Category: News

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Don Boulia.

Today when organizations discuss infrastructure strategies, invariably, the cloud becomes the topic of conversation. After a relatively slow ramp in the enterprise, cloud is now core to IT strategies, helping many organizations lower costs, improve scalability and resiliency, and foster greater business agility. According to a new report by KPMG Institute, 39 percent of IT leaders and CIO’s surveyed for the Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey 2016, plan to invest in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services over the next three years, up from 25 percent just last year.

And the 2015 IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, estimates that 25 percent of total IT budgets will be allocated to cloud computing this year. For many it is no longer a question of if, or even when to adopt the cloud, but rather, what type of cloud infrastructure to consider–private, public, hybrid, or all of the above…

Grazed from Computing. Author: Graeme Burton.

ARM has revealed more details about the Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology it is developing for the ARMv8-A architecture that Fujitsu is planning to deploy in the Post-K supercomputer it is building for Japan’s RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. Detailed at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California today, SVE is capable of handling vectors from 128 to 2,048 bits in length, and is intended for supercomputer makers like Fujitsu to help them adopt ARM products and deploy them in the world’s biggest and most powerful computers.

SVE is a flexible extension to the ARM instruction set that can shift vector calculations from software into hardware, with the scheduler arranging calculations depending on the hardware available. ARM engineers will, shortly, submit patches to the Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM compiler infrastructure project to support SVE auto-vectorisation…

Grazed from TechWeek Europe. Author: Ben Sullivan.

No shift to the cloud comes without a conversation about security, and for attendees of the annual Black Hat security conference, one of the main issues about moving companies to cloud computing is seen to be the increase of the attackable surface area. Almost all of the respondents to a survey conducted by CloudPassage at the conference noted that when moving from traditional data centres to a cloud infrastructure environment, they increased the number of server workloads by a factor of two to 100 times.

‘Attackable surface area’

This, in turn, greatly increases their attackable surface area, and enterprises are worried. In fact, over three quarters of respondents said that security team hiring in the enterprise has not kept pace with this rate at which new server workloads are created, changed or retired in the cloud…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Cray has always been associated with speed and power and its latest computing beast called the Cray Urika-GX system has been designed specifically for big data workloads. What’s more, it runs on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform and supports open source big data processing tools like Hadoop and Spark.

Cray recognizes that the computing world had evolved since Seymour Cray launched the company back in the early 1970s. While the computers they are creating remain technology performance powerhouses, they are competing in an entirely different landscape that includes cloud computing where companies can get as many computing resources as they need and pay by the sip (or the gulp in the case of Cray-style processing)…

“As business-critical enterprise workloads move from DevOps into production-ready clouds in OpenStack, the requirements change slightly,” said David Safaii, CEO, Trilio Data. “We’ve partnered with ZeroStack to help deliver enterprise-ready solutions for long-term success not just in accelerating, accepting and growing OpenStack clouds, but maintaining and assuring the application and data integrity customers deserve.”

Key Findings

Grazed from VMblog.com. Author: Kayla Matthews

Cloud computing is everywhere. Even industry leaders like Google and Apple store content in the cloud. One common misconception is that cloud computing – or the act of storing your data on remote servers – is not very secure. Many IT professionals adhere to the sentiment that cloud computing poses a significant security risk.

Strangely enough, with all the concern about security being lax, the IT industry has bulked up security for cloud computing. Let’s take a closer look at why the public cloud is much more secure than a local data center.

Public Cloud Services Are Up-to-Date on Security

Due to the nature of computing, security is always shifting and evolving. When it boils down, most enterprises don’t have the budget to stay on the frontline. They don’t have the money to continuously deploy new and more advanced security measures or update their systems.

Security and Privacy on the Cloud

Technology has created a plethora of connection choices and with this IT, pain points can arise for business owners, or anyone else trying to manage company-owned and private devices connecting in the office or at home. Employees working remotely need flexibility and typically use their own devices, including laptops, desktops, tablets and cell phones, for work tasks. They are connecting over home broadband or Wi-Fi hotspots, each presenting potential security challenges.

Grazed from AFCEA. Author: Sandra Jontz.

New document lays out plans for department-wide operating system, use of CACs, data center consolidation and migration to cloud services. The U.S. Defense Department unveiled Thursday a bold information technology and cybersecurity road map that modifies its approach on several efforts in the rapidly changing environments.

The guide positions the department’s IT infrastructure and processes for a broad impact, in addition to hopes of greater security and scrutiny, said its chief information officer, Terry Halvorsen. Outlined in the nine-page paper are a number of DOD efforts, from its crawl to a department-wide operating system to its plans to ditch use of the common access card, migrate to a cloud environment and consolidate and virtualize its data centers…

Grazed from Optics.org. Author: Editorial Staff.

Intel says it has started shipping silicon photonics products based around a hybrid indium phosphide/silicon laser, and says that it expects the technology to eventually feature “everywhere” in data centers. Officially launching the platform at this year’s Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel’s general manager of data centers Diane Bryant claimed that the Californian chip giant was the only company building its silicon photonics around a laser directly integrated into the material. “We are the first to light up silicon,” she said, adding that products had been shipping since June. “We integrate the laser light-emitting material, which is indium phosphide, onto the silicon and use lithography to define the laser, to align it with precision.”

Cost, reach and density advantage

Bryant says that this yields a cost advantage versus other approaches to silicon photonics, which can involve tricky manual alignment, as well as longer reach and higher density. But she admitted that it had taken Intel a long time – 16 years to be precise – to transfer the technology from its research laboratories and into a full-blown product…