Category: News

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

Call it one of the most expensive insurance policies in the world. Companies have spent billions of dollars over the years building and maintaining  backup disk arrays and secondary data centers to keep things running in the event that something goes wrong.

Cloud turns backup and recovery on its head, making it possible to provision back-up sites as needed, for pennies. Ironically, however, this goes against the gut instincts of many IT executives, who spend a lot of time worrying about data security and availability.

That’s the view of David Nichols, principal and Americas CIO services leader for Ernst & Young IT Advisory Services, who has been working closely with companies across the globe to identify cloud opportunities. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Nichols to get his take on the pluses and minuses of cloud computing, who observed the approach is still in its early stages. While “there is a lot of demand for cloud,” he confirms, most companies do not yet have a formal strategy or end-goal. That’s because most companies have not reached the point where at least 30% of their workloads are carried in the cloud, he says.  Once an organization passes that 30% threshold, cloud starts to become a serious part of the business…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Technology Partners(TM) Inc. (cloudTP(TM)), the leader in transformational cloud computing solutions, today announced that it has closed out 2011 having achieved a number of significant milestones, including the signing of a number of new client engagements, delivering beyond expectations, and building an amazing team of results oriented professionals."The official launch of cloudTP in January 2011 heralded a new era in cloud computing.

Finally, IT and business organizations had someplace to turn for highly experienced, vendor neutral, end-to-end cloud computing solutions," said Chris Greendale, Founder and CEO, Cloud Technology Partners (cloudTP). "During the past year, we have been fortunate to work with large early adopter clients across multiple industries, and have developed intellectual property which helps our clients accelerate cloud benefits. Also, an area in which we have particularly excelled is in attracting and retaining world-class employees – truly any company’s greatest asset." Greendale continued, "We look forward to continuing on this exciting trajectory as more and more companies turn to cloudTP for its industry unique ability to look across the entire company – the complete application portfolio, assess potential, identify and eliminate road-blocks, prioritize and finally drive the construction of private, public, hybrid and/or community clouds in order to reshape not only the IT department, but how the entire business will operate and benefit as it moves forward."…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author:  Barb Darrow.

Add France to the list of European countries pushing a nationalistic cloud computing agenda, one that could have huge repercussions for U.S.-based cloud powers and the nature of cloud computing in general.

France Telecom is partnering with Thales SA, a maker of aerospace systems and industrial electronics, to build a homegrown cloud to offer built-in-France software, according to a Bloomberg news report.

And the verbiage is getting heated…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: CloudVentures.

Despite all the hype of Cloud Computing the reality is that most large enterprises are still only at an early stage of adoption, mainly focused on applying virtualization internally to their existing application estate, what’s called Private Cloud.

This does achieve many business benefits but isn’t Cloud in the sense of outsourcing to a remote provider.

However although organizations aren’t yet ready to put their crown jewels entirely into the Cloud, it doesn’t mean that externally hosted Clouds don’t offer some kind of value to this scenario; indeed doing so is the first and primary goal of our ‘Cloud BCP‘ best practices…

Grazed from Business Cloud 9.  Author: Katy Ring.

Following the publication of the Strategic Implementation Plan for the Government ICT Strategy back in October, we were told that Cloud delivery will be increasingly important – g.g. by December 2015, the goal is for 50% of central government new ICT spending will be transitioned to public Cloud computing services.

This is an aggressive target, requiring a big culture shift within Government. To assist, the Government is establishing a G-Cloud Authority to act as a government-wide entity for commodity commissioning and direction of procurement as a “Cloud First” initiative is launched. And, as in the US, which pioneered this approach, the low hanging fruit with which to start populating the App Store is tactical and will probably be email…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The OASIS international consortium has launched a new open standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee will advance an interoperability standard that will make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance, and compliance.

“Freedom of choice is part of ASG DNA. Being able to participate in the elaboration of the TOSCA standard is for us a fantastic opportunity to ensure our current and future customers take advantage of seamless interoperability of Cloud environments.”

 

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

OpenNebula 3.2 is the most feature-rich enterprise-class open-source software for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers based on Xen, KVM and VMware.

The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the release of a new stable version of its widely deployed open-source management platform for enterprise data center virtualization. OpenNebula 3.2 is the first stable distribution produced by OpenNebula’s new release cycle aimed at faster delivery of new features and innovations to the community, based on their requirements and feedback, while also increasing technical quality.

"The most recent requirements of organizations building large scale production environments have been the driving force behind all our development and innovation efforts in OpenNebula 3.2," said Ignacio M. Llorente, Director of the OpenNebula Project. "Most of these organzations are using OpenNebula as an enterprise-ready open-source alternative to proprietary cloud solutions."…

Grazed from International Business Times.  Author: David Zielenziger.

More than a dozen of the biggest technology companies, including IBM, Cisco Systems and SAP, formally announced a new standards-setting committee Monday for the emerging sector of cloud computing.

The goal of the big guns is to develop some early benchmarks for the cloud, or Internet-based computing, as early as the fourth quarter of 2012, IBM’s chief technology officer for cloud computing, Chris Ferris, told International Business Times…

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Commercial Linux and Java development tool distributor Red Hat has big aspirations in the server virtualization and cloud computing arenas, and it looks like the company is getting ready to bust out the 3.0 version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor – RHEV for short.

Red Hat has cooked up an all-day event for this Wednesday, January 18, that it calls the "Virtual Experience", and that’s dedicated mostly to the RHEV hypervisor and its surrounding tools and ecosystem partners. (You can see the agenda here.) Paul Cormier, president and executive vice president of products and technology, and Navin Thadani, senior director of the company’s virtualization business, will kick off the event – and that almost certainly means RHEV 3.0 is ready for launch…

Grazed from V3.co.uk.  Author: Dan Worth.

IBM has announced it will launch a cloud-hosted document-editing tool in the second half of 2012 to help firms collaborate more effectively, as it looks to compete with similar offerings from Microsoft and Google.

The IBM Docs tool will form part of the firm’s LotusLive cloud computing platform, which is being rebranded IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business and said it will enable staff to share and edit text documents, spreadsheets and presentations in real-time…