Category: News

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…

Grazed from CNNMoney. Author: PR Announcement.

Fusion, a leading cloud services provider, announced today that it has completed a series of technology, network and infrastructure upgrades and expansion projects. The key improvements, planned and executed through the end of last year, reflect the Company’s 2014 focus on building the systems, staff and resources required to scale in anticipation of the Company’s organic growth and acquisition strategy for 2015 and beyond.

In support of its extensive network and infrastructure expansion roadmap, and to ensure that Fusion is securely poised to assert a leadership position as a single source for the Cloud, Fusion has hired a new Chief Technology Officer to lead the Company’s technology and development effort. Tom Durkin, an industry leader in developing and implementing proven cloud technologies, has joined Fusion to advance its cloud strategies…

Grazed from GulfNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle, like other technology peers, is betting big on cloud computing as it transits from a hardware supplier and developer to a complete cloud solutions provider. Even though cloud offerings posted a robust growth of 140 per cent in the second quarter, Oracle’s dominance in the database market is not exactly leading to its dominance in the cloud space as it still accounts for around five per cent of overall revenues.

“Our strategy in cloud is working and we are going to invest more. We had a tremendous growth in cloud offerings in the Middle East. We have added 300 new and expansion software as a service [SaaS] cloud customers in the first quarter and second quarter,” said Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who was in Dubai on Tuesday…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

MilesWeb proudly announced the launch of cloud hosting services powered by OnApp for supporting diverse IT projects and for maximizing the potential of cloud computing. This is a major milestone for MilesWeb after the launch of virtual data center platform. The cloud hosting servers offered by MilesWeb are fully equipped for meeting the requirements of large and extensive software developments and business production requirements.

MilesWeb has employed leading and unbeatable cloud server technology available in the market for providing the customers with a profound cloud solution. All the cloud servers are crafted to ensure supreme performance with minimum cost of computing along with the resilience for accommodating the growing technology needs…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Following up on my previous post regarding hyperscale infrastructure, I feel I should point out that once the decision to go hyperscale has been made, it will most likely take place in a Greenfield hardware environment. Unless you are already working with a state-of-the-art data facility, any attempt to convert complex, multiformat legacy environments will almost certainly lead to a morass of integration issues.

The key benefit to hyperscale is that it is both large and flexible, allowing data executives to craft multiple disparate data architectures completely in software. This is why current hyperscale plants at Google and Facebook rely on bulk commodity hardware. But as I mentioned last fall, the average enterprise does not have the clout to purchase tens of thousands of stripped down servers and switches at a time, and besides, all those components still need to be deployed, provisioned and integrated into the cluster, which takes time, effort and of course, money…