Category: News

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Weinberger.

Just over a year ago, Cisco unveiled its ambitious plan to spend $1 billion creating a cloud computing platform that could compete with the $6 billion juggernaut that is Amazon Web Services – a plan it calls Intercloud. That plan took a big step forward today with some announcements out of Cisco Live, the company’s big annual conference.

The crux of the Intercloud gambit is that instead of offering this cloud itself, from its own data centers, Intercloud will unify smaller cloud service providers into one big happy family of products that are all compatible with each other. Instead of taking Amazon on directly, Cisco is trying to unify all of the smaller guys into a competitive system…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Behind every great ecommerce website is a database, and in the early 2000s Amazon.com’s database was not keeping up with the company’s business. Part of the problem was that Amazon didn’t have just one database – it relied on a series of them, each with its own responsibility.

As the company headed toward becoming a $10 billion business, the number and size of its SQL databases exploded and managing them became more challenging. By the 2004 holiday shopping rush, outages became more common, caused in large part by overloaded SQL databases. Something needed to change…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Two pizza teams; being vocally self-critical; primitive building blocks and a vitriol hate for PowerPoints. These are some of the ways AWS innovates. Amazon.com is ranked by Forbes as the sixth most innovative company, but one could argue that its cloud computing division is the most innovative.

Amazon Web Services invented the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in the mid-2000s and to this day is anointed by analysts as the market leader, both in terms of the scale of its distributed system, the size of its customer base, and perhaps as important as both of those things: its pace of innovation…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Chris Mellor.

In the name of server and storage efficiency, Nutanix has added KVM hypervisor support, erasure coding and new management to its hyper-converged systems, and promised VVOL-type integration, container and file-serving support. The aim is evidently to increase scale-out X86 server node, storage and admin efficiency, and top-level simplicity, by converging functionality stacks below the app and admin interfaces.

At its .NEXT conference in Miami, the city where DataCore is based, it announced its Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) with Acropolis compute and storage software and its Prism management product. Acropolis consists of a customised KVM hypervisor, which along with ESXi and Hyper-V presents compute and storage services to guest OS’ and their applications…

Grazed from CNET. Author: Ben Fox Rubin.

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing business, plans to support the construction and operation of a roughly $150 million solar farm planned in Virginia, with the project being named Amazon Solar Farm US East. The new initiative underscores Amazon’s effort to maintain satisfaction and curry favor among customers of AWS, one of Amazon’s main profit engines.

In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and "still growing fast." An Amazon representative declined to specify Amazon’s financial commitment to the project, saying the company wouldn’t comment beyond a press release sent out Wednesday…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-backs-150-million-solar-project-in-virginia/

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Jeff O’Heir.

Vendors need to do a better job training its VAR partners on providing cloud services to SMBs. If not, the ire of dissatisfied end users will continue to hurt the channel. That’s the conclusion of a new report from ZS Associates called “Diamonds in the Rough: SMB Cloud Channel Preferences.”

The report’s intent is to assist vendors in identifying VARs with the background and expertise needed to help SMB customers choose, implement and maintain the right software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions. The problem is that not enough of them exist to properly satisfy SMB demands for the latest cloud technologies…

Grazed from BCN. Author: Editorial Staff.

Notforprofit environmental advocacy group Green America is launched a campaign to try and convince Amazon to reduce its carbon footprint and catch up with other large cloud incumbents’ green credentials. cGreen America said Amazon is behind other datacentre operators – including some of its large competitors like Google, Apple and Facebook – in terms of its renewable energy use and reporting practices.

“Every day, tens of millions of consumers are watching movies, reading news articles, and posting to social media sites that all use Amazon Web Services. What they don’t realize is that by using Amazon Web Services they are contributing to climate change,” said Green america’s campaigns director Elizabeth O’Connell…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2015/06/10/green-america-hits-out-at-amazon-for-its-dirty-cloud/

Grazed from AfternoonDC. Author: Diwakar Chittora.

Cloud Computing helps businesses in formulating strategies and is also instrumental in making the lives of people simpler and easier. Cloud can be referred to as the main internet from which people and organisations are able to access a huge pool of information and data.

Benefits to the organisation:

Cloud Computing provides scores of benefits to the organisation like increased flexibility, elevated scalability, reduced costs and easy accessibility. If leveraged in the right way, it also provides enhanced security, keeping companies away from any kind of disasters. The escalated agility it offers companies, helps them immensely in connecting with the customers. The capital investment of the company reduces significantly on employing Cloud Computing. Using local systems incurs huge expenses for the company. With Cloud Computing, such unnecessary expenses get eliminated…

Grazed from TheStack. Author: Alice MacGregor.

IBM has announced that it will be teaming up with silicon chip design platform provider SiCAD to offer a cloud-based solution – High Performance Services for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) – to help improve silicon design for smartphones, wearables and IoT devices.

The new set of tools will be available on demand across IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing clients the flexibility to scale up or down depending on demand. According to Big Blue the new patented suite will deliver three main services: IBM Library Characterisation, to help the creation of abstract electrical and timing models for chip design; IBM Logic Verification, for the simulation of electronic systems and design languages; and IBM Spice, an electronic circuit simulator designed to measure quality and test chip behaviour…

Grazed from CNN. Author: Editorial Staff.

Windstream Hosted Solutions, provider of cloud and data center solutions and part of Windstream (Nasdaq:WIN), a leading provider of advanced network communications, today announced the availability of its Elastic Hybrid Cloud as an enhancement to the Windstream Managed Private Cloud. Elastic Hybrid Cloud provides a bridge between private and public clouds, enabling greater data and application portability.

Windstream’s Elastic Hybrid Cloud reduces costs by efficiently delivering resources to businesses through secure virtual data centers, leveraging existing investments and open standards to ensure interoperability and application portability between clouds. Windstream’s Private Cloud customers can now manage data resources and workloads on demand by elastically bursting virtual machines from a private cloud to a public cloud…