Category: News

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Availability is not merely disaster recovery in the cloud Relevant Products/Services — it’s the empowering connection between a data Relevant Products/Services center and the cloud for protection Relevant Products/Services and value creation. That’s what Microsoft Azure Product Marketing Group Manager Joel Ferman said when he announced new features for the Azure Backup service.

Microsoft now offers on-demand availability in Azure for both hybrid and heterogeneous environments. That lets organizations harness a nearly unlimited amount of compute and storage in the cloud for developing and testing cloud bursting, migration, reporting and analytics, recovery, backup and long-term data retention, Ferman said…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sedar Yegulalp.

Google’s latest enhancement to Cloud Platform is not a new feature but a repackaging of an existing innovation. But it’s a downright useful offering all the same. Cloud Launcher is a gallery of applications that can be deployed to Google Cloud Platform with one click. Many of the offered apps are courtesy of a partnership with an existing app-packaging solution, Bitnami. The service’s catalog includes many commonly deployed applications, such as WordPress or SugarCRM, plus development stacks (LAMP) and stack components (Nginx, Node.js).

The blog post detailing Cloud Launcher indicates that the service is aimed mainly at admins who want to deploy VM-based applications — as opposed to containerized ones — but don’t want to deal with the hassle of setting up a VM, then deploying an app into it. Enter Bitnami, which has been providing VM-packaged application solutions for some time…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2902931/cloud-computing/google-cloud-launcher-spins-up-vm-based-apps-in-a-snap.html

Grazed from TheWhir. Author: Cheryl Kemp.

A new 104-page document describing best practices for cloud providers was released on Tuesday by OpenCloud Connect (OCC). The organization’s focus is to provide cloud providers with guidelines for scaling and enhancing ethernet technology to better deal with the increasing demands of cloud services.

“One of the primary goals of OpenCloud Connect is to advance technology standards, vendor interoperability and best design practices,” stated the executive summary. “These initiatives will help businesses create a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure.” “Where other standards bodies had the space to shape standards in advance of market penetration, cloud computing is already surging ahead in every direction powered by NFV, SDN, virtualization technologies and networking – technologies that are themselves still evolving quickly…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Don Tennant.

Cloud computing will either cause the CIO role to morph into a CTO role, or will leave the CIO to “bow down to the CTO” by becoming a manager of cloud providers and of what’s left of in-house operations. That’s the view of Marc Malizia, co-founder and CTO at RKON Technologies, a managed cloud services provider in Chicago.

In a recent interview, Malizia provided an intriguingly candid assessment of the current and future roles of the CIO and the CTO. It’s worth noting up front that RKON doesn’t even have a CIO. “As a technology company we are strategically driven by the CTO role,” Malizia said. “We also have the luxury of leveraging our internal consultants and managed service team to run our operation, which has somewhat eliminated the need of a CIO.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/from-under-the-rug/cio-or-cto-which-one-will-survive-the-cloud-and-keep-a-seat-at-the-table.html

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

HP has launched a Helion Rack offering that comes pre-configured with OpenStack cloud software, combined with the rich Cloud Foundry development platform. This optimized hardware package is aimed at enterprise customers looking to build out a private cloud infrastructure.

HP is trying to recoup ground heavily contested by competitors Dell, Red Hat, Microsoft, and IBM. These vendors already offer their own on-premises OpenStack private-cloud-building services. However, HP is the sole public cloud service-provider that is also a major supplier of x86 servers, giving the company a shot at shipping pre-configured servers…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Most enterprise IT departments now manage applications across multiple environments in a dizzyingly complex overall IT architecture. They also must constantly reevaluate their unique mix of on-premises, private cloud and public cloud infrastructure to meet new business goals and determine how applications can be migrated to the public cloud in a cost-effective way.

This is no small feat. Dozens or even hundreds of applications built at different times, in different languages, and by different teams need to be evaluated for migration to the cloud, which often requires deep knowledge of the existing IT infrastructure as well as the public cloud resources that could replace these functions…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Frederick Lane.

In a move aimed directly at the crowded cloud Relevant Products/Services storage market, Amazon announced on Thursday that it is now offering all consumers two plans for unlimited storage on its Amazon Cloud Drive. The new products will put pressure on existing cloud storage companies such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and the dozens of other storage competitors.

“Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up,” said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive. “With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space — they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music and files in one convenient place.”…

Grazed from SoftNAS. Author: PR Announcement.

Faction, an enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud service provider offering hybrid, private, and public cloud solutions, today announced its partnership with SoftNAS™, a leading cloud storage software company. Faction partners with SoftNAS to complement its NetApp storage portfolio and address a growing need for on-demand, enterprise-class network-attached storage (NAS) and cloud file gateway capabilities with advanced Network File System (NFS)/Common Internet File System (CIFS) shared storage in the cloud, a mainstay storage solution for customers moving to the cloud.

With Faction’s recent rebranding, the company introduced a flexible cloud computing portfolio designed the way customers want it — with deep access, broad customization capabilities and patented layer 2 private pathways to the Faction cloud. Faction’s core bundles called Cloud Blocs are modular, flexible, and completely customizable so customers can design them with their unique network, processing and storage requirements. Storage is an essential component for enterprises of any size, so they can archive, back up and protect their business-critical data environments and applications…

Grazed from Datapipe. Author: Richard Dolan.

Ever since cloud computing first began to enter the mainstream, security has been its most controversial component. For years, business leaders were reluctant to adopt any cloud services whatsoever out of a fear that this would expose their networks to data loss, theft or exposure. Over the past few years, these concerns have largely softened as business leaders gained more exposure to and a greater understanding of cloud services.

But that doesn’t mean that cloud security is no longer an issue. On the contrary, as a recent LinkedIn Cloud Security Spotlight highlighted, security is still a major obstacle to broader cloud adoption. This is not enough to stop or even really slow down the overall trend toward widespread cloud deployments…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Caroline Donnelly.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) player ProfitBricks has vowed to match the price and performance of any workload that users have running in Amazon, Google or Microsoft’s clouds. In fact, ProfitBricks claims it will cost less to run any workload in its cloud at the same performance level as those hosted on its competitors’ infrastructure.

It also said the move makes it the first provider in the industry to offer a price/performance guarantee to its customers. The guarantee only applies to ProfitBricks’ IaaS on-demand instances, and will be based on the publicly listed prices given by all three of these cloud giants…