Category: News

Grazed from TechDay.  Author: Editorial Staff.

With cybercriminals increasingly targeting cloud service providers, nows the time to leverage your security expertise and guide your customers, says Gerry Tucker, Websense ANZ country manager.  IDC forecasts cloud computing to be a $107 billion industry globally by 2017.

Yet for many IT leaders, security concerns are the biggest hurdle when it comes to adopting cloud.  Many businesses are happy with the experience they have using cloud services as they value the improved flexibility and manageability of their IT infrastructure, not to mention lower total cost of ownership…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

An open-source OpenStack effort, known as Ironic, is a key enabler for Rackspace’s new OnMetal offering, which also supports the Docker container model.  Rackspace aims to shake up the cloud market with the launch of its new OnMetal OpenStack cloud service that enables users to directly provision physical hardware.

The promise of the cloud is highly available, elastic computing power that is available on-demand. For the most part, that promise has been enabled through the use of virtualization and multi-tenancy, where many different users share the same physical hardware…

Grazed from Pulsant.  Author: PR Announcement.

Pulsant, the cloud computing, managed hosting and colocation expert, has completed the latest set of improvements to its Tier iii South London data centre facility. The upgrades are the next phase in an £18m investment and have boosted the site’s levels of redundancy and uptime.

Pulsant built and configured its own high voltage (HV) network on site, which enables it to expand the facility in terms of power with a minimal disruption to customers. This is the first HV network across the company’s 10 data centre network…

Grazed from SysCon Media.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Network address management ought to be, according to the conventional wisdom, a problem that’s been solved long ago. Yet, when you add in complexities like a private cloud infrastructure, everything isn’t always as easy as it seems at first blush. DDI (the management of DNS, DHCP and IP addresses) can be problematic at times, and even the larger providers of cloud solutions, such as OpenStack, don’t always have the answers that you need.

The Infoblox DDI

Infoblox is doing what they can to make the process smoother and more manageable. The Infoblox DDI series of appliances will contain both virtual and hardware appliances. These appliances will automate the way in which VMs provision their IPs and DNS. They’re designed to work with a number of private cloud companies, including:…

Grazed from Flexiant.  Author:  Marco Meinardi.

This year’s GigaOm Structure 2014 event focused on three main themes. The first, the relationship between the enterprise and the cloud; the second the effect the Internet of Things will have on infrastructure; and the third OpenStack.

The conference took place in San Francisco and managed once again to gather industry leaders and visionaries in the computing infrastructure space. While I’m not going to give you a summary of all what has been discussed (you can find the complete coverage on GigaOm), there are some important takeaways to share…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author:  Jack Schofield.

ElasticHosts is offering a next-generation cloud service that it claims could halve the cost of computing for Linux IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) customers. What’s more, the change is relatively simple, and could well become widespread, thanks to Linux LXC containers and the Docker automated deployment system.

ElasticHosts’ chief executive Richard Davies explained in a telephone interview that most IaaS customers pay for virtual machines (VMs) on contracts that run for up to two years. Because usage isn’t constant, the VM capacity is mostly underused, though at peak times, it may not be big enough — see graph below…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Among the improvements for the small thin client system is an app that can turn any Android-based device into a keyboard and mouse.  Dell is updating its pocket-size Wyse Cloud Connect computing device, including launching an app that can take any Android-based device and turn it into a keyboard and mouse.

The updates, announced June 19, were designed to help improve the user experience and enhance management and control of the Cloud Connect, according to Jeff McNaught, executive director of marketing and chief strategy officer for cloud client computing at Dell…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

When it comes to cloud, we’ve come a long way in three short years. Back in the stone age of 2011, cloud was this promising but relatively novel way to access services on a subscription basis. Only a handful of organizations used cloud services in a big way at the time. Now, it seems unusual if an enterprise is not using cloud services for some critical enterprise function.

A new survey of 1,358 executives confirms that cloud has passed the tipping point and is now used, basically, everywhere that matters. The study, a joint effort between North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOm Research, finds record numbers of enterprises have adopted the three primary levels of cloud computing — infrastructure, platform and software as a service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). And many are recognizing the potential impact on the direction of their businesses. This is the fourth year the survey was conducted…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Mike Vizard.

Conceptually, the shift to platform as a service (PaaS) makes a lot of sense. Instead of managing stacks of computing, a PaaS environment makes it simpler to manage large swaths of the IT environment at a higher level of abstraction. For that reason, Cloud Foundry has received a lot of interest. It’s an open source implementation of a PaaS environment that can run on both public and private clouds.

Originally developed by the Pivotal unit of EMC, Cloud Foundry has found a fair amount of support among vendors that see it as providing a counterbalance against the growing influence of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services. The theory is that if IT is managed at the PaaS layer, then the underlying infrastructure on which that PaaS environment rests becomes just another IT means to an end…

Grazed from Automation.com.  Author: Bill Lydon.

Fluke recently introduced Fluke Connect, a system which allows maintenance technicians to wirelessly transmit measurement data from their test tools to their smart phones. The system uses the cloud for secure data storage and allows universal team access from the field. I had the opportunity to meet with Fluke representatives and try this latest offering. There is a lot of hype about the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. To date, from what I have seen on the market, Fluke Connect is the most useful, productivity-increasing industry solution based on these technologies.

I suspect many readers have the same experience that I had when troubleshooting and diagnosing problems. I would write notes about meter readings and other test equipment data. In my field days, I carried a stack of 3 x 5 inch cards in my shirt pocket. I took notes in an attempt to correlate information and understand why systems had problems. Later, I would review the findings with others and write reports…