Category: News

Grazed from Dr. Dobbs.  Author: Ken North.

If you count yourself among the informed members of the software and computing community, you’re undoubtedly aware of NoSQL, "Big Data", cloud computing, and supercomputing. Sometimes technology that has become trendy is a branch on an evolutionary tree; other times it’s a revolutionary departure from long-established status quo.

The arrival of new technology often rekindles the pervasive debate over the merits of "tried-and-true" versus "new and improved". The latter often introduces new words in our lexicon, with recent examples being Big Data, NoSQL, and cloud computing. Supercomputing has been with us for a while but there have been significant strides in 2011, including IBM Watson, Tianhe-1A, and an Amazon virtual supercomputer…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author:  Maxwell Cooter.

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Mark Say.

Advocates of cloud computing often talk of how it offers a new procurement model for IT services, providing both substantial savings and more flexibility in the face of fluctuating demand. Their day is coming with the first procurements for the G-Cloud, the government’s formal channel for procuring cloud services.

However according to Kevin Holland, who has been involved in the G-Cloud programme for two years in his capacity as service management consultant for NHS Connecting for Health (CfH), the outlook is more complex.

While the availability of cloud services can encourage the view that you pay for what you use and it’s the supplier’s job to know about the technology, Holland claims that getting the best out of the cloud is going to demand new skills in service integration that are not yet widespread in the public sector…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Ann Lee.

In recent times, cloud computing has played a dominant role in the industry. Whether you feel positively or negatively about it, it is undeniable that cloud monitoring, like any other component in your network, needs to be monitored – perhaps more than any other. To more old-fashioned solutions for monitoring, the cloud creates a number of obstacles: you do not have ownership of its hardware, it is not run on your network and when problems or glitches occur you have no control over them.

Today there is a wide range of utilities to help you to manage your cloud computing, and the majority of these are able to respond to the disappearance of instances by starting up new ones with just a little direction from you. But how can this be integrated into your existing monitoring?…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Stuart Corner.

The company says it is collaborating with Equinix "to become a one-stop shop for global enterprises that require best-of-breed data centre services…such as co-location, managed hosting and cloud computing services…Enterprise customers can expect a complete approach to service management with a single point of accountability for the company’s network and hosted computing infrastructure."

Nick Lambert, managing director, wholesale, mid-markets and global markets, at C&W Worldwide, said: "Equinix is the ideal company for us to collaborate with because its footprint of data centres closely aligns with our global network. Both companies share a complementary vision to deliver reliable, on-demand services that will enable some of the largest organisations to transit into a world-class cloud computing and communications environment."…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Meredith Levinson.

Keith Fafel entered the world of cloud computing during the summer of 2010, while he was working as a product manager with Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based provider of hosted IT infrastructure services.

At the time, Fafel was working in Rackspace’s monitoring services line of business, which provides information on the performance of the hardware and software that Rackspace runs for its customers. Rackspace had begun developing cloud-based hosting services, and it was trying to create monitoring solutions for customers provisioning those cloud-based services so that they could be assured their servers and load balancers were working properly. Fafel says he "inserted" himself in the conversation Rackspace was having on how it would develop monitoring software for the cloud…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced that Daniel Barreto, General Manager for Wyse’s Mobile Cloud Business Unit, will moderate the closing keynote at APPNATION Enterprise Summit at the The Bently Reserve in San Francisco on Thursday, January 12th at 5:30pm. The keynote includes panelists from Appcelerator, Fifo, IBM, Samsung and SAP, and will discuss challenges and opportunities of mobile technologies in the enterprise.

APPNATION Enterprise Summit is an exciting new event developed to address the critical issues corporate CIOs and enterprise app developers face against an increasingly empowered and demanding enterprise workforce. In one information-packed day, the summit will address the risks, rewards, challenges and opportunities facing CIOs as they struggle to identify the right software, devices, systems and strategies and deliver results for their organizations…

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

Last week Oracle’s long-simmering Java infringement suit against Google, already postponed from Halloween, was scheduled to go to trial "on or after March 19."

On Thursday the court entered another order saying it won’t set a trial date any time soon and suggesting that given the demands on its calendar it could be 2013 before the case gets heard.

Presiding Judge William Alsup, who figures, speaking "from experience," that the trial will take two months, also said in his order that "The court will not set a trial date until Oracle adopts a proper damages methodology, even assuming a third try is allowed (or unless Oracle waives damages beyond those already allowed to go to the jury). For this ‘delay,’ Oracle has no one to blame but itself, given that twice now it has advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Annoucement.

nCircle, the leader in automated security and compliance auditing solutions, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of best practices for security assurance within cloud computing as well as education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Tim ‘TK’ Keanini, CTO for nCircle, will join CSA’s Corporate Member Advisory Council.

"nCircle has invested its top talent to the development of security standards and metrics over the last 12 years," noted nCircle CTO, Tim Keanini. "Meaningful security standards and metrics are crucial to multi-vendor interoperability, socializing the data across multiple disciplines and reducing security risk in public and private networks across the globe. We look forward to working with the CSA to define and educate the public about cloud security."…

Grazed from CFO.  Author:  David Rosenbaum.

In its most recent 10-K filing, HP, number 11 among the 2011 Fortune 500, lists among its business risks “the growing demand for an increasing array of mobile computing devices” as well as the “development of cloud-based solutions,” both of which could “reduce demand for some of our existing hardware products” and consequently require HP to “transition to an environment characterized by cloud-based computing and software being delivered as a service.”

So far, that transition could not fairly be described as smooth. It has been marked by former CEO Leo Apotheker’s announcement last August that HP would abandon its TouchPad tablet (an “existing hardware product”), meaning, essentially, that it would write off its investment in the WebOS operating system (for “mobile computing devices”) HP got by acquiring Palm (for $1.2 billion) in 2010…