Category: News

Grazed from HeraldSun. Author: Rod Chester.

No, not “will you marry me?”. That’s another story. This is the story of “It’s in the cloud”. Cloud computing is something most people do but often with little comprehension of what they are actually doing. When the US government started to get confused about the term “cloud computing” and what it meant, it ordered the National Institute of Standards and Technology to define it.

It came up with this: “cloud computing can and does mean different things to different people.” Well, that clears things up then, in a cloudy way. “Cloud computing” is something we say everyday. A lot. In fact, there are about 48 million times someone has said it on the web, according to Google…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Mark Cravotta.

The public cloud computing model is rapidly becoming the world’s most prolific IT deployment architecture, yet it leaves many promises unfulfilled. While offering scale, flexibility, and potential cost savings, the public cloud often lacks the isolation, computing power, and control advantages of bare metal servers.

Recent feedback suggests that people who adopted public cloud solutions for their elasticity and convenience are now lamenting their "simple" solution’s complexity. To deploy enterprise solutions with the public cloud, one must consider redundancies as a safety net for outages and other disasters, as well as more intricate network architecture for true interoperability…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Cloud computing providers Microsoft and AmazonWeb Services are opening up their pools of virtual servers to climate researchers via two new grant programs announced on Tuesday. Microsoft is offering a year’s worth of Azure cloud resources (180,000 computing hours and 20 terabytes of storage) to 20 recipients submitting proposals related to food resilience. According to a Microsoft Research blog post announcing the grants, “The overarching goal is to encourage data providers, scientists, farmers, food producers and the public to discover the food supply’s key vulnerabilities and inherent resiliency.” Proposals are due Sept. 15, 2014.

The food resilience grants will focus on a handful of USDA datasets, and are part of a broader mission Microsoft says it’s pursuing to address the issue. These efforts include “workshops, webinars, and ‘appathons’ to demonstrate the value of open access data and to promote the development of tools for understanding these datasets,” and the addition of additional datasets over the next year…

Grazed from CNBC. Ari Levy.

In the cloud-computing market, Google and Amazon.com have been embroiled in a brutal pricing war. So when news broke in May that smaller rival Rackspace had hired Morgan Stanley to explore strategic options amid such stiff competition, Rackspace’s president, Taylor Rhodes, expected a six-month parade of discussions with customers concerned about his company’s future.

Instead, Rackspace has been signing up clients at an accelerated pace even as its status remains unresolved, Rhodes said. The company’s pitch has long been that the raw computing power and storage in the cloud is becoming commoditized and that there’s money to be made selling services and support on top of it to the many businesses that need the help…

Increasing numbers of corporate IT and service provider organizations are deploying open source KVM and Xen. Despite this adoption, there are few concrete examples of large scale, mission critical deployments of open source virtualization.

The biggest obstacle we see is a lack of scalable management tools and processes. In this webinar, we will demonstrate three key steps to implement a scalable management approach that will allow you to manage thousands of hosts and virtual machines. Specifically:

1. Centralize and Automate Your Management – Move to a single point of visibility and control, allowing you to provision, configure, administer, monitor, and automate your entire virtualized infrastructure from a centralized, web-based console… 

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Hannah Breeze.

The U.S. government must clean up the act of its National Security Agency (NSA) if trust in cloud providers is to be restored, according to a think tank. In its Surveillance Costs: The NSA’s Impact on the Economy, Internet Freedom and Cybersecurity report, the New America Foundation (NAF) claims U.S. cloud firms have borne the brunt of the NSA scandal.

“Trust in American businesses has decreased since the initial reports on the PRISM programme suggested that the NSA was directly tapping into the servers of nine U.S. companies to obtain customer data for national security investigations,” the report said. “Given heightened concern about the NSA’s ability to access data stored by U.S. companies, American companies that offer cloud computing and web-hosting services are experiencing the most acute economic fallout.”…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Massoud Marzban.

There have been a number of stories recently in the press about some big happenings in the cloud space. IBM recently reported double-digit profits from its cloud products division, and over in the US, the state of California just announced that they are moving much of their infrastructure to a cloud-based approach.

In the past, I’ve been asked to comment on a number of these stories and I’ve been more than happy to add my two cents. But then I thought, "I’ve got much more than a few one-line quotes to share", and so I’ve decided to take off my Business Development hat for a while and try on a tech reporter’s hat for a change…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Alan Ho.

Earlier in July, one of the biggest cloud computing trends to make headlines in recent years celebrated another milestone when it reached its fourth birthday. OpenStack has grown and developed over the past four years, to the point where it is now garnering serious attention from IT executives and developers around the world. One region that is picking up its rate of OpenStack interest is the Asia-Pacific, which hosted the region’s first OpenStack Summit two years ago to much success.

At that event, China OpenStack User Group (COSUG) manager Hui Cheng estimated that the growing group had more than 2,500 members, making it possibly the largest user group outside of the U.S. COSUG’s China micro-blogging site, Weibo, also shows more than 2,000 members currently following the group’s foray into OpenStack…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

There’s no operating system more ubiquitous than Linux. It’s everywhere. It’s even running in devices and computers you may not suspect—our cars, our cell phones, even our refrigerators. Linux supports businesses and organizations everywhere, and because it underpins open-source innovation, it is the platform of choice for new applications.

Companies such as IBM and their work with organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation are creating such new innovations as Big Blue’s new scale-out servers running Linux and putting them in places all around us. In fact, eWEEK recently ran a slide show depicting how prevalent the operating system is in the supercomputing space…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

A network testbed being constructed just south of San Francisco will help carriers and vendors develop standards for better cloud services, the CloudEthernet Forum says. The group’s OpenCloud Project, announced on Monday, will combine commonly used networking and computing equipment with live traffic from service providers’ commercial networks. It’s the first place researchers will be able to test new technologies designed to make cloud services more reliable and easier to set up and manage.

As enterprises put cloud-based services to work in conjunction with their own assets, it’s become hard to set up fast, reliable connections among all the components being used, according to CloudEthernet Forum President James Walker. Cloud providers may try to deliver a certain level of performance, but they don’t own the networks that link them to their customers, said Walker, who is also an executive at carrier Tata Communications…