Category: News

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

Last month IBM formally launched new POWER8-based Power Systems servers—the first generation of Power servers built on an open server platform. IBM’s open strategy for its Power Systems lineup does not come as a surprise to those who have followed this space closely over the last year. From the launch of the first Power Systems Linux Center in Beijing in May 2013 to the formal launch of the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM has been active on a number of fronts preparing to introduce its POWER8 systems as the world’s first open server platform.

IBM’s first Power Systems Linux center was followed in short order by others in New York City; Austin, Texas; Montpellier, France; and Tokyo. The centers make it simpler for software developers to build and deploy new applications for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open technology building blocks using Linux and the latest IBM POWER processor technology…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Technology Business Research’s new Hyperscale Server Customer Landscape Report estimates that the market for hyperscale servers at U.S. organizations with at least 500 employees represents a $1.7 billion opportunity over the next 12 months. As cloud computing continues to shape the market for IT infrastructure, data center customers increasingly require simplicity, flexibility and high levels of scalability in their on-premises hardware ecosystems.

“Cloud services are driving a massive market for hyperscale server technology, but we’re now starting to see the trickle-down effect into the enterprise space,” said Christian Perry, senior analyst and content manager in TBR’s data center practice. “We see data centers moving toward server infrastructure that’s easy to purchase, easy to deploy and relatively simple to manage. These are customers that are not afraid to consider change to obtain the business outcomes they seek.”…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

A well-planned digital strategy is important for any firm looking to get ahead. There is ample opportunity for companies, especially midsize firms, to apply technologies such as cloud computing, social media, mobile and numerous other business analytics into their data infrastructures for long-term success. But are enough businesses thinking this way?

Understanding Convergence

An executive at Ovum recently suggested that firms do not sufficiently understand the importance of converged IT. This deficiency, reports TechDay, causes business leaders to make shortsighted decisions when planning their IT strategies, and ignore opportunities to improve the efficiency with which they manage and interpret information…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

Systems administrators and software engineers have spent the past five years facing down the problem of whether and how to use software to automate application life cycles. As an industry, we’ve agreed to call this process of defining an application life cycle in software "orchestration."

Brian Adler, an architect at cloud management platform provider RightScale, defines orchestration as automating "short- or long-running, event-driven, or schedule-based tasks across a deployment of servers." Luke Kanies, CEO at IT configuration management developer Puppet Labs, defines it as "making ordered changes to multipart services across a wide range of hosts, in an even or progressive manner."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Mike Kavis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft have been consistently dropping their prices in the battle to become the low cost provider of compute, network, and storage cloud services. You can bet that if one of them drops their price, the other two will announce price reductions within days. The reality is that the consumption of these core cloud services has become commoditized. The real differentiator is the features that provide agility to developers. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud providers are in a war to create the best platform for developers to quickly build and launch applications. There are two key categories of features that they are focusing on to win the hearts and minds of enterprises: hybrid clouds and PaaS (Platform as a Service) capabilities.

Building the bridge between public and private clouds

For startups and small or midsized companies, public clouds are a no brainer. These companies don’t have large investments in data centers or the people needed to run them. SMBs also have more limited IT budgets. Enterprises, on the other hand, have complex heterogeneous environments with years of legacy, tons of existing infrastructure, and cultures that are used to owning and controlling infrastructure…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Tsidulko.

Toshiba is a household name when it comes to personal computers, but it’s certainly not the first company that pops into mind when people think of cloud computing. But earlier this year, the Japanese consumer electronics giant launched a new cloud service, one targeting the virtual desktop market and focusing on distribution exclusively through the channel.

Today, Toshiba Cloud Services and Solutions, a division of Toshiba America Information Systems, announced a new partner program that reaffirms this commitment to the channel. The Toshiba Solutions Partner Program offers managed service providers recurring monthly revenue, extensive marketing support, custom product configurations, and the ability to fully white-label the entire product that they offer their customers…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Scott Lowe.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, you’ve no doubt witnessed the tremendous surge of interest in the use of various container technologies. One container technology in particular — a project called Docker — has received enormous attention over the last few months.

The comments I’ve heard about Docker have been almost unanimously positive, with some folks even suggesting that organizations building out cloud computing environments should abandon virtual machines (VMs) for containers due to their lower overhead and potentially better performance…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, today announced that the Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution was launched at the Huawei Network Congress 2014 (HNC) in Beijing on May 25. The Cloud Connect Solution is designed to simplify the process for the construction of cloud service systems among enterprises by using Huawei’s advanced CloudEngine series of data center switches, Huawei Agile Controller cloud applications, cloud platforms, and data center network resources that can be integrated with improved automation.

"With the rapid development of cloud computing, Big Data, and mobility, data center infrastructures are facing unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities. Currently, enterprise servers, storage devices, and switches in data centers are highly virtualized. These devices form a virtual world to support cloud computing. However, there are still a large number of independent physical network devices in data centers, and the distinction between the virtual and physical worlds makes it difficult to implement fast service deployment, unified resource allocation, fault isolation and diagnosis, and automated service optimization," said by Mr. Liu Shaowei, president of Huawei Enterprise Networking Product Line…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mitch Simcoe.

Enterprises today need WAN connectivity that can support their growing cloud and virtualization efforts. There are two main business models to choose from: A build-your-own network model based on dark fiber and the use of carrier-grade packet-optical technology, or a managed private network service that is outsourced to a service provider.

To decide which option to pursue, enterprises must carefully analyze the two deployment models against a well-defined list of capabilities that can best address their company’s long-term goals and needs. They also need to establish clear objectives for how to allocate operational and capital expenses for these initiatives going forward. In the final analysis, this may not be an either/or decision as many organizations have both models running concurrently. Here are some key factors to consider when weighing your options:…

Grazed from Nature.com. Author: Nadia Drake.

Sometime in the next decade, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will open its compound eyes — roughly 2,000 radio dishes divided between sites in South Africa and Australia. The radio telescope will then begin staring into supermassive black holes, searching for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields and seeking clues about the young Universe.

Meanwhile, the telescope’s engineers are struggling to plan for the imminent data deluge. The photons that will stream into the array’s receivers are expected to produce up to 1 exabyte (1018 bytes) of data per day, roughly the amount handled by the entire Internet in 2000. Electricity costs for an on-site computing cluster big enough to process those data could total millions of dollars each year. So the engineers are investigating an increasingly common choice for researchers wrestling with big data: to outsource their computing to the cloud…