Category: News

Grazed from GlobeNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cirrascale Corporation®, a premier developer of build-to-order, independent blade-based computing and storage data center infrastructure for conventional and modular data centers, today launched its high density, two-in-one ARM64 development platform, the RM1905D. The platform is powered by the Applied Micro Circuits Corporation AMCC -0.01% X-Gene™ 64-bit ARM Server-on-a-Chip™ and NVIDIA® Tesla® K20 GPU accelerators.

"Cirrascale is proud to be part of the growing ARM64 development movement with AppliedMicro and NVIDIA in deploying what we believe to be a growing ecosystem in high performance computing and cloud environments," said David Driggers, CEO, Cirrascale Corporation. "Businesses are looking for competitive advantages that tackle their growing workloads, and this platform will enable that next-generation of data center transformation."…

Grazed from Recode. Author: Amy Schatz.

Doug Wolfe doesn’t stand out in a crowd, which isn’t surprising considering he’s been with the Central Intelligence Agency for the past 30 years or so, most recently as the agency’s chief information officer. But he was center stage Tuesday morning at an Amazon Web Services sales event in Washington, D.C., as he gave a 15-minute speech for other government-IT-procurement types about why the intelligence agency picked Amazon for a recent $600 million cloud-computing contract.

“This is not something in my 30 years that we have traditionally done,” Wolfe said, joking that when he agreed to speak, no one told him he’d be addressing upwards of 3,000 government and IT professionals in a cavernous hall at the Washington Convention Center. “It’s been a pretty interesting clash of cultures here,” Wolfe said, describing discussions the agency has had with Amazon over the past few months as they’ve worked on the CIA’s new cloud-based system…

Grazed from Reuben2. Author: Derrick Harris.

NASA launched a new contest Tuesday for imagining and then building new uses for the space agency’s trove of earth sciences data. The challenge — actually two of them, broken down into the imagination and building stages — kicks off on July 1 and runs through Nov. 15, and utilizes the NASA Open Earth Exchange platform.

The exchange’s datasets and informational material, as well as the computing resources for the challenge, are hosted on Amazon Web Services. This is not the first time NASA has opened its data to the public as part of a challenge. It had previously partnered with TopCoder, a platform for crowdsourced challenges, on a number of competitions. The OpenNEX challenge is in partnership with Innocentive…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Eric B. Parizo.

More than a year after Edward Snowden leaked confidential information about the breadth of the National Security Agency’s domestic intelligence-gathering, the former head of the NSA staunchly defended the agency’s actions while advocating for enterprises to adopt the computing paradigm that helps keep the NSA’s systems secure.

In a keynote address Tuesday at the 2014 Gartner Inc. Security & Risk Management Summit, retired U.S. Army General Keith B. Alexander, who led the NSA for nearly nine years and since 2010 the U.S. Cyber Command as well, said the NSA’s bulk metadata collection programs are vital to U.S. efforts to thwart terrorism, support U.S. military operations and ultimately keep Americans safe…

Grazed from FoxBusiness. Author: Adam Samson.

Big Blue has been singing the blues a lot lately. As other tech names woo Wall Street with shiny gadgets and myriad online services, IBM (IBM) sputters. IBM, perhaps the biggest player in the “Old Tech” space, saw its stock dip 2.1% last year just as the broad markets posted a blockbuster performance that included stellar results by a wide variety of technology stocks.

This year hasn’t been much better for the Armonk, NY-based heavyweight, as the firm nurses a year-to-date loss of 3.4% against 6% gains for U.S. equities. In fact, the stock has underperformed the S&P 500 every year since 2012 after beating the benchmark barometer by a wide margin in 2011, according to data from FactSet…

Read more from the source @ http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2014/06/24/ibms-not-so-secret-weapon-hybrid-cloud-computing/

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

As organizations use the power of mobility to transform business operations, Verizon Enterprise Solutions and VMware today announced an expansion of their strategic relationship to include mobile security and enterprise mobility management solutions. Driven by a shared vision for how enterprises will enable the mobile cloud era, Verizon will now provide its enterprise clients in the U.S. greater choice by offering the comprehensive AirWatch(R) by VMware Enterprise Mobility Management Platform as part of Verizon’s mobile device management portfolio for on premise deployments.

The mobile cloud era represents one of the greatest tectonic shifts for IT in the past decade. VMware and Verizon share the vision that organizations need the right solutions delivered by trusted technology partners to enable the modern workforce to work at the speed of life. These solutions will be designed to allow employees to access all of their personal and corporate applications and information securely across any device, virtually anywhere at any time, while enabling businesses to run more effectively by providing unprecedented device choice and flexibility…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Danny Walker.

Running all your IT in-house: the old approach… Until recently, most businesses have had to manage their own IT systems. This has either meant employing a team of technical experts or paying for expensive consultants. The reliance on computer hardware and software means that any problems which crop up need to be addressed swiftly in order to keep day-to-day business running smoothly.

As programs become more advanced, regular office PCs can start struggling and taking longer to boot and leading to lost productivity. A good example of this issue is highlighted in a tweet by the government’s new COO in 2013, Stephen Kelly -but constantly upgrading your hardware to cater for the latest software can be a drain on expenses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Colin Barker.

If your company is struggling to find the right cloud solution for your business, you are not alone – it appears an awful lot of companies are in exactly the same position. That was one of the principle conclusions from some new research by the cloud computing company iland, in conjunction with VMware, which found that the average company is using not one but at least three Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) companies for their cloud development. According to the research there are a number of reasons why organisations are casting around trying to find a cloud solution including:

• An ongoing effort to find the ‘right’ solution.
• A fragmentation of requirements at the departmental level.
• An unwillingness by IT to standardise on one vendor.
• A requirement for diverse suppliers because, amongst other reasons, of liability issues.
• A general urge by cloud providers to continually try new ideas that might meet their needs…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Regulatory pressure is likely to keep private cloud alive and growing within the overall cloud computing market, according to Rob Lloyd, president of Development and Sales at Cisco Systems (CSCO). ZDNet recently noted that Lloyd said "private cloud is not going away." Lloyd was quoted as speaking to a group of Australian media about Intercloud, the company’s global cloud network that it hopes will play a significant role in the cloud space.

But Lloyd also seemed to go against common belief that as enterprises become more confident and comfortable with cloud services, they will increasingly turn to the public cloud. Lloyd seems to believe the opposite—that as regulatory issues continue to put pressure on enterprises and cloud services providers that enterprises will focus more and more on implementing private cloud solutions…

Grazed from Bizjournals. Author: Mike W. Thomas.

Rackspace Hosting Inc. is still generating buzz in the technology industry about a potential takeover. The San Antonio-based managed hosting and cloud computing company announced earlier this year that it was looking at “strategic proposals” and had retained the services of investment banker Morgan Stanley to evaluate the proposals and explore any other alternatives.

The latest company to be touted as a potential buyer is Monroe, La.-based CenturyLink, a multinational communications company that provides services to residential, business, governmental and wholesale customers. Analyst David Phipps tells Motley Fool that a merger with Rackspace would double CenturyLink’s service revenue and increase overall revenue growth for both companies…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/sanantonio/blog/morning-edition/2014/06/rackspace-eyed-by-another-suitor.html