Category: News

Grazed from Fool.  Author: Andrew Tonner.

Given the lucrative economics, competition in the red-hot cloud-computing market among many of the space’s most powerful incumbents will probably remain fierce for a long time. Attempts to redefine the fabric of computing from leading companies such as Amazon.com and Google befit their sky-high ambitions. In one recent example, Google unveiled a new cloud-computing product in its ongoing attempt to steal market share from Amazon.

Supercomputing showdown

Last week, Google announced the public release of its pre-emptible virtual machines, or VMs, a cloud-based supercomputing product that offers a number of benefits both to Google and its cloud-computing customers. At their most basic, VMs allow customers to affordably run advanced supercomputing tasks at steep discounts to current alternatives. However, the discount comes with a catch, and that’s why the term "pre-emptible" deserves some attention…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Salesforce.com is seen as one of the pioneering inventors of the cloud computing market, but company co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff says Salesforce is not about the cloud. Here’s an excerpt of Benioff’s interview with CNBC host Jim Cramer. You can watch the full interview here, this quote comes at the 6:15 mark.

This isn’t about the cloud, Jim, and it never was about the cloud. It’s about the customer…. The cloud is about technology, and technology is transient. The technology we’re talking about today will be obsoleted in 3,4,5 years from now, it will be all new technology. What’s the one thing though that will be the same five years from now? … We’ll still be talking about the customer…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/article/2984644/cloud-computing/benioff-backs-salesforce-away-from-the-cloud.html

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Mike Vizard.

Moving to make it simpler to use an OpenStack cloud management framework to manage network functions virtualization (NFV) software that promises to change how network services are delivered and managed, Mirantis, in partnership with Citrix, Metaswitch Networks and Overture Networks, this week announced a Mirantis NFV Initiative.

In effect, Mirantis is creating a reference architecture for deploy NFV software that not only spans its distribution of OpenStack, but also encompasses session border controllers from Metaswitch Networks, application delivery controllers from Citrix (CTXS) and service orchestration software from Overture Networks…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

As modern enterprise networks move into the world of public cloud computing, certain facts come to light. One is that enterprise network managers are forced to work with public cloud providers to ensure that the network continues to support the needs of the business. This means that some IT fundamentals are undergoing change.

First, cloud network architectures need to be more flexible: Static networks drastically limit the use of cloud. Second, network services need to be decoupled from a single physical location, since the delivery of data, compute and user interfaces are now ubiquitous. Finally, many network resources need to be abstracted so provisioning can be automated and orchestrated…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: David Bradley.

The most obvious disadvantage of putting your data in the cloud is losing access when you have no Internet connection. According to research published in the International Journal of Cloud Computing, this is where “dew” could help. Yingwei Wang of the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Canada, describes what he refers to as a “cloud-dew” architecture that offers an “efficient and elegant way” to counteract cloud downtime and communication difficulties.

In the world of cloud computing, users and organizations keep their data in the cloud, users access the data from their computer, which means their data is mobile and can be accessed from any computer…but only as long as an Internet connection is available. The problem with this arrangement is that the user relies heavily on an Internet connection and the cloud servers, Wang explains…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jason Sparapani.

It’s a given — you need to make changes when moving IT operations to the public cloud. There are new management tasks you need to emphasize, new processes you need to implement, new technologies you need to bring in. But you don’t need to change everything. “There’s a whole set of things that you’ve been doing for decades in the data center that don’t go away,” said Mindy Cancila, an analyst at Gartner, at the recent Gartner Catalyst Conference in San Diego.

“They look a little different with public cloud adoption, so you’re going to have to evolve those traditional management procedures into a public cloud environment.” Among those data center best practices are creating templates to determine how deployments should be carried out, development and test procedures and data governance polices…

Read more from the source @ http://searchcio.techtarget.com/tip/Dont-toss-data-center-best-practices-when-managing-cloud-services

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM recently announced the opening of a new cloud data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil, its second cloud data center in Brazil and its third in Latin America. Big Blue said this move is in response to the rapid growth of cloud adoption in Latin America, which is expected to grow more than 26 percent by 2018.

IBM’s new SoftLayer data center in Sao Paolo has capacity for 9,000 total servers and a power rating of 2.8 megawatts and offers the full range of SoftLayer infrastructure services, including bare metal and virtual servers, storage, security services, and networking. This data center will support its growing customer base in the region that already includes hundreds of customers in Brazil such as Audio Monitor, Unicamp, Finep, Pague Menos Drugstore, WTW Media Group, Seeker, among others…

Grazed from Sourceable. Author: Marc Howe.

According to Philip Bernstein, VP Strategic Industry Relations, Autodesk, enhanced access to staggering amounts of computational power will result in profound changes to the design and development of built assets around the world. “We’re going to see some fundamental changes in the way that assets are built, designed and operated, and chief amongst them is what I call ‘anecdotal predictiveness,’” he said.

Bernstein believes the vast amounts of computational power accessible at low cost via the cloud means that certain decisions that were once made by experts based on years of experience and fine-honed pattern recognition could soon be automated. “We now have access to infinite computing and infinite storage thanks to the cloud,” he said…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Derrick Harris.

Microsoft is hard at work on a new platform that will let developers easily build cloud computing services and mobile applications that can analyze lots of data, according to a report Tuesday in ZDNet. The platform, code-named Prajna, is built on Microsoft’s .NET programming language (which the company open sourced last March) and is inspired by the data-processing capabilities of the white-hot Apache Spark technology.

Like Spark, Hadoop and most popular big data technologies, Prajna is also an open source project. Microsoft is pushing the project to help it gain a stronger foothold in the fast-growing business of processing and analyzing large amounts of corporate data. There’s a lot of money to be made in this space, which is often called “big data,” as evidenced by the multi-billion-dollar valuations of some companies in it and the seeming ubiquity of certain technologies…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-prajna-spark-alternative/

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

Given the cost and complexity of standing up a private cloud these days, there’s been a marked shift toward more reliance on IT service providers that will absorb the capital costs associated with establishing a modern data center on behalf of multiple customers. As a result, IT vendors are either building up their own managed hosting capabilities or relying more on third-party partners.

In the case of EMC, the decision has been made to go the latter route via a Catalyst Alliance program under which EMC and Dimension Data, a unit of the NTT Group, will more closely align their private and public cloud computing efforts to create a comprehensive set of hybrid cloud computing services aimed primarily at midmarket IT customers…