Category: News

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Signe Brewster.

IBM’s pursuit of a chip far more powerful, small and light than the existing options takes its inspiration from a familiar source: the human brain. The company revealed the second generation of its SyNAPSE chip today that lead researcher Dharmendra Modha described as “a supercomputer the size of a stamp, the weight of a feather.” And it consumes the same amount of power as a hearing aid.

“I’m holding in my hand a new machine for a new era,” Modha said in an interview. “When we started the SyNAPSE project many people thought it was impossible. As we look to the future, possible can become real. This could open up a whole new frontier of scientific exploration and commercial exploitation.”…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

It appears that Rackspace (RAX) is ceding the growing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market to its competitors, instead preferring to focus on supporting customers that are planning to build their own clouds. According to a Network World article, the OpenStack company plans to discontinue its IaaS offering while shifting its focus entirely to its existing managed cloud business.

One could look at this as Lady Luck not being on Rackspace’s side, but it looks more like the company is finally recognizing where its strengths-and weaknesses-lie. Instead of competing against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure (MSFT), Google Cloud (GOOG) and others making up the growing IaaS market, which Rackspace has been doing for the last few years, it makes a lot of sense for the cloud company to bow out…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

A federal District Court judge’s ruling last week that stated Microsoft must comply with a U.S. warrant for customer data stored in a data center in Ireland could impede progress for American cloud companies hoping to continue growing their European Union accounts. The ruling, which Microsoft will be fighting, came from U.S. District Court Judge Loretta A. Preska and has to do with a narcotics investigation in which the feds are demanding access to some Microsoft customer emails stored in Ireland.

Cloud security solutionas provider CloudPassage commented on the ruling, noting it could inhibit the adoption of cloud within the European Union. "As the result of the District Court ruling last week in the Microsoft case, coupled with the NSA PRISM program, U.S. policy is having a serious negative impact on the ability of U.S. technology companies to compete in the global market for cloud-based services and infrastructure," wrote Carson Sweet, founder and CEO of CloudPassage, in a statement…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/public-cloud/080714cloudpassage-microsoft-ruling-impact-us-cloud-providers

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Fay Humphries.

A successful shift to cloud computing involves, among other considerations, identifying the current business and IT issues that need to be addressed, understanding the risks and making the right infrastructure decisions for the business. Moving to the cloud can reduce costs, while meeting the need for the improved computing resources required to drive business, says Jon Tullett, senior editor: news analysis at ITWeb.

"Among the primary reasons CIOs implement cloud computing strategies, which has been borne out by several research houses, is to improve their business agility," he says. "And, while there are companies who haven’t seen any significant advantages and who may in fact have disrupted their business operations by adopting the cloud, there is an increasing number who have increased their competitive edge and seen real benefits."…

Grazed from CloudComputingNews. Author: David Linthicum.

Private cloud was popular in the early days of cloud computing when enterprises struggled with security and control issues. These days, public cloud dominates, as revealed in the recent “State of the Cloud Study” from RightScale. The reasons for the growth of public clouds are pretty clear, including low operating costs, instant scalability, and the ability to better support changing businesses. However, the private cloud still has a place in IT, and understanding what’s about to emerge in the private cloud space will give you a better focus on this pattern of cloud architecture.

Private clouds are being leveraged as points-of-control or interfaces into public clouds. These emerging hybrid clouds or multi-cloud architectures use a tiered approach where the private cloud (tier 1) links to public cloud services (tier 2), and those looking to access cloud services do so using the private cloud services as the primary interface. Then, as needed, the private cloud leverages the public cloud services…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective. Author: Rick Delgato.

We are in a new technological phase spurring innovation and job creation. One job, the big data architect, offers IT pros great prospects in the growing field of big data analytics. In 2013, 65 percent of IT buyers indicated cloud computing as a top area of investment for 2013. In addition, it’s predicted that by 2015, 60 percent of information workers will access their content via mobile devices.

Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud-computing company Box, described the rapid adoption of mobile and cloud computing as the next phase in technology. For those in the IT space or just the business world in general, technological phases are nothing new. As first mainframes and then PCs were adopted, companies learned to adapt. They adapt their IT infrastructure they run their business off of. They change the way they interact with the consumer, and of course, new technology requires new skills and expertise introducing new job positions in the IT industry…

To view infographic and read more from the source, visit: http://smartdatacollective.com/rick-delgado/223076/latest-technological-phase-and-what-it-pros-should-do-about-it

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ram Lakshminarayanan.

As far as open source pedigree goes, OpenStack is of a pretty high calibre. Born out of a joint initiative between NASA and Rackspace in July 2010, its main goal was to simplify the management of both private and public cloud computing services deployed on traditional computer hardware. Since then it has attracted the support of many high-profile corporate partners such as Intel, IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell, EMC and Red Hat. Under the guidance of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity formed in September 2012, the platform has steadily matured into a fully-featured cloud-building platform. OpenStack’s current stable version (codenamed "Icehouse") is the ninth release to date.

Integrating OpenStack into a corporate IT strategy can provide several key benefits. By removing the complexity behind managing and deploying on-demand infrastructure, the platform can dramatically reduce the time required to build applications and bring new products to market…

Grazed from ThoughtsOnCloud. Author: Francesco Pedulla.

At a recent social media workshop on cloud, we discussed the effect of cloud computing on employment and decided to write a joint blog post addressing this topic. A few months ago, one of us read “Race Against the Machine” by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. The authors argue that digital innovation has “changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink.” Their statement is not an opinion. It is the conclusion of a long, thorough study of empirical data. For the sake of discussion, we will assume it is correct.

Since Brynjolfsson and McAfee talk about innovative technologies that enable machines to replace human workers, the first question we asked ourselves was: can we apply that result to the ongoing cloud revolution? After all, the cloud is a matter of optimization through consolidation, not of replacing workers with machines. Still, the net effect of the consolidation is replacing workers with automated mechanisms. So, the real question is: if the results do apply to the cloud, then would the balance between created and destroyed IT jobs make it so that few people would lose their jobs, if any?…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

SAP SE’s software chief may have one of the toughest jobs in the technology industry: dragging the IT operations of 45,000 businesses into the era of cloud computing. Bernd Leukert, a 20-year company veteran, was promoted to the executive board after the sudden departure of chief technology officer Vishal Sikka in May. Now Leukert is breaking with his predecessor’s focus on fighting Oracle Corp. (ORCL:US) in the database market, and is responding to customers of its market-leading enterprise software who want a clear path for moving their applications to cloud-based systems.

“There is confusion,” Leukert, 47, said in an interview at SAP’s headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. “There’s no debate anymore in the IT industry that the cloud will be the preferred consumption model,” he said, referring to the shift toward delivering software via the Internet instead of installed on clients’ servers. “A road map is something we owe the market.”…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Wolfgang Gentzsch.

Stuttgart HPC Center (HLRS) director Michael Resch will present the ISC Cloud keynote on “HPC & Simulation in the Cloud – How Academia & Industry Can Benefit,” at the conference this September. ISC Cloud, the fifth in the series, will take place September 29 and 30 in Heidelberg, Germany.

As an HPC cloud skeptic in 2011, Resch characterized cloud computing as hype and predicted it would eventually go away. In the following interview with Wolfgang Gentzsch, Chairman of the ISC Cloud Conference and President of the UberCloud, Resch explains why he has come to think much more favorably of HPC cloud over the last three years…