Category: News

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…

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

Shares of Oracle Corporation fell 3.97% in yesterday’s trading session, after the company was named in a lawsuit by a former employee. On Wednesday, Oracle’s former senior Finance Manager, Svetlana Blackburn filed a lawsuit against the company. Blackburn alleged that the company had terminated her service when she resisted some manipulative accounting practices in Oracle’s cloud-computing business.

Oracle in its defense stated that “We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance.” However, Blackburn, a certified financial analyst, claimed that she had received a positive performance review just a couple of months before she was fired in Oct 2015…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tierman Ray.

Shares of Oracle are down $1.57, or 4%, at $38.69, following reports late Wednesday that the company is being sued by a former accountant who claims the company tried to falsify its revenue from cloud computing. Reuters’s Jonathan Stempel, Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Sarah McBride report that a former senior Oracle accountant, Svetlana Blackburn, has filed a complain in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the former executive, claiming she was fired on October 15th of last year after she took exception with the company’s request that she “make Oracle Cloud Services’ results look better” by “adding millions of dollars of accruals for expected business ‘with no concrete or foreseeable billing to support the numbers’,” adding that executives above her added accruals on their own." Oracle released a statement following the article, attributed to Oracle communications director Deborah Hellinger, stating it will sue her:

We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct. This former employee worked at Oracle for less than a year and did not work in the accounting group. She was terminated for poor performance and we intend to sue her for malicious prosecution. In a note to clients today, Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard, who has a Neutral rating on Oracle, writes that looking at the complaint, it will keep alive some concerns about the opaque nature of Oracle’s cloud results:..

Read more fromt the source @ http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/06/02/oracle-whistle-blower-complaint-highlights-opaque-cloud-bookings-says-citi/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Thomas Rectenwald.

Infrastructure as code has defined the last five years of systems engineering, and will likely define the next five. But as we became better and better at manipulating infrastructure with declarative languages, we started to look beyond JSON to find more full-fledged, dynamic programming languages to create and configure cloud resources. In many ways, this movement is mimicking the evolution of web development as web ‘sites’ became web ‘applications’; in a few years, systems engineers will be coding infrastructure applications, not hard-coding declarative templates.

What is CloudFormation?

Amazon Web Services’ infrastructure as code (IaC) offering, CloudFormation, enables engineers to manage infrastructure through the use of declarative templates, utilising the data format language, JSON. The value of this approach is tremendous. Templates can be checked into a source code management system, linted and validated using tools and IDEs…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Tina Amirtha.

Phone companies around the world are working to protect their customers’ data from a threat does not yet exist: large quantum computers. Although the arrival of these advanced machines could be as far off as 15 years, telecoms companies are already implementing new quantum encryption algorithms.

These firms are preparing for the possibility that quantum computers will one day scale sufficiently to break through even the most sophisticated of today’s encryption barriers. The most common quantum encryption method utilizes a technology called quantum key distribution, which can be implemented on existing fiber-optic connections…