IBM's SmartCloud public and private cloud portfolio are being fleshed out in answer to a growing demand from IT and enterprise users.
Based on an IBM survey of 500 enterprise IT and business executives, 33 percent have deployed more than one cloud pilot to date, a figure poised to double by 2014. The survey also found that 40 percent see the cloud as bringing "substantial change" to their IT environments. IBM said it will be supporting 200 million users in the cloud by the end of next year. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 14, 20110 comments
Microsoft's SQL Server database server platform and its cloud-based SQL Azure may share many core technologies but they are not one and the same. As a result, moving data and apps from one to the other is not all that simple.
Two companies this week set out to address that during the annual PASS Summit taking place in Seattle. Attunity and CA Technologies introduced tools targeted at simplifying the process of moving data from on-premises databases to SQL Azure.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 13, 20110 comments
Looking to quell criticism that it has too much control over the OpenStack Project, Rackspace has agreed to establish an independent foundation next year that will assume ownership and governance for the open source cloud platform.
Rackspace had been under pressure to make such a move, and did so last week, announcing its intention to form the foundation during the OpenStack Conference in Boston. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 12, 20110 comments
In a move that will boost its portfolio of high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud management software, IBM on Tuesday said it has agreed to acquire Platform Computing for an undisclosed sum.
Founded 19 years ago, Toronto-based Platform is regarded as a leading provider of workload management software for distributed, clustered and grid computing environments. IBM boasts Platform has more than 2,000 customers, including 23 of the 30 the world's largest enterprises. Among them are the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN), Citigroup and Pratt & Whitney. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 11, 20110 comments
Hosting provider Savvis this week said it will offer Microsoft's SQL Server and Oracle's Enterprise 11g RAC databases in the cloud.
Savvis said its new Symphony Database lets customers provision the databases without having to license the software or acquire hardware, while providing a scale-up and scale-down architecture. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 06, 20110 comments
Looking to convince large enterprises to use its broader suite of infrastructure and platform cloud services, Google has launched its Cloud Transformation Program.
To date, much of the company's enterprise cloud emphasis has focused on Google Apps, its suite of e-mail, calendaring, collaboration and productivity tools. Now the company is looking to extend its other cloud offerings, notably its Google App Engine Platform as a Service (PaaS), to large enterprises. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 06, 20111 comments
Adobe Systems has been slow to move its traditional desktop software business to the cloud, but the company will take a key step forward to change that when it lets users of its Creative Suite of apps share and synchronize content through a new cloud service it plans to launch next month.
The company announced Creative Cloud at its annual AdobeMAX 2011 conference in Los Angeles this week. Initially, the service will offer 20 GB of storage capacity to users of Adobe Touch Apps, also launched this week, and the flagship Adobe Creative Suite, enabling collaboration and sharing of the content created with the software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 06, 20110 comments
Startup Piston Computing came out of stealth mode this week, introducing a hardened operating system based on the open source OpenStack project for private enterprise clouds.
Piston is led by CEO and co-founder Joshua McKenty, who was technical lead and cloud architect of NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. NASA and Rackspace co-founded the OpenStack Project. Just last month, former NASA CTO Chris Kemp launched Nebula, which offers a turnkey appliance based on the OpenStack platform. McKenty left NASA last summer to launch Piston with the goal of bringing private clouds like Nebula to enterprises based on OpenStack. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 28, 20111 comments
Looking to extend the reach of its customer support and service platform, Salesforce.com last week said it has acquired Assistly for $50 million.
The company said it will integrate Assistly, a provider of online customer service help-desk apps for small and medium businesses that run in the cloud, into the Salesforce.com Service Cloud offering. Assistly is targeted at SMBs and startups with its $49 per month, per user subscription fee. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 27, 20110 comments
Cloud infrastructure software vendor Nimbula has released an upgrade of its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform.
Nimbula Director 1.5 now supports a geographically distributed cloud and can manage the multi-site cloud from a single management interface. It also features policy-based automation for compute and storage, aimed at simplifying the request of resources; persistent block store, which provides self-service interfaces to cloud storage; and a customizable installer for operating system, drivers and management software. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 27, 20110 comments
The OpenStack consortium on Thursday released the fourth version of its open source cloud operating system.
Dubbed Diablo, the new release gains improved compute scalability, storage and networking. And OpenStack is introducing identity management features and a new Web-based management interface slated for the next release of the platform. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 22, 20110 comments
Wondering what caused the outage that brought down some of Microsoft's cloud services two weeks ago? While Microsoft attributed it to a DNS error, that was all the company was saying at the time.
The three-hour outage occurred on the evening of Sept. 8 and affected Windows Live services such as SkyDrive, MSN and Hotmail for three hours. Also affected was Microsoft's Office 365 service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on September 21, 20110 comments