Even as Hewlett-Packard prepares its public cloud compute service, it is already planning an upgrade to the portfolio that would include block storage.
The high-performance, high-availability HP Block Storage was released to private beta on Tuesday. HP didn't say when the public beta or final version would become available, or how much the service will cost. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 08, 20120 comments
As VMware's Cloud Foundry effort continues to gain momentum toward creating an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) ecosystem, Red Hat this week re-invigorated its rival OpenShift alternative. But it remains to be seen if Red Hat's bid to rain on VMware's parade will succeed.
Both companies launched their respective projects last year but VMware appears to have gained the upper hand in lining up a broad mix of partners and enthusiasm for Cloud Foundry than Red Hat has with OpenShift. Red Hat revived OpenShift on Monday by releasing OpenShift Origin, the components of its OpenShift PaaS platform to the open source community. Developers can access the code from GitHub. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 03, 20120 comments
CollabNet, well known by software developers for its commercial distribution of the Subversion open-source application lifecycle management (ALM) platform, is bringing its source version control (SVC) technology to the cloud.
The company this week is launching CloudForge, a self-service iteration of its TeamForge ALM platform and source code repository that runs in public and private clouds. CollabNet's ALM technology is used by developers who practice Agile development.
Enterprises typically have used TeamForge More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 02, 20121 comments
Microsoft today said it has partnered with Twilio in a pact which will let developers build voice and SMS-enabled applications that run on the Windows Azure cloud service.
Twilio is a startup based in San Francisco that offers a cloud-based telephony service. Its APIs let developers build the ability to initiate and receive phone calls from mobile and Web apps. In addition to enabling call control, the APIs allow developers to integrate voice messaging, interactive voice response and text messaging into their applications. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on May 02, 20120 comments
Looking to shore up its big data strategy, IBM has formed a partnership with Cloudera, provider of the widely deployed distribution of Hadoop, the open-source data management platform for searching and analyzing structured and unstructured data distributed across large commodity compute and storage infrastructures.
IBM also announced Wednesday it has agreed to acquire Vivisimo, More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 26, 20120 comments
The personal cloud storage landscape this week grew with Google throwing its hat in the ring -- but not without the competition attempting to rain on its parade.
Google Drive arrived Tuesday, making it the latest personal cloud storage offering to join the likes of Apple's iCloud, Box, Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive. Google Drive includes 5 GB of free storage with the option of paying for more. Among several alternatives, Google Drive subscribers can pay $4.99 per month for 100 GB of storage or $49.99 per month for 1 TB. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 25, 20120 comments
Looking to incent enterprises to use its Windows Azure cloud service to backup and archive their data, Microsoft today launched a discounted plan that lets customers store up to 41 TB of data for one year for $50,000.
At 8.5 cents per GB, that's a healthy discount over the current per-GB rate of about 12.5 cents, said Karl Dittman, a Microsoft business development director. "Normally a customer would have to purchase a petabyte of storage in order to get this pricing model we are providing for [approximately] 50 TB," Dittman said. That's not the upper limit; pricing will scale for larger amounts of storage. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 23, 20120 comments
While it took longer than planned, Rackspace, the first OpenStack co-sponsor and co-contributor along with NASA, says its cloud compute service is now based on the OpenStack platform. That means Rackspace has transitioned its existing Cloud Servers compute service to OpenStack, though it had originally gunned to have that work done by the end of last year. Customers can start utilizing it May 1. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 19, 20120 comments
Amazon Web Services today launched the AWS Marketplace, an online store that lets enterprise users procure cloud-based development tools, business applications and infrastructure from software suppliers.
This is a major step forward for the leading provider of cloud services in that the company is not only offering enterprises an alternative to running compute and storage infrastructures in their own datacenters but now Amazon is using its cloud infrastructure to become a major software-as-a-service (SaaS) distributor. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 19, 20120 comments
Not always seen as the most partner-friendly cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today took a key step toward trying to reverse that perception.
The company has formed the AWS Partner Network, a program aimed at supporting a wide cross-section of partners, including ISVs, third-party cloud providers (including SaaS and PaaS), systems integrators, consulting firms and managed services providers (MSPs). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 18, 20120 comments
While public and private clouds are changing the economics and delivery model of computing, IBM hopes to shake up the status quo of how systems are configured and supplied.
Big Blue on Wednesday said it will deliver a new class of hardware and software this quarter that it believes will reshape how servers, storage, networks, middleware and applications are packaged, set up and managed in datacenters run by enterprises, hosting facilities and cloud service providers.
IBM describes PureSystems as More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 12, 20120 comments
Microsoft today said the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has agreed to deploy Office 365 across 10,000 technical colleges and educational institutions throughout India, making the cloud service available to 7 million students and 500,000 faculty members.
Colleges that are part of AICTE will start using the Live@edu hosted e-mail, Office Web Apps, instant messaging and SkyDrive storage service over the next six months, and ultimately Office 365 as the version for educational institutional services rolls out. Office 365 will give students and faculty in colleges across India access to Exchange Online e-mail and scheduling, SharePoint Online and Lync Online. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on April 12, 20120 comments