Category: News

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

They are the amongst the most productive and self-reliant members of your staff, user of your IT systems who used to be called “power users” but now they’re being given the trendy new appellation of “citizen developers.” Are they going to be key players in your move to Cloud computing?

There are various reasons for moving your applications to the Cloud. The ones most commonly mentioned are cost savings (potentially considerable) and the ability to react quickly to workload changes (scale-out and elasticity). Not so often discussed is the new ability for your people to more rapidly develop and deploy new Cloud-based applications that will differentiate your organisation and give it a business advantage…

Grazed from Mohana Ravindranath.

Salesforce.com got its start in 1999 selling software to businesses, helping them manage customer data for sales leads. Fifteen years later, the San Francisco-based company is ramping up to reach a different audience: the federal government. As part of this attempt, Salesforce debuted cloud services for federal agencies before 4,000 business partners and government representatives recently at a company-sponsored conference at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the District.

Spearheading the public-sector push is Vivek Kundra, an executive vice president at Salesforce who until 2011 served as the United States’ first chief information officer. As CIO, Kundra issued a “cloud first” policy, mandating that federal agencies take advantage of the Internet cloud as a way to reduce costs and develop new applications…

Grazed from Calgary Herald. Author: Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla.

While devoid of any earth shaking hardware announcements, the revelations made at last week’s World Wide Developer’s Conference all point to improving Apple’s key strengths and further linking their mobile, desktop and cloud ecosystems. The introduction of new product areas and functionalities make Apple products even more indispensable by putting them at the centre of the new CarPlay, HealthKit, and HomeKit initiatives.

Continuity is a key differentiator

Apple may be battling Android on the mobile front and its user-base is still way behind Windows adoption on the desktop category, but the recently announced iOS 8 for mobile and OS X Yosemite have key advantages for users that have iPhones and iPads as well as Mac desktops or notebooks. These are features no PC or smartphone maker can offer…

Grazed from StarTribune.  Author: Steve Alexander.

In an effort to make computing services nearly as reliable as the telephone, CenturyLink last week opened Minnesota’s first high-reliability “Tier 3” public data center in Shakopee.

CenturyLink, based in Monroe, La., is best known to Minnesotans as the state’s largest telephone company. But it has bet its future on the belief that data center services such as “cloud computing will make up for a decline in the use of its traditional phone service caused by cellphones. And it believes opening a rare Tier 3 data center will be a lure for computing customers in the Twin Cities…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: Nick Hardiman.

This year container-based technology announcements went crazy. This isn’t the craze for packing data centers into shipping containers (that’s so last decade) — this is the Linux OS container craze. What’s a container, and why is everyone so excited?

A brief history of fitting IT supply to demand

Ten years ago computing capacity requirements were calculated for the next business year. The process of estimating what would happen in the next year was practically impossible, but something had to be done (and is still being done in the enterprise)…

Grazed from AssociationsNow.  Author: Ernie Smith.

A year ago this week, a pair of shocking revelations about the federal government’s surveillance capabilities came to light.

The double-whammy of reports exposing the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection from phone calls and internet connections became one of the year’s biggest stories. It also introduced the world to Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked the information on the spy agency’s surveillance to journalists and continues to evoke strong opinions on whether he’s a traitor or a hero.

The disclosures also kick-started a tech industry lobbying effort that continues as a bill aiming to roll back the NSA collection program moves through Congress. Here’s the latest:..

Grazed from InsideBigData.  Author: William Wallace.

As the technology world stares down exascale computing the need for faster and faster interconnect solutions is critical for delivering the requirements of super low latency and high throughput. Mellanox offers end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet products aimed at the cloud and Big Data. We caught up with Eyal Gutkind, Senior Manager, Enterprise Market Development of Mellanox, to learn more.

insideBIGDATA: What products does your company offer the Big Data sector?

Eyal Gutkind: Mellanox Technologies offers analytics and file systems accelerations for Big Data deployments, using Mellanox 40Gb/56Gb Ethernet and InfiniBand solutions. With Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), Mellanox enables an efficient data transfer mechanism that allows applications, such as IBM BigInsights, to increase customer data ingress rate by more than 35 percent and analytics data processing by 50 percent compared to other data transport solutions…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Silver Peak, the leader in accelerating data over distance, today released a new infographic that illustrates a smarter approach to the IT challenges of branch offices. Drawing from its recent “Branch Office Blueprint” whitepaper, Silver Peak recommends a mix of software, virtualization and commodity hardware to maximize agility while minimizing costs.

• View the infographic: http://blog.silver-peak.com/smarter-branch-office-infographic

Many attempts to address the IT challenges of the branch office rely on expensive, proprietary “all-in-one” appliances that package server, storage and networking along with the vendor’s core capabilities. Though proponents of this approach tout simplified deployment, it often forces organizations to double or even triple their capital expenses while constraining their options…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Elliot Markowitz.

The IT space is growing more dangerous. As much as security protection has advanced, new, more sophisticated threats are cropping up every day. While this is always an opportunity for solution providers, it’s time-consuming to make sure customers are protected—especially as the world moves more toward mobile devices and cloud computing and needs to deal with Big Data.

These issues are being brought to the forefront of the industry as researcher Gartner gets ready to kick off its Security & Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, later this month…

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: Sarah Lake.

Moving your business to the cloud is probably an idea that would set you on course for better profitability. However, this transition is far less easy than simply choosing a cloud vendor and moving a portion of your business activities to the cloud.

You need a clearly defined cloud strategy in place if you are to leverage the immense potential of the cloud computing for your business. More importantly, you need a qualified person to be in charge of this strategy to ensure its successful implementation…