Category: News

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…

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: PR Announcement.

In the initial years of the Cloud, Gartner observed that "organizations are switching from company-owned hardware and software assets to per-use service-based models" so that the "projected shift to computing … will result in dramatic growth in IT products in some areas and significant reductions in other areas."

However, according to Dr. Jaushin Lee, founder and CEO of Zentera Systems, "The public cloud vendors have evolved disparate infrastructures, which operate as segregated Cloud Islands. The solution for cloud ecosystems is CoIP, or Cloud over IP. Like VoIP before it, CoIP overlays on top of IP networks, leading to deployments in days rather than weeks or months."…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

Every MSP offering a cloud-based file sharing service knows that few other IT infrastructures out there can compete with the cloud as far as security goes. In fact, advanced security features, such as multi-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, are almost taken for granted in the world of cloud computing.

No doubt this is good news. However, cloud services should not make the mistake of taking their security for granted if they don’t want to witness a catastrophic fall someday. Take the recently released report on data breaches by Ponemon, which clearly finds that costs related to attacks against IT services are increasing…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Salesforce wants to use its massive cloud computing capabilities to make it easier for businesses to gain useful, real-time information from the massive amounts of data being generated by the devices that make up the Internet of things. At the company’s Dreamforce 2015 event in San Francisco Sept. 15, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff unveiled the Salesforce IoT Cloud, a new service through which businesses can not only store the data from the billions of IoT devices and applications as well as Websites and social networks, but also can analyze that data in real time and connect it back to Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) software.

The result is businesses can quickly get the information they need to bring new products and services to their customers, improve user experience and operate more efficiently, according to Salesforce officials. It’s part of a larger shift where business is becoming more "customer-centric," as connected devices meet growing and changing consumer expectations, according to Adam Bosworth, executive vice president at Salesforce…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/salesforce-extends-its-cloud-reach-into-the-iot.html

Grazed from MotleyFool. Author: Editorial Staff.

The evolution of the server market over the past few years has not been kind to International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM). While the company’s mainframe systems remain entrenched, its Power servers have been losing share to x86-based systems for quite some time. Cloud companies have been building massive, hyperscale data centers, often designing custom systems around chips from Intel. This is where much of the growth in the server industry is occurring, and IBM has completely missed the boat.

IBM recognized this problem a few years ago, and in 2013, the company founded the OpenPOWER foundation along with a handful of other member companies. The goal of the OpenPOWER foundation is to build an ecosystem around IBM’s POWER architecture, with technology being contributed from all of the foundation’s members…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alan R. Earls.

There’s something comforting about the concept of a cloud service-level agreement. There it is in black and white: a cloud provider’s promise to keep your applications up and running — almost all the time. But while a cloud service-level agreement may be an indispensable component for securing cloud services, it’s rarely as airtight as it looks.

In fact, according to experts, users need to be aware of both service-level agreement best practices, as well as a host of potential problems. One of the biggest issues with cloud computing SLAs is that they haven’t yet evolved into an industry standard, said Michael S. Mensik, partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP, a Chicago-based law firm, citing a the firm’s recent survey on cloud computing and SLAs…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ron Miller.

Accenture, the worldwide consulting company, announced today it was buying Cloud Sherpas, a firm that specializes in helping companies incorporate cloud services like Salesforce.com, Google and ServiceNow into the enterprise. Accenture did not disclose the purchase price.

It’s not a coincidence that this announcement came as Dreamforce, the enormous Salesforce.com customer conference, is taking place in San Francisco this week. The acquisition actually has a lot do with Salesforce consulting services.Accenture already has a team of more than 2700 consultants devoted to helping with Salesforce integration. They will be adding 500 additional Salesforce experts with the Cloud Sherpas deal…