Category: News

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Cloudyn this week announced it has raised $4 million in financing to expand support for more more cloud computing infrastructure platforms and enhance its offering. Titanium Investments led the Series A funding round, with participation from existing investors RDSeed. This investment brings Cloudyn’s total funding to $5.5 million to date. The Tel Aviv-based cloud monitoring company in September 2011 secured $1.5 million in seed financing.

Cloudyn co-founder and CEO Sharon Wagner told Talkin’ Cloud that the company will "use the proceeds to expand our offering to new hybrid cloud platforms and support our growing base of clients in North America and EMEA." "Specifically, as we are seeing a nice uptake of Azure, this is an important platform that we are going to support," he said. "As part of our hybrid-cloud strategy and to expand our private cloud support, we will additionally support VMware."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

After months of evaluating strategic alternatives and being acquired, Rackspace said Tuesday that it will remain independent. Shares promptly plunged about 18 percent in after hours trading. The company declared "its commitment to remain independent." Rackspace also named Taylor Rhodes CEO. Co-founder Graham Weston will be chairman.

Rackspace’s plan is to focus on its managed cloud strategy, which will avoid price wars with the likes of Google and Amazon Web Services. In May, Rackspace said it was approached by multiple parties exploring an acquisition. The company’s board then evaluated its options. During that evaluation, Rackspace shares would surge based on takeover speculation. Now that speculation is over. Rackspace said:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Application migration can be daunting when IT pros first look to make their way to the public cloud, but it doesn’t have to be, according to experts with experience moving workloads on behalf of clients. Whether you’re a novice cloud user or one of the enterprise clouderati, some rules of thumb apply when moving apps from being hosted on-premises to a cloud service provider’s data center. It’s important to note that at least half the battle lies in preparation for running in the cloud, from assessing applications to evaluating internal operations processes. After that, a phased, stepwise approach to cloud migration is strongly recommended.

Get ready: Assess applications first

Before migrating, IT professionals must assess applications and understand their business objectives for the cloud. Will the cloud host production or test and dev applications? And is there a variable demand for resources within those apps that can take advantage of flexible cloud infrastructure?…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR NewsWire.

tw telecom, a leading provider of Business Ethernet and networking solutions, and Virtacore, a leading cloud services provider specializing in virtual infrastructure solutions, today announced a partnership to provide a combination of cloud, network and data center services, giving customers the ability to deploy flexible cloud solutions.

Virtacore provides customers the ability to cost-effectively extend their IT infrastructure in the cloud utilizing best-of-breed technologies built on Cisco’s UCS platform, VMware VSphere, and hybridized storage using either NetApp or Nimble storage devices hosted at Equinix data center ecosystems. Utilizing tw telecom’s eLynk service, customers benefit from a secure, dedicated and scalable Ethernet cloud connection…

Grazed from ISC-Events.  Author: PR Announcement.

The ISC Cloud and ISC Big Data conferences will be held this fall in Heidelberg, Germany. This will be the fifth ISC Cloud Conference to be organized by ISC Group, and it will take place in the Marriott Hotel Heidelberg from September 29 – 30. The second ISC Big Data will be held from October 1 – 2 at the same venue.

The ISC Cloud Conference

This year’s ISC Cloud Conference, chaired by European cloud expert Wolfgang Gentzsch, offers a comprehensive agenda, addressing the interests of the research community as well as the industry attendees. The topics lined up for the two-day event include:…

Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

I’ve just returned from the IBM Analyst Insight event and have much to think about. I was given the opportunity to speak with IBM executives responsible for Big Data and Analytics, X86 and PureSystems, cloud computing, Flash storage and Power and System z hardware. Although each executive was highly focused on their own area, they all presented IBM’s main messages first and messages about their products second. I’m going to focus on my discussions with IBM about cloud computing in this article.

IBM’s Take on Hybrid Cloud

Most members of the cloud computing community would agree that there are three different implementations of a cloud computing environment: private, public and hybrid. Hybrid combines the first two into a single computing resource, from a management and development perspective…

Read more from the source @ http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2014/09/15/ibm-hybrid-cloud-analysis.aspx

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has unveiled a cloud-based performance testing platform that is designed for Agile development teams that want to "apply smarter testing techniques into development."

HP said the new platform, StormRunner Load, can help Agile development teams accelerate application delivery and improve app quality. StormRunner Load is part of the HP Performance Testing suite. It supports HP’s mission to help Agile development teams accelerate application quality and delivery by providing them with a simple, intuitive and scalable cloud-based platform, according to the company…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/091514/hp-adds-cloud-based-load-testing-performance-testing-suite

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Shawn Drew.

The right cloud solution can make a business more agile, more cost-effective and even more secure, but despite what evangelists might say, it is not an IT department’s panacea. Only by understanding the potential disadvantages of cloud computing can IT managers ensure that their migration is as successful as possible.

Finding Trouble in the Cloud

Over the past few years, the cloud has cemented itself as a developing technology that is going to be at the center of IT for decades to come. However, this does not mean that IT managers can simply schedule a cloud migration and assume success. Computer Weekly highlights the potential missteps when moving to the cloud, going over four real-world examples of instances in which businesses found trouble due to either a lack of understanding of how the cloud works or an overestimation of its potential benefits…

Grazed from Phys.Org. Author: Editorial Staff.

A team of computer scientists at NJIT has won a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation to come up with a platform that would allow mobile devices to interact with each other with help from the cloud. The technology they are developing is designed to support collaborative applications in areas such as healthcare, safety, and social interaction, potentially benefiting millions of users.

The proposed mobile cloud computing platform would not only stimulate the creation of groundbreaking applications, it would also leverage the cloud to expand the processing power, network bandwidth, storage space, and battery life of individual devices.
"Our goal is to make smart phones smarter," says Cristian Borcea, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Computer Science, who is the grant’s principal investigator…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Zulfikar Ramzan.

Security in the cloud is on a lot of people’s minds following the hacking of celebrities’ iCloud accounts. When we hear about user accounts on cloud services and SaaS applications getting compromised, we start thinking more about he types of security capabilities that cloud providers offer versus what they leave unaddressed, and where responsibility should lie.

Although many people think that security is a monolith, in reality it’s much more of a mosaic — full of nuances and subtleties. There are undoubtedly various kinds of threats associated with cloud services. From the perspective of the cloud service provider, the most pressing security issue involves protecting its back-end infrastructure from outside attackers. An attacker who can break in through the back door can abscond with a wealth of data…