Industry News Desk

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

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:25:00 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.

AMD Sales Chief Out

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:46:00 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.

New York Drops Intel Antitrust Case

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:26:00 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.

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.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Computing and Healthcare

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:15:00 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.

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.

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

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:00:00 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.

Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 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.

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.

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

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:15:00 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.

The New OpenNebula Self-Service Portal in Action

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

A new episode of the screencast series is now available at the OpenNebula YouTube Channel. This screencast demonstrates the new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers. Its aim is to offer a simplified access to shared infrastructure for non-IT end users. The screencast shows how to create a virtual network, how to upload an image, and how to launch virtual machines using them.

SoftLayer Appoints New Chief Financial Officer

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:45:00 EST

SoftLayer Technologies on Monday announced the appointment of Walter Z. Berger as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective in March. A seasoned finance and accounting executive, Mr. Berger will help guide and oversee the company’s continued market leadership and financial growth. He brings more than 30 years of experience to SoftLayer, including extensive operational experience as a CFO with several large, publicly held companies. Lance Crosby, CEO for SoftLayer, notes that Berger’s “proven track record and leadership will be invaluable as we embark on our next phase of growth. We’re delighted to have such a high caliber executive join our team.” Prior to joining SoftLayer Technologies, Mr. Berger was the CFO and executive vice president of Leap Wireless International Inc. From 2006 to 2008, Mr. Berger served in senior management roles at CBS Corporation, including as executive vice president and chief financial officer for CBS Radio, a division of CBS Corporation. Prior to joining CBS Radio, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO and a director of Emmis Communications from 1999 to 2005. From 1996 to 1997, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO of LG&E Energy Corporation and in 1997 was promoted to group president of the Energy Marketing Division, where he served until 1999. Early in his career, Mr. Berger held a number of financial and operating management roles in the manufacturing, service and energy fields. Mr. Berger began his career in audit at Arthur Andersen in 1977. Mr. Berger is a certified public accountant and holds a Bachelor of Arts in business administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

SeaMicro Adapts Xeon for Microservers

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

SeaMicro, the ambitious start-up that has been building so-called microservers out of low-power Intel Atom chips, has started building microservers out of low-voltage quad-core Intel Xeon chips using the same architecture its Atom systems use. The development is called the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. Needless to say, it’s the first fabric-based Xeon microserver ever made. It’s also supposed to be the most energy-efficient, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Xeon server now available, period. A single SM10000-XE replaces 32 dual-socket servers, but draws half the power and takes up a third the space without any changes to operating systems, applications or management tools. It eliminates layers of Ethernet switches, server management devices and expensive load balancers.

Tilera’s New Server Chips Arrive

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.

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

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:15:00 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.

Open Data Center Alliance Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:00:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that The Open Data Center Alliance, an independent organization that gives stakeholders a voice in shaping the future of cloud computing, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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. The Open Data Center Alliance was formed in 2010 as a unique consortium of leading global IT organizations. The Alliance is led by a steering committee of senior IT executives from BMW, China Life, China Unicom, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Terremark, Disney Technology Solutions and Services, and UBS. Intel Corporation serves as the organization’s technical advisor. The Alliance came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Its mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards.

SoftLayer Introduces Flex Images

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

The lines between physical and virtual IT resources are being erased with the introduction of SoftLayer Flex Images. Flex Images allow users to capture, replicate, and store an image of a cloud or dedicated server, and then deploy the image on either type of computing environment. Capabilities traditionally in the domain of virtual infrastructure, including the ability to quickly clone and reload servers, are extended to dedicated servers, along with cross-platform compatibility and simple migration between physical and virtual environments. “Flex Images provide our customers with unprecedented flexibility and scalability,” said Simon West, Chief Marketing Officer for SoftLayer. “The ability to provision and automate server images seamlessly between cloud and dedicated computing environments empowers users to easily build out their IT environments while being able to quickly meet changing requirements. Our customers can focus on the purpose of their application and then on the right technology solution—with the freedom to move between or integrate technologies as needed.”

Open Data Center Alliance to Co-Locate “Forecast 2012” at Cloud Expo NY

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:54:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Open Data Center Alliance, an independent organization that gives stakeholders a voice in shaping the future of cloud computing, will co-locate its one-day event “Forecast 2012: Shaping the Future of Cloud Computing” on June 12 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. “Forecast 2012: Shaping the Future of Cloud Computing” will be open to Alliance members, partner organizations and any companies and organizations interested in addressing the most pressing challenges associated with transitioning to cloud computing. The event will include presentations by top cloud visionaries, classes presented by Alliance technical leaders and the latest industry advancements in delivery of solutions based on Alliance requirements. For more information, or to register for Forecast 2012, please visit Forecast 2012.

UShareSoft to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:45:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that UShareSoft, provider of a cloud template factory, 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. UShareSoft offers a cloud server template factory and enterprise app store platform for self-service software onboarding to cloud. UShareSoft's UForge enables customers to automate the creation and management of cloud images and server templates, with full software governance. Additionally, UForge allows hosting providers to build their own dynamic app store for enterprise IT applications, quickly scaling their cloud services business and ecosystem. UShareSoft tools are helping hosting providers, ISVs and enterprises in their transition phase to the cloud. Headquartered in Europe, UShareSoft has an R&D center in Argentina and offices in the United States and Japan.

Riding the Enterprise Cloud Computing Wave of Change into the Future

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

In her general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Jill Tummler Singer, CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), discussed the key elements needed for a triumphant enterprise cloud computing migration and highlighted strategies (including security advantages found in the cloud) to ensure you don't crash and get caught in the riptide of this rapidly emerging technology. Jill Tummler Singer is CIO for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)- which as part of the 16-member Intelligence Community plays a primary role in achieving information superiority for the U.S. Government and Armed Forces. A DoD agency, the NRO is staffed by DoD and CIA personnel. It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program.

The DNA of an Enterprise Cloud

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Cloud computing has gained momentum and is increasingly being embraced by enterprises of all sizes for application delivery. But the cloud itself is often its own worst enemy as performance, reliability, and the lack of enterprise level capabilities have led to obstacles in growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology. This is only exacerbated by an increasingly mobile and global world, one that is plagued with security concerns. In his Day 3 Keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Willie M. Tejada, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai, discussed what Akamai is doing to solve the challenges you face in the cloud, and how Akamai's Intelligent platform can help you leverage both public and hybrid cloud infrastructures without sacrificing security or control.

Jon Rubinstein, Father of webOS, Leaves HP

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

HP has dispensed with the services of former Palm CEO and pivotal Apple graduate Jon Rubinstein, according to AllThingsDigital. Rubinstein has been like a man without a country since HP, after spending billions on the stuff decided it couldn’t go toe to toe with Apple and Google, and up and dumped Palm’s webOS-based phones and TouchPad last August then announced that by September it would open source the operating system on which Rubinstein spent four-and-a-half years of his life.

Europe's IT Commissioner Announces European Cloud Partnership Initiative

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

"The cloud has the capacity to make lives easier for many of us, including the smallest of businesses. But to achieve that requires us to take many different policy areas and really test them to make sure they are as cloud-compatible as they can be." Writing in her official capacity as Europe's Commissioner for the Internet - and therefore as Czarina of the 'Digital Agenda' of the European Union - Commissioner Neelie Kroes has just announced a brand new initiative on cloud computing – the European Cloud Partnership.

C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebula Pro 3.2 Cloud Manager

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of the OpenNebula Toolkit. OpenNebula 3.2, released two weeks ago, brings important benefits to cloud providers with a new easily-customizable self-service portal for cloud consumers, and builders with full support for VMware that now includes live migration, advanced contextualization and image management. The new release additionally included important enhancements in networking and security. C12G delivers OpenNebulaPro for business, government, or other organizations looking for a hardened, certified, supported cloud platform. OpenNebulaPro combines the rapid innovation of open-source with the stability and long-term production support of commercial software. Compared to OpenNebula, the expert production and integration support of OpenNebulaPro and its higher stability increase IT productivity, speed time to deployment, and reduce business and technical risks.

Three Down: Another HP Director To Leave Board

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:30:00 EST

HP told the SEC Monday that long-time board member Lawrence Babbio won’t be standing for re-election at the stockholders meeting in March. Babbio’s been on the notoriously dysfunctional HP board since the divisive Compaq acquisition, made over accusations of vote-buying, there through the pretexting spying scandal, the fallout resignation of chairwoman Pat Dunn; the Mark Hurd ouster; the questionable Léo Apotheker hire, the Apotheker ouster 10 months later; the shopping of the HP PC unit; the repudiation of the $1.2 billion Palm acquisition; the unpopular ~$12 billion Autonomy acquisition and assorted other overpriced board-approved acquisitions.

NaviSite Announces SSAE 16 SOC 1 Compliance

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 06:00:00 EST

NaviSite on Monday announced it has completed its annual Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16 Service Organization Control (SOC) 1 compliance for its cloud-enabled data centers in Andover, MA and San Jose, CA. SSAE 16 compliance also extends to managed services and managed cloud services in these two flagship data centers, as well as managed services in NaviSite’s Syracuse, NY and London, UK data centers. "The SSAE 16 program is of great benefit to customers of our managed services, including our industry-leading cloud services,” noted Allen Allison, Chief Security Officer at NaviSite. As an SSAE 16 SOC 1-compliant company, NaviSite has demonstrated its commitment to providing customers with the highest standards in processes, controls and procedures.

Tucci’s Reign Extended

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

EMC CEO Joe Tucci is gonna keep his eventual replacement waiting a while longer. When the company posted pretty Q4 results the other day Tucci said he won’t be stepping down this year as planned. He said the board asked him to stay into 2013 and that “after much soul-searching” he agreed. “As I’ve said in the past, the board and I fully expect that my successor will come from within the existing, talented and experienced ranks of the EMC management team” – who reportedly all asked him to reconsider his transition plans.

CodeFutures Corporation to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:30:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, 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. CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, is a leading supplier of database performance and reliability tools that reduce the time and effort required to dramatically increase database scalability and performance. With dbShards, production environments gain scalability, high-availability and easy management of multi-terabyte databases through its Continuous Replication technology, providing an ideal foundation for fast-growing, 24X7 applications.

ICOS and Joyent Partner Up

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:30:00 EST

Joyent’s SmartDataCenter IaaS platform is going to be sold to Italian VARs and service providers by ICOS, an Italian value-added distributor, for private cloud infrastructure or value-added private cloud services. SmartDataCenter’s local storage is supposed to reduce the TCO of cloud data centers. It’s designed to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, a k a SmartMachines, and supports a multi-tenant PaaS. ICOS means to develop its own cloud infrastructure for channel partners too so they don’t have to build their own cloud data center. JoyentCloud.com delivers public cloud services to LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe and Kabam and licenses its cloud software to service providers that include Dell, FirstServer, XYBase, ClusterTech and Uniserve. Its offerings include a Platform-as-a-Service based on Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript development environment that’s been embraced by Microsoft.

OpSource Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 04:00:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that OpSource, Inc., Dimension Data’s wholly owned enterprise cloud and managed hosting business, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of 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. OpSource provides cloud and managed hosting solutions that enable businesses to accelerate growth and scale operations while controlling costs and reducing IT infrastructure support risks. Headquartered in Santa Clara, with operations in California, Virginia, the UK, Ireland, and India, more than 600 enterprises, service providers and Software-as-a-Service ISVs rely on OpSource's expertise, experience and cloud automation technology to operate high-availability, business-critical hosting environments. OpSource is a Dimension Data company.

OpenNebula Public Cloud Updated to 3.2

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

The OpenNebula project has just announced that its OpenNebula Cloud has been updated o 3.2 and now offers a virtual computing environment accessible through two different remote cloud interfaces, OCCI and EC2, and two different web interfaces, Sunstone for cloud administrators and the new SelfService for cloud consumers. These mechanisms access the same infrastructure, i.e. resources created by any of the mentioned methods will be instantly available on the others. For instance, you can create a VM with the OCCI interface, monitor it with the EC2 interface, and shut it down using the OpenNebula Sunstone web interface. This Cloud has been migrated to the last OpenNebula version, 3.2. If you have an account you can still use your old username and password. If not, request a new account and check out the new OpenNebula 3.2 features. These interfaces will show you the regular user view of the Cloud, but you will not be able to manage ACLs, hosts, groups nor users, since that will be delegated to the oneadmin group.

Private vs Public vs Hybrid: Moving Beyond the Soundbites at Cloud Expo

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:15:00 EST

Endless discussion about the "right" cloud delivery model has not produced a consensus. Instead, the cacophony of discussion resembles a Fox News Show – all talking points and no enlightenment. The reality is that every IT organization will face a mixed deployment model going forward. The key issue is how that mixed environment will be implemented and managed as well as how to decide which environment is right for a given application. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStratus, will address the opportunities and constraints IT organizations confront as they chart their hybrid cloud future. It will discuss the deployment decision criteria IT organizations should follow as they decide where to install applications, and identify administrative tool requirements to make operating a hybrid cloud environment successful.