Joyent has launched a new public cloud service that it says is faster and cheaper than Amazon Web Services' popular Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), as well as other Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
The San Francisco-based company's upgraded Joyent Cloud service is built on a new platform, called SmartDataCenter 6, which Joyent claimed offers improved performance, management and security. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 20, 20110 comments
Gartner has endorsed Google's Gmail service as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Exchange Online for enterprises with more than 5,000 employees.
The IT market researcher last week released a report called "Google Gmail Emerges as a Significant Threat to Microsoft in the Enterprise." The conclusions are noteworthy given the IT market researcher's clout with CIOs and the cutthroat rivalry between Microsoft and Google to win large enterprise cloud e-mail contracts. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 20, 20117 comments
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has picked up another security accreditation from the federal government, which should allow it to further penetrate the public sector with its popular infrastructure services, as well as give it more credibility with businesses.
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) last week gave Amazon the green light with its Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Moderate level authorization and accreditation. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 19, 20110 comments
The world got to see the next version of Windows this week, and while its new Metro user interface promises to change how users interact with their PCs, it also will leverage the cloud in new ways.
Not that that should be a surprise. With Microsoft's marching orders that it is "all in" the cloud, one would expect Windows to lead the charge. At its Build conference in Anaheim, Calif. this week, Microsoft gave the first in-depth public demos of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8, the code names for the next Windows releases. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 15, 20111 comments
Rackspace plans to deploy the OpenStack open source cloud platform across its entire infrastructure.
OpenStack was originally developed by Rackspace and NASA, which built the NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. The year-old OpenStack Project now has more than 90 members, with a community of developers collaborating on the open source cloud operating system. The OpenStack code is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 14, 20110 comments
New backup and recovery software from CA Technologies is designed to support a number of cloud services.
The company's ARCserve r16, released last week, provides a common cloud connection for all forms of data protection, including core file backup, disk imaging, replication and high availability. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 14, 20110 comments
While chaos seems to be reigning at Hewlett-Packard Co., one area where it doesn't appear to be making any strategic shifts is in its push into cloud computing. On Wednesday, the company revealed plans for its public cloud services, making them available to select beta testers. And at last week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas, HP launched a number of products aimed at helping both enterprises and service providers build cloud-based infrastructures.
Perhaps most noteworthy was HP's new VirtualSystem platform consisting of converged servers, storage and networking, controlled by the company's Insight management software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 08, 20110 comments
Dell this week launched its first public and hybrid cloud offerings, following on its announcement earlier this year that it would invest $1 billion to deliver cloud computing infrastructure and services. The company also introduced cloud-based application services for small and medium businesses.
On Monday at the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Dell and VMware jointly released Dell Cloud, which is built upon vCloud Datacenter Services. The two companies said they will jointly offer the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform to enterprises, hosting and outsourcing providers, systems integrators, and service providers. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 01, 20110 comments
VMware's Cloud Foundry project released a beta version of its open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) for developer laptops and desktops.
The Micro Cloud Foundry is software for developers who want to build and test applications locally without having to connect to the cloud. Developers can download a virtual machine image of Micro Cloud Foundry, which is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X, VMware Workstation and VMware Player for Linux and Windows. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 26, 20110 comments
Verizon Communications has acquired CloudSwitch, whose software makes it possible to move applications and workloads between public and internal datacenters. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The company's gateway appliance includes software that allows administrators to move workloads from enterprise datacenters to public clouds without changing the application or infrastructure layer. Applications maintain policies when moved between various cloud environments and internal datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 26, 20110 comments
Eucalyptus Systems disclosed plans to roll out the third version of its open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private cloud software.
The new release, dubbed Eucalyptus 3, adds high availability (HA) to its cloud platform, meaning customers will be ensured uptime in the event of a hardware, software or network failure. The system will fail over if it goes down for any reason, including a failed disk drive, memory corruption or even a power outage. In any such event, the software will fail over to a "hot spare" service running on different hardware. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 25, 20110 comments
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched a new Web caching service that lets customers deploy an in-memory cache for applications running in the cloud.
The company says its new ElastiCache service lets customers add an in-memory cache to their application architectures. That will enable them to boost the performance of applications by letting customers retrieve information from the in-memory cache rather than from slower disk-based databases.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 23, 20110 comments