Category: News

Grazed from IBM.  Author: PR Announcement.

An alliance led by IBM Research (NYSE:IBM) today announced that it has produced the semiconductor industry’s first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors.  The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches — transistors — on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft.

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Hey, did you see that there’s a new patch for that game out? Yeah, it introduces a new bug, so make sure you saved your game to the cloud before you grab it. Thanks to the smartphones, tablets, and laptops we’re increasingly carrying around all day, computer jargon is entering our daily speech at an alarming rate. But these words started somewhere else.

From bugs to cloud to to mice to spam, here’s where we get 11 common computer terms. The term "bug," meaning a flaw in a piece of software, gained popularity after a moth flew into the insides of the Harvard Mark II supercomputer in 1946. "Booting," meaning to start a device up (think "rebooting") comes from "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Red Hat (RHT) launched its global Certified Cloud and Service Provider program this week, which replaces the company’s existing Certified Cloud Provider Program. The new program is designed to expand the company’s cloud ecosystem to provide support for additional distributors, managed service providers and partners selling hybrid cloud-centric services. Red Hat said the Certified Cloud and Service Provider program would allow cloud providers to grow their private cloud solutions with Linux-based infrastructure and platform as service solutions, according to the announcement.

“Much like enterprise IT itself, the world of cloud computing is constantly evolving, especially with the growing promise of hybrid cloud approaches and Linux container-based architectures,” said Michael Ferris, senior director of Business Architecture at Red Hat, in a statement…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Cloud vendor DigitalOcean today announced that it has raised $83 million in a Series B round of funding led by Access Industries and with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz. The new funding, according to Ben Uretsky, co-founder and CEO of DigitalOcean, will help finance his company’s growth, buying new servers and investing in the facilities and assets that are needed to move the company forward.

"We’re trying to look two to three years ahead to understand what the capital needs of the business are," Uretsky told eWEEK. "When you go out to raise capital, what you’re doing is balancing the valuation against the time horizon." To date, DigitalOcean has raised $123.4 million in venture capital, with a $3.2 million seed round of funding in July 2013 and a $37.2 million Series A round in March 2014…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Michael Brown.

MSPs build trust with customers and prospects by providing transparency in their approach to cloud data storage and cloud-based file sharing. Because many businesses are cautious about making the transition to cloud computing. When customers move their data and applications to the cloud, they’re relinquishing some of their control. Of course, many find this disturbing. In this environment, how can you alleviate stress and establish trust?

Transparency

One critical component of building trust is transparency. Merely claiming your services are secure and reliable isn’t enough. Transparency gives customers information about not just what you can promise, but also how you’re going to fulfill that promise. How can you achieve transparency? How can you tailor your cloud approach to build trust?…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

It’s easy to despair about the cloud computing industry and its seemingly endless navel-gazing. It often seems that the cloud crowd is more interested in internecine warfare than actually helping customers realize the benefits of this emerging platform. The prime example of this tech narcissism is the ongoing industry slugfest regarding private/public/hybrid cloud and what the “right” solution is.

Out in the real world of enterprise IT, however, organizations are adopting cloud computing with enthusiasm, which was displayed in full force at London’s Cloud World Forum in June. One of the strengths of this conference is how it’s able to entice end users to present case studies of their actual experience; this is a refreshing change from other cloud events that seem to serve primarily as opportunities for vendor marketing departments to pitch their products…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Jim O’Reilly.

Public cloud adoption has grown significantly over the past few years, as even the most skeptical IT pros admit the technology is right for certain use cases. Spending on public cloud services is expected to exceed $127 billion in 2018, up from $56.6 billion in 2014, according to industry analyst group IDC.

But, even as adoption grows, many organizations still question whether they can use public cloud to run all mission-critical workloads. The answer, however, depends on several factors. To protect data, a business’ most mission-critical applications are kept close. In fact, by law, certain data must be protected…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Editorial Staff.

Towards the middle of January, the Defense Information Systems Agency – a subdivision of the United States Department of Defense – released a new cloud computing security requirements guide, which we first heard talk of back in November. The primary purpose of this SRG is to make the process of acquiring commercial cloud services more efficient for DoD agencies (without undermining security, of course). Not surprisingly, this means that the SRG effectively renders obsolete the DoD’s original Cloud Security Model, under which only a few select vendors received authorization.

“In plain language, the new guide explains that components “remain responsible for determining what data and missions are hosted” by cloud service providers,” writes Frank Konkel of Nextgov. “Each use of cloud services will also require an enterprise IT business case analysis, with each analysis required to consider DISA-provided cloud services such as DISA’s milCloud offering.”…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Editorial Staff.

ProfitBricks opened an office in San Antonio last year expecting big things in the cloud computing industry. So far this year it has not been disappointed. “2015 is proving to be the year where cloud computing becomes the norm,” said William Toll, vice president of marketing for Boston-based ProfitBricks.

The company, which also has an office in Berlin, Germany, provides its clients with access to cloud servers, storage and networks using its own platform. The company uses a drag-and-drop data center design and management tool giving customers the ability to customize their cloud environment…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Chris Mellor.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project testing is sub-standard and doesn’t follow well-established industry procedures, according to The Register’s sources. The Open Compute Project (OCP) was formed in 2011 and involves the Facebook-initiated design of bare-bones computer equipment that can supposedly be built, installed and operated at a lower cost than branded servers. A product certification lab was opened at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) in January 2014. There is another lab at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan. UTSA said it would:

• Conduct OCP certification and deliver the certification logo
• Develop OCP certification quality assurance tools and methodologies
• Research, build and publish OCP-based cloud and Big Data reference architectures
• Support Open Compute events by providing educational opportunities…