Category: News

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

IT staffs spend an inordinate amount of time and effort configuring the stacks of software to run applications. But if anything was made clear at the OpenStack Summit 2015 conference last week, it’s that much of the work associated with deploying tools like Hadoop is about to become automated.

Case in point is Piston Computing, which used the conference to showcase a turnkey platform for deploying a private cloud. Via the click of a single button, IT administrators can use Piston CloudOS 4.0 to not only launch OpenStack in minutes, but also to deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal servers. In the near future, Piston Computing plans to add support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Joe Tucci is at it again. The longtime EMC chief executive and chairman has made another purchase, buying Virtustream, an enterprise-oriented cloud computing company, for $1.2 billion in cash. This move follows EMC’s EMC -2.09% late 2014 acquisition of Cloudscaling and its OpenStack-based private cloud expertise.

Virtustream is focused on big corporate customers—SAP is among its investors—and fields data centers in the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands. It particularly suits financial customers and others who require payment card industry (PCI) compliance, as well as federal government customers, according to Gartner’s IT latest cloud computing report. Domino Sugar, Coca-Cola, Heinz, and Lexmark are some of Virtustream’s corporate customers…

Read more from the source @ https://fortune.com/2015/05/26/emc-expands-cloud-push-with-1-2-billion-buy-of-virtustream/

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Dion Hinchcliffe.

I’ve spent much of my Memorial Day Holiday here in the United States pondering the Red Queen effect vs. network effects, seminal laws of technology and business both, that are often held as gospel by their adherents who believe they are the natural and intrinsic properties of their operating environments (digital ecosystems in this case.)

Both hypotheses apply to any connected, relatively closed environment of some kind, which very much includes everything from traditional marketplaces, online communities, app stores, cloud services, SaaS, enterprise social networks, social media, and cable/video networks to e-mail, telephones, and package delivery…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steven Rosenbush.

Two powerful tech trends—3-D printing and cloud computing—are coming together. And that might make it a lot easier for small companies to get into the manufacturing game. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about small companies rushing to adopt 3-D printing, taking advantage of the ability to turn computer-generated designs into physical objects.

Yet even though the technology can crank out items more cheaply than traditional manufacturing, for many small firms the investment is too big: Higher-end printers that produce finished products can cost thousands or even millions of dollars, and require specialized skills to use. Enter a new batch of cloud-based services—such as Shapeways, Cubify, i Materialize and Sculpteo—that offer to do the 3-D printing for small businesses…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

With the summer season rapidly descending upon those in the northern hemisphere, it’s time to kick it down a notch and engage in some less stressful pursuits than running a business — namely, reading up on cloud computing. Let’s face it, there will be cloudy days through the summer, so why not get into a cloud frame of mind?

With that in mind, here are some of the works that really help clarify and cut through the confusion on what cloud computing is and can be. These are all works published over the past few years that document the cloud story:…

Grazed from PRWeb.

EasyStreet Inc. has brought to market a new type of cloud computing solution engineered for unrivaled speed and scalability. The EasyStreet Extreme Performance Cloud Computing solution is ideal for situations where access to data has to be quick such as supporting website visitors and data-driven applications. Working with leading products from SanDisk Corporation and Dell Inc., EasyStreet now deploys private clouds with a storage system capable of ten times the performance of a traditional disk system and three times the performance of an all-flash system using the same computing resources. Clients can take advantage of environments that are easy and fast to deploy and are also simpler to maintain. The performance realized with this solution ensures a predictable application response even under heavy utilization.

DealerPeak is one of the first clients to take advantage of this solution and has seen impressive results. DealerPeak supplies solutions to hundreds of automotive dealerships nationwide including the Ron Tonkin Family of Dealerships. The DealerPeak applications provide customer, sales, inventory, and service data to sales staff as well as prospective customers…

Grazed from NetworkAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

A study of 232 global IT executives this year has revealed that a vast majority of organizations (87%) are concerned with the security and privacy of corporate data in cloud deployments. The survey, titled “Preparing for next-generation cloud: Lessons learned and insights shared”, was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Hitachi Data systems.

Responses also indicated that outages and failures of public cloud implementations were twice as likely to occur when compared to private cloud. Almost half of the respondents indicated the biggest risk of a failed implementation to be loss of customer data. The report found that while cloud computing has delivered many benefits, cloud adoption also continues to challenge even the most nimble of companies. Other highlights include:…

Grazed from PCTechMag. Author: Ephraim Batambuze III.

Cloud storage is one of best innovations in the tech space. It brings the convenience to everything. Instead of copying crucial documents to flash drives or burning them to disc, you stick them in the cloud where they can easily be accessed any time. Cloud-based storage knows when you’ve updated a file and updates its copy accordingly.

Cloud computing is getting stronger by day and this is being facilitated by price wars and continuous upgrading of various cloud storage services. Below is a comparison of Mega, Dropbox, Google drive and One drive…

Read more from the source @ http://pctechmag.com/2015/05/mega-vs-dropbox-vs-onedrive-vs-google-drive/

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Danny Bradbury.

Cloud-based communications provider Switch Communications just landed $35m in funding, highlighting a growing interest in the online communications and collaboration market. The series C financing follows an $18 million B-round for Switch Communications, which provides cloud-based unified communications and phone systems.

The funding round for the San Francisco-based firm was led by Amasia Associates, with Felicis Ventures, SoftBank, Work-Bench Ventures and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The deal might signal good fortunes for companies selling cloud-based telecommunications, but companies are still showing themselves to be wary of the cloud, especially when it comes to mission-critical infrastructural applications…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froelich.

Hate is a powerful word. Yet, it accurately describes how IT professionals feel about cloud computing. They’re not screaming it from the rooftops, or starting protests in social media, but there’s a quiet level of vitriol we hear whenever we speak with IT professionals about the cloud in our daily conversations, at industry conferences, and in other settings.

Yes, cloud computing can cut costs (if done properly). Yes, cloud computing can improve economies of scale. And yes, cloud computing can streamline IT processes. Despite these and other clear-cut benefits, there are many infrastructure administrators who find enough problems with cloud computing that they end up loathing the whole concept altogether…