Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)’s decision to focus most of its efforts on cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security seems to have been the right one. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, Big Blue on a Tuesday earnings call with investors said its total cloud revenue for fiscal year 2014 hit $7 billion, up 60 percent from the prior-year period.

“We are making significant progress in our transformation, continuing to shift IBM’s business to higher value, and investing and positioning ourselves for the longer term," said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a statement. Big Blue also reported that its cloud delivered as a service revenues of $3 billion are up approximately 75 percent year over year…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Kelley Katsanos.

As businesses increasingly seek to partner with MSPs for their cloud business needs, they will want assurance that selected services will meet their business requirements before making a commitment. New insight indicates that MSPs should consider building a customer engagement plan using a "high touch" process in order to achieve successful cloud onboarding and ultimately reassure businesses of their decision.

Three Key Areas

A recent MSPmentor article suggests that MSPs should implement three key areas of the cloud onboarding process: assessments, transitional and cutover plans, and ongoing performance analysis. Before MSPs embark on a new cloud project, they will first need to include key business players, such as sales and executive management…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

The newest feature added to VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud is the ability to spin virtual machines up and down with just a few clicks and pay for them by the hour. This better positions VMware to go head-to-head with public IaaS cloud vendors Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, but analysts say VMware still has lots of catching up to do.

VMware’s stronghold in the virtualization market has made it an important cloud computing vendor to watch. The company, touting a software-defined data center strategy since its VMworld event last year, has helped many customers migrate their virtual environments into private clouds via automation and self-service provisioning features…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicholas Rando.

Trust is one of the most important factors in any relationship. And that sentiment holds true in a cloud provider-user relationship, as well. When a cloud service provider guarantees a certain level of performance, the user needs to know those expectations will be met. That’s where a service-level agreement comes into play.

Each cloud service provider has its own service-level agreement (SLA) that covers a range of service limits and guidelines around performance, availability, costs and more. An SLA might look good on paper, but a user should understand all the details to be satisfied with their service…

Grazed from TheLinuxFoundation. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced the release of its 2015 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Open Cloud Projects Profiled.” This is its second paper on the open cloud and adds many new projects and technology categories that have gained importance in the past year. The report covers well-known projects like Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, Docker and Xen Project, and up-and-comers such as Apache Mesos, CoreOS and Kubernetes.

The purpose of this guide is to serve as a starting point for users considering which projects to use in building and deploying their own open clouds. Taking a deeper look into cloud infrastructure, the paper includes storage, provisioning and platform projects. New categories outline emerging cloud operating systems, Software-defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies…

Grazed from FedTech. Author: Nicole Blake Johnson.

The Department of Defense’s vision for cloud computing is about more than hosting public websites and data in commercial facilities. DOD is pursuing several opportunities for migrating sensitive military data to the cloud to reduce costs and boost performance. Options include cloud hosting in facilities outside the United States, moving defense enterprise cloud services such as email to a commercial environment, and modernizing milCloud, the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) private cloud offering.

“As we work through using commercial providers, DOD CIO is going to make a determination as to whether or not those commercial providers can be used for all unclassified workloads, even national security systems,” DISA’s Chief Technology Officer David Mihelcic, told FedTech during the Federal Cloud Computing Summit in Washington, D.C., last week. “National security systems are things that, even if unclassified, are defined as mission critical. They are things that DOD needs to go to war.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fedtechmagazine.com/article/2015/01/how-dod-navigating-cloud-landscape

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Most IT organizations are going to approach hybrid cloud computing from the perspective of their data centers out. After all, they’ve already made substantial investments in existing IT systems. With that idea in mind VMware (VMW) today extended the scope of the VMware vCloud Air initiative by adding new disaster recovery capabilities, the ability to support hundreds of virtual network connections, and announced the general availability of the VCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand service.

Scott Collison, vice president for the hybrid platform at VMware, said that while public clouds have been widely used to test and deploy stand-alone applications, it’s clear that the move to hybrid clouds is being driven by a desire to extend the reach of existing IT environments into the cloud. Given those requirements, most enterprise IT organizations are looking for the cloud service that most seamlessly provides those extensions…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, wants to bring its operating system to more connected devices and intelligent objects with the launch of its “snappy” Ubuntu Core for the Internet of Things today. Over the last few months, the company launched “snappy” versions of Core on a number of cloud computing services, but given that the whole idea behind Core is to offer stripped-down versions of Ubuntu that developers can then easily customize based on their needs, the Internet of Things and robotics applications are a logical next area of focus for Canonical.

Ubuntu Core lets developers install the basic OS and then add the applications and services they need. Those applications then run in their own sandboxed environments. Ubuntu Core also features transactional updates, which ensures that the update process either works perfectly or can be rolled back immediately if things go awry…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

SAP has released its latest financial figures, and it’s to be expected; cloud subscriptions up, software subscriptions down, overall numbers ticking over, and a pledge that cloud profits will exceed software license revenues by 2018. The company has again shifted its long term goals, with a 2017 operating profit target now of €6.3bn to €7bn, from a previous total of €7.7bn – and it’s all due to the company’s aggressive shift towards cloud.

The full year figures weren’t anything to write home about, but it’s all going in the right direction. Non-IFRS operating profit stood at €5.64bn for 2014, an uptick of 3% on the year before, while total revenue stood at €17.58bn, an increase of 4%. The meatiest figures however were in the software and support sections. Cloud subscriptions and support went up 45% year on year to €1.1bn, while traditional software numbers were down 3%, to €4.4bn…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2015/jan/20/sap-financial-figures-offer-few-surprises-expects-cloud-transformation-2018/

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon joined existing big-name tech companies last year when it committed to running its cloud-based “Amazon Web Services (AWS)” technology entirely on renewable energy. Though it remains a longer-term commitment, Amazon has today revealed a 13-year partnership with Pattern Energy Group to “support the construction and operation of a 150 megawatt (MW) wind farm,” Amazon says in a press release.

The new wind farm will be built in Benton County, Indiana, and will be called — drum roll — the “Amazon Web Services Wind Farm (Fowler Ridge).” Plans are afoot to start generating around 500,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of power from as early as January 2016. For context, the average residential electricity consumer in the U.S. used around 10,837 kWh in 2012, or 903 kilowatthours (kWh) per month. So Amazon estimates that it’s new farm will help power the equivalent of around 46,000 homes each year…