Category: News

November 18, 2011 Off

Big Data Bug Bites GE

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

General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the "next frontier" and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets.

The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the "Industrial Internet," a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data.

It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper…

November 18, 2011 Off

Cloud, mobility to drive security market

By David
Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Ellyne Phneah.

Cloud and mobility are upcoming trends that will drive the business environment and, hence, influence the security landscape, note Symantec execs, who also advise organizations to step up measures to protect their employees and infrastructure from emerging threats.

At the Symantec Vision 2011 conference here Friday, Enrique Salem, the security vendor’s president and CEO, reiterated that the significance of cloud computing, mobility and virtualization in driving IT transformation.

"IT trends in mobile and cloud computing are driving increased connectivity on an unprecedented scale.

"These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points of risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures," Salem explained…

November 18, 2011 Off

Alcatel Promises Better Clouds for Carriers

By David

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Stephen Lawson.

Alcatel-Lucent is developing a cloud computing platform for carriers that aims to take full advantage of their networks to deliver guaranteed performance.

Carriers can use the platform, called CloudBand, both to run their own software and to offer cloud computing services to enterprises. For internal purposes, the cloud can make it faster and cheaper to launch and operate services, and for subscribers it will offer more predictable performance than current clouds, according to Alcatel. Carriers will be able to sell cloud computing services with guaranteed availability and response times, the company says.

Service providers already can build their own cloud data centers and link them to their infrastructure, which can provide an edge in performance over using the open Internet, said Dor Skuler, vice president of cloud solutions at Alcatel. But CloudBand goes beyond this with software that examines a wide range of conditions and user requirements to find the best settings for a given application at a certain time…

November 18, 2011 Off

Morphlabs Appoints New Chief Technology Officer

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Morphlabs, the leader in converged Dynamic Infrastructure Services for the Enterprise, today announced the appointment of Lee Thompson as Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Thompson will work to advance Morphlabs’ technical vision of mCloud technologies, which support enterprise clients in overcoming the complexities of implementing the most price performant cloud solution on the market.

 "Morphlabs has developed strategic cloud computing solutions for enterprise infrastructure which extend far beyond server consolidation and virtualization," said Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO at Morphlabs. "Lee has a proven track record of taking disruptive open source innovations and implementing them successfully in mission-critical environments. With more than 25 years of experience in balancing open initiatives and proprietary technologies in large-scale deployments, Lee is the right CTO to help Morphlabs to execute on driving the adoption of Dynamic Infrastructure Services in the enterprise."…

November 18, 2011 Off

Ensuring cloud computing performance on data communications networks

By David
Grazed from LightWave Online.  Author:  Mannix O’Connor and Vladimir Bronstein.

Cloud computing promises to reduce IT expenditures, increase network flexibility, and streamline communication infrastructure. This is the first in a series of three articles in which we will examine communications technologies as key enablers that can make cloud computing a reality. Specifically, we will look at protocols, traffic management, and the control of wide-area communications and how the application of industry-standard techniques can assure network designers robust performance in their cloud offerings.

In this article, we’ll define specific communications reference points (RPs) within cloud computing networks so that software designers and network architects can better understand and address specific problems. Each RP presents unique requirements and challenges for creating, maintaining, and managing connectivity. Creating proper communication paths on the network and configuring them correctly at these RPs, or interfaces, will maximize cloud performance. The communication RPs will be defined individually; for each RP we will analyze the type and characteristics of the data communicated, describe the expected traffic patterns at the RP, and discuss the reliability requirements, the need (or lack thereof) for real-time traffic delivery, quality of service (QoS), and other characteristics of communication technologies, such as security…

November 18, 2011 Off

FXI Demonstrates Any Screen Connected Computing

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

FXI Technologies, a hardware and software startup based in Trondheim Norway, demonstrated today the world’s first any screen, connected computing USB device. Codenamed "Cotton Candy", this sweet little device serves as a technology bridge between any display, the Cloud, and any input peripheral.

The vision for Cotton Candy is to allow users a single, secure point of access to all personal Cloud services and apps through their favorite operating system, while delivering a consistent experience on any screen. The device will serve as a companion to smartphones, tablets, notebook PCs and Macs, as well as add smart capabilities to existing displays, TVs, set top boxes and game consoles…

November 17, 2011 Off

Jelastic Enables Java Applications to be Built and Deployed in the Cloud

By David
Grazed from GlobalNewsWire.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Now, using the next-generation platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) offering Jelastic, it is possible to build and run any Java application in the cloud instead of from a personal computer — speeding development time and maximizing computing resources.

Jelastic allows developers to make code changes and rebuild applications in the cloud, removing the lag time caused whenever files are updated and uploaded from a personal computer. Jelastic can take application source code directly from version control repositories, via either the Git or SVN protocol.

Using Jelastic, developers can easily swap test and production environments with simple point-and-click. The same is true for cloning an exact copy to test or prepare an application for production deployment. Jelastic is fully compatible with existing Java applications and libraries…

November 17, 2011 Off

OpDemand service aims to ease IaaS deployments

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Nancy Gohring.

OpDemand on Thursday opened its service that automates deployment of cloud infrastructure to all users. The service is free to use initially.

OpDemand was created to make it easier for businesses to use hosted cloud computing services. Gabriel Monroy, OpDemand’s CTO, helped start the company after doing cloud consulting work. "During the time I spent helping companies adopt the cloud, I realized the problems they were facing were namely that the tools they had available to them were complicated and exposed a lot of technical detail," he said.

Users of OpDemand’s C2 (Command & Control) service can choose from a library of preassembled networking, middleware, Web, processing, and other templates to compile their software to run in the cloud. The library includes cloud services templates for Ruby on Rails, Django, Node.js, and Wordpress as well as databases like CouchDB…

November 17, 2011 Off

Cisco, Corous360 and IAHGames Take Online Gaming to the Cloud

By David
Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Infocomm Asia Holdings (IAHGames), a leading publisher, operator and distributor of popular online games, today announced that they are the first gaming company in Southeast Asia to use the power of unified computing to deliver efficiency and scalability to their operations in the region. IAHGames achieved this using Corous360, a leading independent online games cloud service provider that chose the Cisco Unified Computing System(TM) (Cisco UCS(TM)) to take their operations of managing interactive entertainment into the virtual space.

The implementation provides a highly secure, scalable, efficient and cost-effective platform that reduces information technology infrastructure costs and complexity, while improving IAHGames’ business agility. The business value in using cloud computing has also resulted in IAHGames offering the platform to all game developers and providers, as they collaborate to share knowledge and cost-savings measures with other companies in the industry, taking the business of online games to a future-state…

November 17, 2011 Off

Clarifying Cloud Computing

By David
Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author:  Michael Vizard.

There’s obviously a lot of confusion these days about the distinctions between public and private cloud computing, managed hosting and managed services. In fact, it’s not all uncommon for IT organizations to start investigating cloud computing only to discover what they really want is some form of managed hosting or managed service.

The reason for this comes down to concerns about data security and the nature of the application workloads that the IT organization wants to run. In an ideal security world, many IT organizations don’t want to have their applications running on multi-tenant systems where not only is security a potential issue, but where events such as “noisy virtual machine neighbors” can have unexpected consequences for the applications they have running on shared IT infrastructure…