Industry News Desk

Atlantis Computing Gains Momentum in Global VDI Deployments

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:09:30 EST

Atlantis Computing, a provider of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions, has become the VDI storage optimization technology of choice for a growing number of customers ranging in size from 25 to 100,000 users across vertical markets that include financial services, insurance, government, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, retail, real estate, manufacturing, construction, energy, education, legal and telecommunications. Atlantis Computing customer base growth was driven entirely by partners on three continents; including deployments in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany and Japan. Atlantis Computing also increased its channel to 64 partners including value added resellers, system integrators and distributors. “Desktop Virtualization holds the promise of many benefits but had yet to receive a warm welcome from the market as initial VDI technologies were too expensive to deploy, speeds were slow, and users could easily tell the difference between virtual desktops and physical PCs,” said Bernard Harguindeguy, CEO of Atlantis Computing. “Atlantis ILIO is leading the new generation of VDI technologies and enabling our customer and partners to unlock the full potential of VDI by driving down the cost per desktop and delivering an experience that makes users want to switch to virtual desktops.”

Cloud Expo New York: Copyright and the Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

Wide and cheap availability of cloud-based media services is upon us. With the transformations these services are already bringing to the consumption of music, video and interactive media, change has likewise come to professional workflows. Documents in 2012 are read, written, collaborated on, and distributed anywhere an Internet-enabled device can reach – which is to say, everywhere. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Christopher Kenneally, Director of Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), will discuss how among research institutions and other knowledge-intensive enterprises (e.g., R&D units, medical research teams), widespread adoption of this new cloud functionality will bring dramatic changes in the ecology and characteristics of content use and re-use. Repertory-style licensing is already an important component to facilitate this shift in knowledge workers’ and researchers’ workflows. Indeed, as cloud-based content usage increases, repertory-style licensing will likely become an ever more critical and indispensable part of the toolkit for collaboration and content-sharing.

Rackspace Buys SharePoint Expertise

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:16:00 EST

Fresh off a happy quarter, Rackspace said Thursday that it’s bought SharePoint911, one of those you-never-heard-of-them outfits that does SharePoint consulting, training and JumpStart services so it can deliver newfangled SharePoint services along with its existing SharePoint hosting. It didn’t say how much it paid for the self-funded unit so it’s obviously immaterial. Eight-year-old SharePoint911 includes six Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and the authors of over 10 SharePoint books and nine SharePoint training courses. It’s thought Rackspace is fattening up because of AWS. Microsoft’s SharePoint operation is a billion-dollar-a-year business with tens of millions of users. As popular as it is, the software can be crotchety to set up and handle.

Enterprise Transformation Using Cloud and Cloud Platforms at Cloud Expo NY

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:58:00 EST

Cloud is a shift from the focus on underlying technology implementation to leveraging existing implementations and further building upon them. Cloud orchestration or a network of clouds is the wave of the future where these clouds can operate with elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. Effective service management is an important aspect of managing such networks. The transition to the cloud will enable the further aggregation of composite web services and enhanced business-to-business capabilities for integrating processes and applications. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Ajay Budhraja, CTO at the Department of Justice, will discuss how, for example, the requirement to access multiple clouds will cause a shift toward utilizing identity management services and single sign-on capabilities. With cloud services, a traditional project that just obtained survey information from customers and provided reports was transitioned to leverage an authentication service, cloud customer information service, cloud reporting service and other cloud services to provide a scalable, highly integrated solution quickly.

Citrix Floats CloudStack 3

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:18:00 EST

Citrix has opened up a beta of its CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. Citrix acquired the Java-based cloud management last year when it bought Cloud.com. A full production version of the branded stuff is supposed to be available later this quarter. Citrix said CloudStack is already handling over $1 billion in revenue for more than 85 large-scale production clouds, including Zynga, IDC Frontier and Nokia Research. CloudStack 3 is supposed to be for any size customer that wants to transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds in the IaaS fashion of Amazon.

Atos, EMC, VMware Start Cloud Company

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:37:00 EST

EMC and VMware are going into the cloud business with Atos, the big, publicly owned, Paris-based global IT services firm, intending to take an equity position in Canopy, an end-to-end cloud company Atos is setting up using EMC and VMware technology. The companies said Wednesday when Canopy was announced that their shareholder agreement wasn’t set in stone yet and wouldn’t be until early Q2 but the Americans are talking about kicking in tens of millions of dollars. At least EMC is. The object of the game is to cash in on what is projected to be a $267 billion cloud market by 2020, up from $59 billion this year.

Start-Up Encrypts Data in the Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:56:00 EST

A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that’s just hit the radar says it’s got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It’s supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing keys. It promises that a user’s data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual Private Data (VPD) System, a combination of the start-up’s Virtual Appliance and Virtual Key Management Service, comes complements of its patent-pending homomorphic split-key encryption technology, which is supposed to increase security by an order of magnitude through hosted key management.

Rackspace Acquires SharePoint911

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing, on Thursday announced its acquisition of SharePoint911, an industry leader in SharePoint consulting, training, and "JumpStart" services within SharePoint. The unification of both companies provides capabilities to deliver unparalleled SharePoint hosting solutions along with expert services to the enterprise market. "For several years, Rackspace has focused on providing managed SharePoint infrastructure," says John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace. "We are thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure."

Swisscom Floats Red Hat Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Swisscom, the Swiss telecom, is going into the cloud business. Its subsidiary Swisscom IT Services AG has signed up with Red Hat as a Certified Cloud Provider and launched a public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud targeting enterprise-class customers primarily in the Swiss market. It’s offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the hour or year for virtual machine consumption on the IaaS cloud. Swisscom just posted its first quarterly loss in 10 years, losing $911 million largely because of a write-down in its Italian fixed-line unit impacted by the Italian debt crisis. It also pinched guidance on expectations of lower revenues and price erosion in its core market, which might explain it’s interest in diversifying.

Atlantis Computing & Trend Micro Launch VMware View Reference Architecture

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 03:00:00 EST

Atlantis Computing, the leader in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimisation solutions and Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704) (TSE: 4704), a global cloud security leader, on Friday announced the release of the first VMware View 5 reference architectures for 1,000 persistent and non-persistent virtual desktops. The groundbreaking new reference architectures were developed by Atlantis Computing and Trend Micro with guidance from VMware and is the first to incorporate the latest technology from VMware View 5 including vSphere 5, View persona, ThinApp and View Planner as well as Trend Micro Deep Security 8 to secure every desktop. This reference architecture documents the blueprint for scaling from 300 desktops to tens of thousands of users with Atlantis ILIO to drive down the infrastructure cost per desktop to $172 for non-persistent desktops and $234 for persistent desktops while delivering a rich user experience that users can embrace. The impact is a dramatic reduction of up to 94 percent in the cost of storage for VDI and a major boost in performance of View desktops.

CloudLinux Releases Virtualized File System for Shared Hosters

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:12:00 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., on Thursday released CafeFS 3, a virtualized file system for shared hosters that cages each customer within its own virtualized file system. CageFS becomes part of CloudLinux OS at no additional charge. CloudLinux OS, the only commercially-supported Linux OS made specifically for shared hosting, substantially increases server stability, density and security to bring far greater efficiency to the Web hosting business. To eliminate potential security issues, CageFS ensures that users will not see any other users and will have no way to detect the presence of other users on the server. As an additional precaution, users are not able to see server configuration files, such as Apache config files. Meanwhile, the user's environment is fully functional and is not restricted in other ways. Beyond providing safe Web hosting, CageFS offers the necessary functionality and security to provide safe IRC, shell and backup hosting.

Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for application integration and dependency management technologies to take center stage and accelerate enterprise application workloads into the cloud with single pane-of-glass view and control.

Cloud Expo New York: Big Data, Colocation and the Cloud

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:45:00 EST

As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architectures Require Scale-out Storage

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will discuss how Ethernet SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability – no forklift upgrades required. With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualization or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture. Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.

Bringing Cloud to the Business at Cloud Expo New York

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:45:00 EST

Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of cloud services brokerages and cloud orchestration. He will analyze challenges and presents practical results. Finally he will present his view on the practical implementation of cloud orchestration combined with event processing and maybe even “learning agents.”

Cloud Expo New York: The Compliant Cloud

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

Many organizations have embraced, or are considering, the benefits of cloud computing – speed, flexibility, increased expertise, shared workload, reduced costs, etc. The benefits are many – but so are the risks. What are the threats to cloud security? Which parties assume responsibility for securing the environment? What about the data? Which type of cloud deployment offers superior security benefits? In her session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kristin Lovejoy, Vice President of Information Technology Risk for IBM, will examine cloud computing from a security and compliance perspective.

HP’s Voyager Project Bears Fruit

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:15:00 EST

HP Monday claimed to have the most self-sufficient line of servers, the x86-based HP ProLiant Generation 8, the first fruits of a two-year Project Voyager meant to eliminate error-prone, downtime-creating manual tasks and cut data center costs. HP says it’s spent $300 million on Gen8, managing to automate 50% of a data center’s manual operations such as server administration, application deployment, and power and cooling management. On average that means it can save a 10,000-square-foot data center an estimated $20 million a year. It says the Gen8 servers, previewed late last year, adapt to their environment in real-time and by continuously analyzing thousands of system parameters, they optimize application performance and proactively improve uptime. Naturally the automation increases productivity, reduces errors, and simplifies operations for virtualized, cloud, and other dynamic computing models. (HP’s just gotta pray customers don’t forsake the bulk of their big on-premise boxes for the public cloud.)

HP Announced a New Generation of Automated and Efficient Hardware

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:15:00 EST

HP on Monday took direct aim at the ever-increasing costs of data centers and managing an explosion of data by announcing a new generation of automated and efficient hardware. The new generation of ProLiant servers includes better internal management, powerful automation features, and improved energy conservation. The ProLiant Gen8 servers are part HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, and represent the first step in the company's Project Voyager, a two-year, $300-million effort to redefine the economics of the data center. At the heart of the new generation of servers is ProActive Insight architecture, which includes integrated lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. Data has become a differentiator in business, and with an ever-expanding growth in storage needs, enterprises are feeling the pinch in personnel costs, energy, and facilities. Supporting data as a lifecycle may be IT's fastest growing cost worldwide.

SoftLayer Introduces Searchable Object Storage

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced the immediate worldwide availability of SoftLayer Object Storage, a redundant and highly scalable cloud storage service that allows users to easily store, search and retrieve data across the Internet, with optional CDN connectivity, or across SoftLayer’s global private network. According to Marc Jones, director of product innovation for SoftLayer, “Object Storage gives our users an easy, scalable way to store and retrieve data. With our search functionality, SoftLayer Object Storage customers can efficiently find and retrieve objects from the store based on user-definable tags, extending their data management capabilities beyond traditional object storage services.”

OCZ Launches Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

OCZ Technology Group, a provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, on Tuesday announced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express (PCIe) flash storage solution, designed to accelerate cloud computing applications and reduce operating expenses in the data center. The new Z-Drive R4 CloudServ features monumental data throughput, and raises the bar in performance and capacity. Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology, notes that "the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe solid state drive delivers game-changing performance and enables clients to process massive data-sets with up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single, easy-to-deploy card." With increasing emphasis on cloud computing and the sheer growth in data, PCIe-based flash storage systems have the ability to bypass traditional storage overhead by reducing latencies, increasing throughput, and enabling efficient processing of massive quantities of data. The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ is capable of transferring multiple gigabytes per second and delivering over a million IOPS with a level of concentrated performance that enables system architects to design more productive infrastructures while lowering costs associated with hardware failure, maintenance, structural footprint, and energy consumption.

Cloud Expo New York: Clouds Are All About APIs

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST

Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud computing? Mårten Mickos is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. From 2001-8 he was CEO of MySQL AB, which was then bought by Sun. In September 2009 he became Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. He joined Eucalyptus as CEO in March 2010.

Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing at Cloud Expo New York

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:45:00 EST

Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management of cloud computing environments. The session will appeal to anyone who has a good grasp of traditional data center infrastructure but is struggling with the benefits and migration path to a cloud computing environment. Systems administrators and IT generalists will leave the discussion with a general overview of the options at their disposal to effectively build and manage their own cloud computing environments using free and open source software.

Cloud Expo: Why Cloud Is the Answer to the World’s DNA Big Data Challenge

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it will impact healthcare across the globe.

Apache Hadoop: Now, Next, and Beyond at Cloud Expo New York

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have happened recently with the Apache Hadoop project, what is has already accomplished (including real-world examples), and what it is going to make possible in the future.

Embedded Cloud Enablement Services at Cloud Expo New York

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:06:00 EST

The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive dynamic within the embedded ecosystem. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Chris Rommel, VP Embedded Practices at VDC Research Group, will discuss the key question: What companies or even types of companies (hardware, software, or third-party engineering vendors) will emerge as the primary providers of professional services to supplement the COTS components and enable this next level of system connectivity and functionality?

AMD Sales Chief Out

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought. AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to the company so the sales experience will be good for him. He knows how to do it judging from his record at Lenovo although it does leave him with a full plate. Ghilardi joined AMD from HP to run EMEA in 2008 and was named sales chief the next year. Read last week told Wall Street that AMD is switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet.

Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

New York Drops Intel Antitrust Case

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Intel has finally seen the back of that 2009 antitrust suit that New York State’s attorney general brought against it that was pretty much a case of New York copying over the charges AMD had made in its massive but now long-settled suit. See, AMD was building a big state-of-art chip plant upstate New York, a project that Globalfoundries inherited when it bought AMD’s factories, and New York figured it could get some easy money. Its mistake was in thinking that cases like AMD’s actually go to a jury – like Intel would ever let that happen – and not realizing that AMD needed the money and would take a settlement and run. When it did, New York was left in district court in Delaware, where it had piggybacked on AMD’s suit, with no home court advantage.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Computing and Healthcare

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 05:15:00 EST

What are the legal implications and consequences of cloud computing in the healthcare and high-tech sectors? What are the potential legal protections and solutions from the point of view of providers, suppliers and consumers? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Paul Rubell, a Partner at Meltzer Lippe, will discuss the federal mandates that will encourage “meaningful use” of EHR technology by 2015, and what those mandates will require executives to understand about cloud computing and solutions for implementing cloud computing across large companies, corporations and not-for-profits in advance of federal mandates.

Clustrix Delivers Software-Only Kit to Demo Shard-less MySQL Scaling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

On Tuesday, Clustrix announced the availability of the free Clustrix Development Kit, allowing users to try out the NewSQL system that it's backers say scales to an "unlimited number of users, transactions or data." There's a lot to like about MySQL databases if you're a start-up, until success comes knocking a bit too fast. When big data demand soars then MySQL can sour on making the transactions needed on time. Sharding the application and data resources has been about the only answer, other than to painfully and expensively cut and run to another data base like NoSQL. This was the problem facing Massive Media when its social networking site Twoo rapidly grew to four million users in six months. By using the Clustrix distributed relational database system, Massive Media gained high scale-out transactional performance and automated fault tolerance, said Clustrix. And that has now made Twoo the poster child for Clustrix, a San Francisco start-up funded by Sequoia and USVP and its co-founder, Paul Mikesell, also co-founded Isilon, which was sold to EMC for $2.25 billion.

EMC Touts Isilon for Hadoop

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

EMC moved to make Hadoop safe for the Joe Blow big company that wants to figure out what’s in all that unstructured data it’s got. It’s integrated the Hadoop file system into its Isilon scale-out NAS storage and lets the two of them cuddle up with its Hadoop-digesting Greenplum analytics machine. Greenplum also handles structured data so users can run queries across both datasets. EMC says that makes Isilon the very first enterprise-class scale-out NAS system with native Hadoop support, giving Hadoop Big Data enterprise comfortable features like snapshots, replication and backup. The storage Goliath figures it can probably make a packet off the scheme, removing Hadoop’s NameNode single point of failure and making it manageable by mere mortals. The way EMC does things Isilon’s native petabyte-scale OneFS file system actually handles the Big Data, not Hadoop, thanks to Isilon’s native OneFS file system being integrated with Hadoop’s Distributed File System protocol and chewing through the scads of resident in the scale-out repository.

Amazon Trims S3 Prices

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Amazon has reined in the price of its S3 storage a bit as of February 1. It didn’t give a reason for its largesse other than a vague allusion to economies of scale. Maybe it has something to do with Gartner saying using cloud storage for business intelligence is only cheaper for the first five years. Anyway, under the new schedule 50TB, for instance, will cost 12% less than it did and 500TB will be 13.5% less; headier amounts are unchanged – at least in America. Other regions have their own schedules. AWS GovCloud also has its own pricing. Last week Amazon counted the objects S3 is stored and put the number at 762 billion, up 192% year-over-year.

AMD Vows Not to Be Road Kill

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

AMD Thursday told financial analysts it’s gonna try not to become road kill by addressing the “trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence” and switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet. That means AMD might pump for mobile maven ARM, whose low-power chips are challenging Intel enough for AMD CEO Rory Read to prophesy “the breakdown of proprietary control points.” Such a move has been suspected. The fact that AMD didn’t have a mobile strategy cost the company’s last CEO Dirk Meyer his job.

ScaleOut Software to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:15:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleOut Software, a leading provider of distributed in-memory data grids and data analysis solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. ScaleOut Software develops and markets distributed in-memory data grid (IMDG) software for storing, managing, and analyzing data in the cloud, on-premise, and mixed environments. Its flagship product, ScaleOut StateServer®, accelerates application performance with linear scalability and enables automatic data migration to and from the cloud. Integrated map/reduce functionality provides intuitive, powerful data analysis.

Acer Sues Ex-CEO

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

Acer has sued its former CEO Gianfranco Lanci in Milan, charging him with breaching a one-year non-compete by going to work for its Lenovo rival. It is asking for damages. Lanci left Acer last year at the end of March in a strategy flap over the company’s direction, mobile gismos and an underestimated global downturn and started consulting for Lenovo in September. He was named head of a new Lenovo EMEA unit last month, starting April 2. Acer reportedly doesn’t want an injunction stopping him from taking the job, just money. Lenovo is on a tear currently challenging HP’s grip on its title as the world’s top PC vendor. Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit a few years ago and last year added German merchant Medion, a move regarded as dangerous to Acer.

Cloud Expo New York: The Dark Side of Virtualization

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. Reasons range from technical to legal to IT ops to politics to finances. Attend this session, and hear a true IT insider’s guide to the truth about virtualization.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Security for Regulated Industries – CloudAudit

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent. CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments.

Cloud Expo New York: Goodbye PaaS 1.0, Hello PaaS 2.0

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to reach its full potential and become the modern day abstraction layer for software delivery, we must enter the PaaS 2.0 phase. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Sinclair Schuller, Co-Founder & CEO of Apprenda, will explain how organizations are currently using PaaS, where PaaS is evolving to, and highlight best practices to maximize the value of existing investments when adopting PaaS today.

Cloud Expo New York: Best Practices for Big Unstructured Data Storage

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Big Data has become very popular as what can probably best be described as “loosely structured large scale data”, i.e., data sets of relatively small files. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, will explain what Big Unstructured Data is (lots of large, unstructured files) and how you build scalable storage infrastructures that can handle such volumes of data. The focus will be on Object Storage, which is the future storage paradigm that uses concepts of cloud computing to optimize the back-end storage for cloud applications.

Cloud Expo New York: The Growing Big Data Tools Landscape

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best – and most cost-effective – for their organization. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Lucas, Chief Strategy Officer at GCE, will run through what enterprises really need to know about the growing set of big data tools – including those being leveraged by organizations today as well as the new and innovative tools just arriving on the scene. He will also help attendees gain greater insight on how to match the right data center tools to a specific enterprise challenge and what processes need to change to handle big data.