CERN Keeps Options Open With Its Clouds
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Paul Miller.
Europe’s particle physics lab, CERN, generated its share of cloudy headlines at the recent OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, as a multi-year collaboration between CERN’s openlab Project and managed cloud provider Rackspace reached prime-time as the underpinnings of OpenStack Kilo’s federated identity capability. Other organizations also contributed code and ideas as this project rolled into OpenStack, but CERN continues to explore other cloud technologies and perhaps even other ways of solving very similar problems.
As Frederic Lardinois reported for TechCrunch at the time, OpenStack Executive Director Jonathan Bryce used the opening keynote at last month’s Summit in Vancouver to announce a number of advances within the project. One of those was support for ‘federated identity,’ or the ability to log in to a remote OpenStack cloud using credentials associated with your own OpenStack cloud…
Here’s the mayor of Toronto, not an IT professional, but John Tory has no problem articulating why he sees potential in cloud computing. “I’m of the age where I still ask my children for advice about these things, but even I knew an 18-year-old email system was not something to be admired,” Tory told a press conference where Microsoft announced it is building two new Canadian data centres to support its cloud-based software products.
Hewlett-Packard announced updates to the HP Helion portfolio with debut of the HP Helion CloudSystem 9.0, an integrated enterprise cloud solution, and enhancements to HP Helion Managed Cloud Services to manage enterprise workloads in a secure hosted cloud environment.
Virtualization and cloud computing provider VMware has performed well in the network virtualization domain, which it ventured into relatively recently. The company launched the VMware NSX in late 2013, which merged its existing vCloud networking product line with the network virtualization platform of Nicira (which it acquired in 2012) into a single product family. VMware has since witnessed strong demand for the NSX, with the number of customers growing from just 30 to over 400 by the end of 2014.
Now that most folks have a reasonably solid understanding of what the Apple Watch is any interesting new phenomenon is starting to occur in terms of how cloud services are being marketed directly to line of business (LOB) executives. Historically, mobile computing and the cloud have always been joined at the hip. In fact, it’s hard to think of one being nearly as useful without the other.
Nokia Networks officials are continuing their efforts to better compete with larger rivals like Ericsson and Huawei Technologies in the rapidly evolving telecommunications space. Nokia in April announced plans to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion, a move that will give it greater scale against larger vendors and expand its capabilities in network-functions virtualization (NFV), a key technology being pushed and embraced by telecom operators.
Google’s new account hub, for users of its Web services and Android smartphones, gives IT organizations a new tool to improve employee awareness of security and privacy. Following its developer conference last week, on Monday Google enhanced its security and privacy offerings with a unified security page and a Web resource for those with privacy questions.
When you think about the hallmarks of cloud computing — on-demand service, resource pooling, elasticity, scalability and the like — it’s easy to overlook how you pay for those cloud services. Federal agencies often still use a fixed pricing model, where an agency purchases an allotment of cloud services and pays for them, whether they are fully used or not.