Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Cliff Saran.

There appears to be strong correlation between moving to the cloud and cutting costs, according to the Computer Weekly IT priorities 2016 survey of 142 IT professionals and managers. The survey showed that 50% of those asked said they would be increasing spending on cloud computing, while 37% confirmed they would be decreasing their hardware investments.

As previously reported by Computer Weekly, in the UK and Ireland 38.4% of respondents named server virtualisation as their top investment area. And although 23% of those asked said they would be investing in more staff, 35% claimed they would be cutting their headcount, suggesting pressure remains in IT to reduce costs…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: T.C. Doyle.

Cloud services innovator BitTitan is taking a big step forward this week with the acceptance of a $15 million in Series A funding. The investment from TVC Capital and Tao Capital Partners marks the first time that BitTitan, which was formed in a basement nine years ago, has accepted seed money form outside sources.

The company plans on using the investment to fuel expansion overseas and help accelerate the development of its cloud services enablement platform, MSPComplete. “Our founders have literally thrown would-be investors out of our lobby previously, but decided now is the right time to accept investment that will help propel our company forward,” said Rocco Seyboth, vice president of product and marketing at BitTitan…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched AWS Migration Competency, a list of more than 30 long-standing partners in cloud delivery, consulting, mobility and more to help customers with deeper migrations. With the AWS Partner Competency Program, which has validated that each partner has demonstrable expertise in helping enterprise customers migrate applications and infrastructure to AWS, the IaaS giant aims to reduce the complexity of adoption, with delivery partners including Cognizant and Accenture among others.

Kate Miller, AWS strategic communications manager, wrote in a company blog post: “Workload migration is a key milestone of the customer journey on AWS, and helping customers map out a clear and comprehensive migration strategy is a top priority in which AWS Partner Network partners can provide enormous support…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Ed Scannell.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise hopes it has found a way to update the venerable HP Way for the new computing age, extending a helping hand for users navigating a hybrid cloud strategy. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) rolled out a handful of cloud-based offerings at its annual HPE Discover conference here that make it easier to deliver, integrate and manage a mix of applications that work with a range of cloud-based infrastructure — and catch up with some of the company’s heavyweight competitors.

The HPE Helion Cloud Suite lets IT shops deliver and manage applications from traditional on-premises to virtualized to containerized apps across a range of infrastructure environments. Unveiled were:

• The new Helion CloudSystem 10 suite is a hardware-software bundle to help IT shops build and deploy cloud environments for a number of workloads…

Grazed from CloudAwards.net. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM has launched the Data Science Experience, a cloud-based development environment for data scientists. The project is available on IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform and is designed to deliver near real-time, high-performance analytics. Which will give scientists the opportunity to access and provide developers with “insight-driven models”.

The new project follows the introduction, in May, of IBM Quantum Computing. The experimental cloud-enabled quantum computing platform was designed to usher in the next level of computing power.

Grazed from The Register. Author: Simon Sharwood.

To understand the lessons of this week’s Amazon Web Services outage in Sydney, which took down the local AWS cloud for a few hours, take a walk down Huntley Street, Alexandria, an unlovely street in a light industrial suburb. Huntley Street is interesting because its footpaths are riddled with an unusual concentration of telecoms duct covers that hide the wires and fibres bringing data into the Equinix data centre around the corner.

Another feature of Huntley Street is a bridge, currently under repairs, over a stormwater drain that feeds into a waterway called the Alexandria Canal. The Canal is at sea level, so Huntley Street is maybe a meter or two above the water. It’s almost certainly below the hundred-year flood line. When Equinix opened the data centre it knew about the canal and the hundred-year line, because it told us servers there are all five metres off the ground so they don’t get wet in a really big wet…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco continue to battle it out for supremacy in the cloud infrastructure market with HPE having the slight advantage, according to the latest note from Synergy Research. The note, which assesses the most recent Q1 data, sees Cisco just ahead of HPE and Dell in public cloud hardware, but HPE more dominant in the private cloud hardware space, capturing more than 20% of the overall market.

In cloud software, Microsoft has more than 40% share and is streets ahead of nearest competitor VMware, but given the relatively nascent size of the market sees the Redmond giant in third place for the overall poll. Even though both HPE and Cisco gained market share in the previous quarter, HPE slightly widened its advantage, according to Synergy…

Grazed from HotHardware. Author: Marco Chiapetta.

Back in March, Intel launched its Xeon Processor E5 v4 family of products, based on the Broadwell-EP core. We had the chance to evaluate a dual Xeon E5-2697 v4-based system with a total of 36 cores (72 Threads) and detailed some of the changes and new features in Broadwell-EP. As powerful as that 36-core system was, the E5 v4 family is not Intel’s top-end server offering. That designation belongs to the Xeon E7 v4 product family being announced today, which typically features more cores, more cache, and support for additional sockets.

Back in March, Intel launched its Xeon Processor E5 v4 family of products, based on the Broadwell-EP core. We had the chance to evaluate a dual Xeon E5-2697 v4-based system with a total of 36 cores (72 Threads) and detailed some of the changes and new features in Broadwell-EP. As powerful as that 36-core system was, the E5 v4 family is not Intel’s top-end server offering…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Paul Smith.

Australian businesses have been warned they need to spread the risk in their cloud computing operations across different regions after the Sydney storms on Sunday knocked out the operations of numerous Amazon Web Services customers. The ferocious storms that hit NSW, left AWS clients including Domino’s Pizza, Foxtel, The Iconic, Stan and Domain without websites or key systems for hours.

It served as a warning that sending systems to the cloud, rather than hosting them on-premise did not remove the risk of costly failures. The failure represents a major embarrassment for the company, which generated $US2.57 billion revenue in the latest quarter, based largely on the fact that it is perceived as being hugely reliable…

Grazed from ARNNet. Author: Moheb Moses.

There’s a belief that sales people are coin-operated (i.e. they work purely on extrinsic rewards like their pay packet). While this may be true for some, my experience is that the best sales people are driven by intrinsic goals and rewards (achieving results, recognition, helping customers) with an understanding that the money will follow.

Good compensation plans reward success while enabling companies to weed out non-performers. But, equally, they should reward sales people for doing the right thing. There are countless stories of compensation plans that had unintended consequences from innovative sales teams finding shortcuts…