Rackspace Hosting is shutting down its Slicehost service within the next 12 months, the company said in a letter to customers.
Acquired by Rackspace in 2008, Slicehost is a managed hosting provider that Rackspace maintained as a separate business unit. The move is likely to be unwelcome news to those who must migrate from the Slicehost service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 04, 20110 comments
One of the most popular PC and server backup and recovery software products is Symantec's Backup Exec and the company said this week that cloud-based support is on the way.
Symantec announced Backup Exec.cloud at its annual Vision conference in Las Vegas. The new offering is targeted at small and medium businesses and branch offices of larger enterprises that want to offload backups to a cloud-based service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 04, 20110 comments
[UPDATE: Amazon released a detailed report explaining the cause of the outage on Friday. Read the story here.]
Amazon Web Services' four-day outage was a defining moment in the history of cloud computing -- not only for its impact but for the company's deafening silence.
The widely reported outage at Amazon's Northern Virginia datacenter left a number of sites crippled for several days, though Amazon most recently reported that service has been restored. However, the company has acknowledged that .07 percent of the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes apparently won't be fully recoverable. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 28, 20114 comments
Boomi, the provider of cloud integration software acquired by Dell late last year, has upgraded its AtomSphere software with improved middleware connectivity, support for large datasets and extended monitoring capabilities.
AtomSphere is designed to connect Software as a Service cloud offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite and others to on-premises systems. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 27, 20110 comments
BMC Software has upgraded its Cloud Lifecycle Management platform to support creation and management of complete private and hybrid cloud stacks.
The introduction of CLM 2.0 comes a year after the first release, which focused on virtualization management and datacenter automation, thanks to the company's $800 million acquisition of BladeLogic. BMC describes CLM 2.0 as a cradle-to-grave cloud provisioning and management platform. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 27, 20110 comments
Microsoft International President Jean-Philippe Courtois earlier this month told Bloomberg that the company will spend a whopping 90 percent of its $9.6 billion research and development budget on cloud computing this year.
That brings up the question: Is Microsoft putting all its eggs in one basket? Sourya Biswas asks that same thing in a blog post this week. A proponent of cloud computing and, according to his LinkedIn profile, an MBA student at the University of Notre Dame and a former risk analytics manager at Citigroup, Biswas wonders if Microsoft is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He writes in his blog: More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 21, 20112 comments
Rackspace Hosting this week added a new load balancing service aimed at letting customers rapidly scale capacity.
Called Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers, the service is intended for those with mission-critical Web apps. It lets customers configure cloud servers or dedicated hosts with more capacity as workloads require. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 20, 20110 comments
Hewlett-Packard Co. last week released Cloud Services Automation 2.0, an upgraded version of its toolset aimed at simplifying the transformation of premises-based apps to those that can run in the cloud.
CSA 2.0 not only accelerates the deployment of cloud infrastructure but it expedites the deployment and configuration of the applications, said Paul Muller, VP of strategic marketing for HP Software products. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 20, 20110 comments
Fresh off Microsoft's announcement last week that the next version of its Dynamics AX enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite will be available as a hosted cloud service, systems integrator Avanade said it will do the same -- but customers don't have to wait.
Avanade, 80 percent of which is held by IT outsourcing firm Accenture with the remaining stake held by Microsoft, launched Cloud ERP at the annual Convergence conference that took place in Atlanta last week. Cloud ERP will work with the forthcoming version, Dynamics AX 2012, as well as the current release. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 19, 20110 comments
At the MIX 11 conference in Las Vegas this week, Microsoft revealed a number of new features in its Windows Azure service, as well as several new offers to those testing the company's cloud service.
The new features are targeted at developers to help them build apps faster, while accelerating the performance of applications and providing access to those apps via popular identity providers, including Microsoft's Active Directory, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo! and Facebook. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 13, 20110 comments
Iron Mountain is shutting down its public cloud storage services Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform, market researcher Gartner reported in a research note last week, making it the third company to make an exit over the past year.
Startup Vaultscape shut down last year, and EMC's Atmos Online also went offline last year, Gartner noted. "To date, public cloud storage IaaS has had a modest level of adoption," according to the research note. "Not incidentally, all three service providers' go-to-market strategies focused purely on cloud storage unaccompanied by any cloud compute services." More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 13, 20110 comments
A high-profile startup run by key founders of Amazon Web Services EC2 cloud service is shipping its first product.
Nimbula last week officially released Director 1.0, a cloud operating system that enterprise customers and service providers can install on their own servers. The software provides an EC2-like experience, according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 12, 20110 comments