Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Ben Kepes.

Having been following the technology industry since the dawn of the cloud age (which was, after all, only a decade or so ago) I’ve been privy to some pretty interesting conversations. Indeed, when it comes to the adoption of cloud, Gandhi’s quote springs to mind: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

I remember eight years ago or so sitting in a conference where large traditional technology vendors were busy telling people that cloud wasn’t real, that it was dangerous, that no real enterprise could ever trust it. Fast forward a few years and with the increasing success of cloud vendors, the traditional organizations changed their tune and started slapping the word "cloud" on top of their existing products…

Grazed from Bizjournals. Author: Ashley Stewart.

Microsoft may have found a solution for some of the cloud computing industry’s biggest problems by moving its clouds under the sea. The Redmond company on Monday released details about a prototype for an underwater data center. Throughout a one-year pilot, called Project Natick, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) built and submerged a 10-by-7-foot, 38,000-pound data center about a half-mile off the Pacific Coast.

As Microsoft’s cloud business ­– which reached $6.3 billion in revenue during the most recent quarter – continues to grow, so does the company’s need to store data. Underwater data centers, Microsoft found, decrease cooling and power costs, use more renewable energy, reduce latency and can be set up more quickly…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

You can have all the infrastructure and platforms in the cloud you want. But let’s face it; it’s the cloud computing applications that people use to get real work done. From applications for finance and marketing, to business intelligence and analysis software, to tools for managing IT systems and mobile devices, cloud-based software is what brings everyday users into the cloud picture.

Here are 20 cloud software vendors — from established companies such as SAP and NetSuite to startups such as Domo and CognitiveScale — that caught our attention. Some are cool because of their leading-edge technology while others achieve “coolness” through their success in bringing cloud software to a wide audience of users…

Read more from the source @ http://www.crn.com/slide-shows/cloud/300079548/the-20-coolest-cloud-software-vendors-of-the-2016-cloud-100.htm?itc=hp_tax_cloud

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Managed hosting and colocation business, Pulsant, has launched a customised decision engine, created to help C-level executives and management to evaluate the cloud buying process and make more informed choices. The new interactive tool has been developed to assist buyers in wading through the myriad options of cloud services that are available.

The decision engine — ‘Cloud Intelligence’ — caters for technical and non-technical visitors, ensuring visitors are able to find the information that meets their needs. The configuration tools separates technical users familiar with the technology landscape from those less knowledgeable, like procurement personnel tasked with researching technical solutions…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Advanced Micro Devices is continuing a steady drumbeat of product releases as officials look to make the chip maker a larger player in everything from high-end gaming PCs and virtual desktops to cloud computing. The company on Feb. 1 unveiled virtualized graphics cards that can be housed in data center servers and delivered as needed to a range of devices, including remote workstations and other client systems. A day later, officials introduced two new desktop processors—the A10-7860K and Athlon X4 845—featuring AMD’s new Wraith Cooler thermal system that they said generate less than a 10th of the noise of previous chips.

"Customers can build a capable, near-silent online gaming PC in a surprisingly small form factor for an unexpectedly low price," Kevin Lensing, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s Client Business Unit, said in a statement. "The low-power requirements mean you can build a tiny system perfect for a small dorm room, for use in the living room as a home theatre PC … and portable enough to take to a LAN party."…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: David Needle.

Microsoft may have been late to the cloud party, but steady investment and improvements to its Azure cloud have made it a worthy competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yet like most cloud platforms, Azure pricing is filled with potential complexity. Among the many advantages of moving to the cloud for cash-strapped IT departments is saving on continued investment in on-premises infrastructure by off-loading to an off-premise cloud platform. In addition to savings in hardware costs and the real estate required to maintain a datacenter, management and security is handled to a great extent (though not completely) by the cloud provider.

Cloud systems let you pay for what you need and scale up, which is far better than guessing at, for example, how many servers you need to buy and maintain in-house and risk getting more than you need or scrambling to add as demand increases. One reason some industries – like retail – overbuy is to handle demand spikes around the holidays even though that means a fair bit of capacity will go underutilized during other parts of the year…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Last month LinkedIn published an analysis of the 25 Skills That Could Get You Hired in 2016. There’s a 19 page report available on Slideshare that provides a breakout of the hottest skills of 2015 on LinkedIn by country. Countries included in the analysis include Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Netherlands, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States. Key takeaways from the study include the following:

1) Cloud computing was the hottest skill in demand in France, India, and the United States in 2015 and will continue in 2016. LinkedIn found that cloud computing skills have progressed from being niche to mainstream as the world’s most in-demand skill set.

2) Statistical Analysis and Data Mining is the only skill set that ranks in the top 4 across all countries analyzed. LinkedIn found that businesses are hiring expertise in data storage, retrieval and analysis as fast as they can be on-boarded. LinkedIn also found that there weren’t enough members with big data skills including Hadoop, HBase, and Hive listed on their profiles to rank the category on the global list in 2014. In 2015, LinkedIn saw a rapid increase in members worldwide listing these types of skills on their profiles…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/02/01/cloud-computing-leads-linkedins-25-skills-that-can-get-you-hired-in-2016/#16d769fc4e90

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brian Butte.

Every once in a while I get asked what my background is, and my answer is always that I’m a generalist: a jack of all trades and master of some. Being a generalist is not easy in a world where IT professionals have been told since the beginning to specialize. However, it requires a generalist to see the forest for the trees, an analogy well-suited to the continually emerging world of cloud computing.

In 2001, I started my journey into the world of cloud computing. With a background in plant-floor automation and embedded systems, my point of view was admittedly skewed with a natural affinity for distributed computing. The hot topic at the time was grid computing, and as I was learning about it, I recognized a model that made sense: CPU scavenging. CPU scavenging virtualizes all the spare CPU cycles wasted on desktops and servers as they wait for something to do (when operating on a scale measured in billionths of a second, it turns out a lot of time is wasted waiting for something to do)…

Grazed from StorageReview. Author: Adam Armstrong.

Today IBM and Catalogic announced that a new set of solutions that combines Catalogic’s flagship product, ECX, with several of IBM’s products. The new joint solutions are aimed at modernizing IT infrastructure including automation of storage and data management, self-service capabilities, and complete RESTful API management. This modernization should deliver superior results while lowering OPEX. The joint solutions will enable companies to accelerate implementation of new use cases and workloads.

As we stated previously: ECX manages the full lifecycle of Copy Data. The software is deployed as a virtual appliance allowing IT to leverage the existing storage investment without going to the "rip and replace" method of expanding storage. And ECX has several use cases including: leverage copy data by orchestrating and automating consistent SnapMirrors to automated disaster recovery, Test Dev, and analytics; next generation data protection through instant recovery and disaster recovery by leveraging snapshot data; hybrid cloud “killer app” that uses orchestration to leverage liquid compute resources in the cloud, and copy data analytics with advanced search, report and analyze…