Category: News

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bull is launching a new range of bullion(TM) servers designed to speed up the implementation of Big Data and private Cloud infrastructures. The latest bullion systems feature a suite of leading-edge technologies for the next generation of Data Center. The bullion S servers have been developed by Bull with the aim of delivering an innovative response to the new requirements created by the massive explosion in enterprise data and the challenges of Data Center modernization and optimization.

Featuring an architecture designed to support up to 240 processing nodes and exceptional memory of up to 24TB, the bullion servers are engineered for performance and in-memory computing. Powerful, reliable and scalable, the new bullion models are designed to be the most efficient enterprise servers for Data Center optimization, information systems modernization and transforming raw data in real value for organizations…

Grazed from InfoTech Group. Author: Steve Saslow.

What a different world we live in than the one most of us grew up in, am I right? – Mobile technology. A wealth of information our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of at our fingertips. A computer just recently passed the Turing Test for the first time, and Google is making investments in research and development firms that aim to “cure” aging.

Unlike the brave men and women who braved the primitive Earth before us, carving out their survival wherever they stood, today’s men and women can run businesses and work for corporations from the comfort of their own homes or even while moving swiftly around the planet…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Stacey Collet.

DreamWorks Animation knows the magic of the cloud. Since 2003, the famed studio has held its product development, design and manufacturing functions in a hybrid cloud environment, long before the storage option was even called "cloud." The cloud gives the Los Angeles-based company "massive flexibility in both human and digital capital," says DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen, adding that it gives "any artist access to any movie from any site, anywhere, on any project… instantly."

It also allowed DreamWorks to move from producing one movie every 18 months to three movies a year. A blockbuster solution, no doubt. But things proved trickier when cloud options were weighed for corporate and back-office functions. In 2012, DreamWorks switched email systems from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail on the Google Apps platform to create a uniform framework for its 2,600 employees, half of whom used Linux for creating animation and the other half Microsoft tools for corporate functions…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/425298/how-recover-after-cloud-computing-misstep

Grazed from TechTimes.  Author: Robert Lawson.

Cloud storage is now viewed as a commodity and the result is a bidding war between the major consumer and enterprise solutions offered by tech companies such as Google Drive, IBM SoftLayer, Dropbox, Box, Apple iCloud and Amazon Cloud Drive and Web Services (AWS/S3). 

The mantra of the day is, "it’s in the cloud," a phrase that, several short years ago, would have held a completely different meaning to consumers. But because of the exponential shift in the worldwide information economy, the "consumerization of IT" has taken hold and placed a premium on value in terms of flexibility, scalability, reliability, cost and mobility…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Sue Poremba.

Cloud computing solutions may be growing in use, but a new survey of 400 global IT professionals by Enterprise Management Associates finds that cloud migration is fraught with failures and unexpected challenges. As InformationWeek reports, the survey reveals that companies are turning to cloud computing in order to keep up with technology innovations. Charles Babcock puts it simply: "The enterprise now wants the advantages of cloud computing, and IT needs to deliver." By migrating to the cloud, companies of all sizes — especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs) — are able to stay more competitive.

At the same time, however, the report adds that cloud migration appears to be overwhelming IT departments, which is leading to unexpected challenges such as monitoring and correcting problems on the fly. By not being able to meet these challenges, IT departments are seeing computing failures. "Unfortunately, many IT organizations lack the skills they need to perform these tasks," InformationWeek quotes from the report. "In part, this is because clouds represent an entirely new platform — from their pricing models to their operational metrics — and thus require entirely new expertise."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Red Hat (RHT) is introducing a new incentive for enterprises to adopt its open source OpenStack cloud computing solutions. Now, the company will certify cloud-management solutions for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification offering comes as part of Red Hat’s OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which the company calls "the world’s largest commercial ecosystem for OpenStack." Through the program, Red Hat will provide certifications for integrating channel partners’ cloud-management products into RHEL OpenStack.

Red Hat is pitching this initiative as a way for enterprises to take full advantage of the diversity of OpenStack solutions now available on the market without having to commit to a single vendor’s offerings. Instead, they will be able to adopt any of a wide range of the certified OpenStack management tools and integrate them into RHEL OpenStack…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Users of Dropbox for Business will now be able to share folders with colleagues without necessarily giving them rights to edit their content. Giving users read-only access to folders hasn’t been possible until now: Dropbox for Business users by default granted edit rights to the people they shared the folders with.

Dropbox makes this move as it faces heightening pressure both in the consumer and enterprise cloud storage and file share markets from rivals like Microsoft and Google. Dropbox hasn’t rolled out the new feature to all of its business customers, but admins can turn it on for their users. The company plans to gather feedback from early adopters and make it broadly available later on…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Jose Castano.

Technology is moving at a blistering pace. In today’s era of data-centric, complex environments where the lines between business and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, organizations are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing to meet new challenges and keep up with the pace of change. Critical investments are needed to keep companies competitive, and chief among these technologies is cloud computing. In fact, Gartner expects cloud computing to become the bulk of new IT expenditure by 2016. The bottom line is, if you’re not already looking at cloud as an essential investment, you’re risking your survival into the next era of computing.

The emerging cloud-based model of computing requires systems that can provide very fast response times to huge volumes of requests. And, mission critical services such as healthcare, finance, transportation, public utilities, and other industries require very high levels of availability, security and other industrial-strength capabilities. Those attributes, qualities and requirements make the mainframe the ideal platform for such mission critical cloud-based workloads…

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Todd Bishop.

Amazon is suing a former Amazon Web Services strategic partnerships manager, Zoltan Szabadi, alleging that his new job at Google Cloud Platform violates the terms of a non-compete agreement that he signed when he originally joined Amazon. The suit will be closely watched in the tech industry as a new test of the standard employment agreements that Amazon and some other large tech companies require employees to sign when they’re hired, restricting their activities if they leave.

The case also underscores the growing rivalry between Amazon and Google in the cloud. “Szabadi was directly and integrally involved with the marketing of Amazon’s cloud computing business to its partners and resellers, and played a significant role in developing Amazon’s business strategy and direction in this area,” the suit says. “Szabadi was involved in developing, implementing and managing Amazon Web Services’ strategy for many of its partners, and was the first point of contact for most partners who were considering working with Amazon.”…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Carroll.

Can you name a single activity that consumes more IT staff time and presents more potential exposure to enterprise security risks than maintaining desktop and laptop computers across the enterprise? Despite the widespread use of remote desktop management tools, administrators must periodically descend upon offices and cubicles to upgrade or troubleshoot PCs.

Most organizations have grown accustomed to distributing PCs to employees, maintaining and upgrading them, and then replacing them every few years. But you can now disrupt this repetitive cycle and drive down the costs of acquiring and maintaining PCs for your connected workforce. Desktop virtualization is an increasingly popular approach that allows the enterprise to reduce desktop IT costs, improve operational efficiency, and increase control over desktop computing environments…