacific countries.
In its report on the PBBA market, industry analyst firm, IDC, says the market for the whole year in 2011 is now forecast to have increased to over 65 per cent compared to 2010.
According to IDC, during the first half of 2011, EMC commanded a 62 per cent share of the total worldwide PBBA market with its EMC Avamar, Data Domain and Disk Library for mainframe products, with the nearest competitor holding a 20.7 per cent share and all others below four per cent share. In its latest market forecast, IDC says it expects the total PBBA market to grow robustly with a 2010-2015 compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.6 per cent, totalling nearly US$5.3 billion by the close of 2015…
Building Your Cloud? Remember Your Workers
My post last week discussed the importance of long-term benefits related to productivity and cost when implementing cloud computing technologies. CFOs and their IT directors must understand the importance of hard costs, but they should not forget their employees who will ultimately be impacted by these changes.
"The role of IT is changing, and businesses must recognize how this change will impact their employees", HCL Technologies’ Global Vice President, Cloud Computing Sadagopan “Sada” Singam emphasizes. "IT is becoming more cross-functional, and companies must understand how their IT departments will impact business operations."…