Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been putting rockets into the air since World War II, but its involvement with cloud computing goes back only about six years. JPL is a federally funded research center, run by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for space exploration projects, particularly robotic missions.

Despite its mission to "dare mighty things," JPL must also be cautious in order to protect lives, complicated equipment, and money while managing missions in extreme environments. JPL built the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, as part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The idea of devops is very simple. It automates the notion of agile, which provides the ability to remove the traditional latency around the application development lifecycle. The advantage is that developers can make changes, then test, integrate, and deploy those changes automagically. The cloud provides more of an advantage for the devops model.

Since the applications are centrally deployed and managed, they could change several times a day, adding both fixes and enhancements. While this kind of freedom and automation empowers developers, users also benefit. Indeed, as users discover issues with the cloud-hosted software or offer suggestions for improvement, they can communicate requests to developers, then correct and enhance the issues in hours or days, not months or even years…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2913966/cloud-computing/cloud-devops-empower-users-developers.html

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols.

If you really want your web pages to impress, you need to get them in front of your viewers’ eyes as fast as possible. So it is that Rackspace, the managed cloud company and one of the OpenStack cloud parents, has announced the availability of Rackspace Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Of course, while you can just roll out a cloud with enough servers, rolling out a CDN isn’t that easy. You need low-latency storage, such as that provided by SanDisk’s new Fusion ioMemory PCIe flash storage cards, data-centers across the country, and multiple tier-one network connections. Rackspace has the data centers, six throughout the world, but it didn’t have the connections…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Eileen Yu.

StarHub has unveiled plans to deploy software-defined networking (SDN) technology across its network, which it says will result in an "open, cloud-based" infrastructure that can better respond to demands from its enterprise customers. The Singapore telco said it had completed the design of its SDN environment and had begun implementation work on its existing core and access networks.

Cisco Systems and Huawei are among several vendors involved in the deployment, StarHub said in a statement Tuesday. It added that the deployment was targeted for completion in two years. StarHub CTO Mock Pak Lum noted that the company’s enterprise business had been expanding over the past few years and was projected to become the telco’s second-largest revenue contributor…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Carloline Donnelly.

IT services firm Accenture has joined forces with Oracle to form a business group geared towards accelerating enterprise adoption of cloud technologies. The Accenture Oracle Business Group will provide enterprises with access to industry-specific services built using Oracle’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

The hope is, by offering firms access to services designed with the needs of their industry in mind, Accenture and Oracle can help them make the move off-premise more quickly by doing a lot of the preparatory work on their behalf. The delivery of these services will be supported by Accenture and Oracle’s joint workforce, which includes 52,000 consultants and 20,000 Java professionals…

Grazed from ITBusiness Edge. Author: Don Tennant.

It occurs to me that as the Internet of Things emerges as a topic of increasing relevance to CIOs, one of the things they’re going to need to be concerned about is standards. As the cloud-to-cloud integration that is necessarily associated with IoT becomes more commonplace, that integration will entail the adoption of certain standards that may or may not be in place at this point. So where is all of this heading?

I had the opportunity to discuss this topic with Shane Dyer, CEO of Arrayent, an IoT platform provider in Redwood City, Calif. To kick off the discussion, I asked Dyer what role industry associations like the IPSO Alliance, the Cloud Computing Association, and the Cloud Industry Forum are playing in advancing cloud-to-cloud integration, and how effective they’ve been in this regard…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Mark Samuels.

Using the power of the cloud to improve organisational efficiencies is one thing, but the potential benefits that can come from adopting on-demand IT in medical research are truly life-changing, creating the potential for great advancements in patient care and long-term life prospects.

What the cloud provides is a platform to store, analyse, and compare huge information data sets. This means the types of detailed investigations that might have seemed impossible a decade ago can now be performed on a grand scale. The results can be remarkable, and a number of key use cases stand out…

Grazed from AllCovered. Author: Editorial Staff.

If your business has yet to switch to cloud computing, you should carefully consider doing so. There are many benefits to be gained, with the primary one being enhanced business success. Whether your company is small or large, cloud computing will still be of benefit. Here’s a closer look at five of the top reasons you should consider implementing cloud adoption practices.

Less downtime when unforeseen events take place

When you have adopted cloud practices, you’ll be provided around-the-clock support for your cloud activities. Whether it be uploading transactions to the cloud or responding to customer inquiries, cloud vendor support enables you to perform your daily functions without fear of something going wrong. If an issue was to arise, your cloud vendor can use IT services to fix it remotely…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Ed Goldman.

Demand for efficiency, flexibility, and scalability continues to increase, and the data center must keep pace with movement to our digital business strategies. Previously, Diane Bryant, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, recently stated, “We are in the midst of a bold industry transformation as IT evolves from supporting the business to being the business. This transformation and the move to cloud computing calls into question many of the fundamental principles of data center architecture.”

Those “fundamental principles of data center architecture” are on a collision course with the direction that virtualization has lead us. This virtualization in conjunction with automation and orchestration is leading us to the Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI). The demand of SDI is driving new hardware developments, which will open a whole new world of possibilities for running a state-of-the-art data center…

Grazed from AFR. Author: David Ramli.

One of the United States’ biggest telecommunications companies, CenturyLink, has attacked Telstra on its home soil by launching its popular cloud computing services in Australia. CenturyLink has a market capitalisation of $US20.51 billion ($26.18 billion) and is the third-largest telco in the United States. It is also one of the world’s leading providers of cloud computing and managed services, according to technology analysis firm Gartner.

The decision by US giants such as CenturyLink and Verizon in March to land services in Australia comes at a critical time for Telstra as it invests billions of dollars to become a global cloud player to offset falling revenue from traditional businesses such as phone calls. It is also the key division for Telstra’s much-vaunted push to grow revenues and profits from the Asian region…

Read more from the source @ http://www.afr.com/technology/us-giant-centurylink-aims-to-take-down-telstra-in-cloud-computing-20150427-1mrpuo