Category: News

Grazed from the Los Angeles Times.  Author: David Sarno.

If you’ve ever had your laptop stolen, watched your toddler baptize your PC with Pepsi, or had your MacBook come to a cold, dead stop, you know that the digital memories we store on our home computers are anything but indelible.

But now there’s a special place coalescing where data never dies: It’s called the cloud.

Internet giants Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. have relied for years on cloud computing, where information is split up and stored across large networks of remote servers, rather than all in one place. When storing a holiday dinner photo, for instance, Google slices it into many shreds of data that are then duplicated and sent to dozens of data centers all over the world. That way, if one data center melts down or has a long power outage, your family portrait can be reassembled from the pieces still stored in the center’s surviving peers…

Grazed from Hosting News.  Author:  Travis J. Hampton.

One of the primary reasons a company might turn to cloud hosting is the perception that it will save money. With rising energy costs, the demands for faster and more powerful hardware, and the cost of maintaining in-house servers, cloud computing seems like an economical choice. That perception may or may not be reality, and that largely depends on the business.

Over the course of five years, you may spend several thousand dollars on new server hardware and also have to pay for power and bandwidth. Still, you could conceivably end up paying more over the course of five years, even with low fees from a cloud hosting provider. That may make you wonder why so many people are moving to the cloud to save money…

Grazed from The Motley Fool.  Author:  Evan Niu.

42.

I’m not referring to the meaning of life, mind you. I’m talking about the annual list of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. When you look at that list, Amazon.com‘s (Nasdaq: AMZN  ) virtual supercomputer built using its Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, ranks No. 42, according to a recent Wired report.

The reason that’s such a feat is that Amazon’s virtual powerhouse is in the clouds and its raw processing power is decentralized and spread throughout its global network of data centers. This contrasts with the old-school approach of calling up Cray (Nasdaq: CRAY  ) or Penguin Computing and ordering a multimillion-dollar machine, similar to what the feds just ordered sporting NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA  ) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD  ) chips or this one using only ARM Holdings (Nasdaq: ARMH  ) -based NVIDIA chips…

Grazed from Daily Journal of Commerce Oregon.  Author: David Murray.

The term “cloud computing” is everywhere these days. It’s not a new phenomenon, but rather it is continuing to evolve.

The simplest, nontechnical definition of cloud computing is using an Internet browser to access software applications over the Internet. People who use Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com or free email services are using a form of cloud computing.

The recent surge in popularity in cloud computing is driven by the fact that businesses do not need to make a large capital investment in servers or licensing fees. In other words, the future of computing becomes subscription-based, and not ownership-based…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud services provider CA Technologies announced on Wednesday it has partnered with ECS Technology to promote cloud adoption in the commercial, retail, government, finance, insurance and manufacturing industries.

The companies will provide technical support for cloud adoption in China and help deliver Business Service Innovation by enabling new levels of speed, innovation, performance and cost/risk efficiencies.

This support will allow local firms to benefit from cloud computing and accelerate time to market with agile business services that deliver innovation, business value and competitive advantage…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author:  Rich Miller.

Bidding for unused capacity on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform has become more competitive, causing periodic price spikes in the spot market Amazon has created. Prices for virtual machine deployments that normally cost less than a dollar an hour to have risen to $5 to $10 an hour, and sometimes even as high as $999 per hour.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says the price spikes are caused by periods of “constrained capacity” in particular availability zones and customer bidding strategies that employ above-market bids to prevent interruptions of their computing jobs. Amazon says these strategies result from confusion about how spot pricing works, and has posted a video outlining effective approaches to spot bidding…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author:  Elizabeth Montalbano.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wants to migrate its in-house telephony infrastructure to the cloud in yet another move supporting the federal government’s push to decrease costs and increase efficiencies through cloud computing.

The VA is seeking proposals for a voice-as-a-service (VaaS) system that will integrate with a unified communications system–including Internet chat, video, Internet voice, and traditional voice services–to replace its existing department-wide telephony service and reduce its overall communications footprint, according to a request for information (RFI) on FedBizOpps.gov…

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

The past couple of years has seen HP hard at work developing new services and solutions under its cloud computing division.

Last month, the company launched what is perhaps its strongest advancement in cloud solutions that work to better deploy its private, public and hybrid clouds.

The company has integrated its HP CloudSystem with Alcatel-Lucent to provide networking solutions for service providers, in addition to HP CloudAgile Service Provider program, HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, HP Cloud Protection program, and HP Enterprise Cloud Services–Compute…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Shawn Drew.

Anyone paying attention to recent developments in cloud computing will understand just how much data is now being stored in private and public clouds around the world. This big data explosion means that companies of all sizes have access to an amount of data that was unthinkable just a few decades ago, but without the ability to perform complex business analytics, companies may just find themselves buried under all this information. Some recent moves by IBM show just how important analytics have become, especially in commerce, and how much they promise to transform the face of business for those who know how to harness them…