Hey Network Solutions, New Rule: Use Social During an Outage

Network Solutions is in trouble today. Rumor has it DNS issues are the root cause, but it’s unclear. What is clear is if your site is hosted by NetSol it is unreachable.

If you dig really hard you can get links to their blog which might offer more detail. But… it’s unreachable (duh).

I picture NetSol personnel happily posting critical updates to a blog only they can reach.

New Rule: If your servers/dns/routers/network is experiencing problems, use your Twitter and Facebook accounts to communicate with customers. Don’t want your dirty laundry messing up your marketing? Set up Twitter/FB Support accounts.

SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Proliferation of Cloud Computing

“This cloud wave started for us in the hosting industry, which has been around for quite some time, and we really got into high availability hosting and cloud solutions,” stated Kenneth Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Lessons Learned: VA Cloud Email Termination

According to a Federal Computer Week article by Frank Konkel, The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract for email and calendaring services with HP Enterprise Services. Citing a material change in the agency’s requirements, VA officials declined to elaborate on the requirement changes that were actually made. Although I have no personal connection or first hand knowledge of the specifics of this deployment, this failure was apparently caused by failure to first build and understand the business case for supporting the cloud transition.
«In November — after the agency announced its cloud deal with HP Enterprise Services – VA’s Deputy CIO for Architecture, Strategy and Design, Paul Tibbits, told an audience at 1105 Media’s Enterprise Architecture Conference that he questioned the cost-effectiveness of moving to the cloud.

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Coraid Provides New File Storage Building Block for Enterprise and Cloud

Coraid on Tuesday announced the general availability of its latest and fastest file storage appliance – the Coraid ZX4000. «Public cloud scalability, economics and resilience models are setting a new agenda for IT,» said Coraid CEO Kevin Brown. The ZX4000 delivers flash-enhanced performance to handle large-scale mixed workloads in both enterprise and cloud deployments. The unique architecture of the ZX solution allows customers to create a potentially limitless pool of elastic, shared, block storage and to scale file storage performance by simply adding more ZX appliances.
Brown noted, «By combining enterprise-class storage features with a scale-out architecture, the ZX4000 provides an unmatched storage building block for cloud deployments.»

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Hybrid cloud evolving, yet most CIOs have a handle on it

Handle the hybrid cloud with care, but get to grips with it quickly to make sure you don’t miss out.

That’s according to a survey from SAP of 52 CIOs in conjunction with Wakefield Research, which comes to the conclusion that hybrid has various advantages, which even non-hybrid users can appreciate.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that SAP would be advocating this line; when CloudTech was present at its UK & Ireland Forum earlier this month, this was the underlying takeaway. Indeed, VP cloud systems Sven Denecken told CloudTech that “the right mix of cloud solutions…private cloud and on-premise” were the way forward, although he admitted he preferred the term ‘interoperable’.

Yet the research statistics were certainly of intrigue:

  • Three quarters of hybrid cloud users feel that their IT processes are less complex having moved to hybrid
  • Half of non-hybrid cloud users admit that cloud and hybrid …

Dell May Postpone Vote: Reports

The stock market and its pundits spent Tuesday adjusting to reports that

there may not be a shareholders vote on the future of Dell after all and that

come Thursday morning the special committee of the Dell board in charge

of sorting out offers for the company may decide to postpone publicly

tabulating the results because the $24.4 billion offer put on the table by

founder Michael Dell and private equity house Silver Lake Partners has

failed to garner enough support.

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Cloud Gaming and the Future of Console Gaming

With the fall/winter 2013 release of Playstation 4 and Xbox One, the console world is starting to buzz about the possibilities of Cloud gaming. Now, we have to admit, we normally use this space to blog about more VPS Cloud centric topics however, we, like you, are nerds, geeks and gamers. Due to this, we are going to break from our normal indulgence in Cloud tech to talk about the future of console gaming and how it relates to the Cloud. Cloud Gaming: A Short History Before we can chat about the real subject of this post (the Cloud capabilities of PS4 vs. Xbox One), we have to take some time to cover the history of Cloud gaming. From the founding of Cloud gaming at the turn of the millennium to last year’s acquisition of Gaikai (the world’s largest Cloud gaming community) by Sony to Microsoft’s announcement that legacy games will only be playable by way of optical disks and the launch of the worlds first open source Cloud gaming platform, GamingAnywhere, in April, the history of Cloud gaming is short yet full of interesting turns and developments. However, instead of writing about them, we made an infographic. It’s below. Enjoy. Now, with that out of the way, let’s chat about what all console gamers are currently talking about, the Cloud and the future of gaming. Playstation 4 vs. Xbox One Let’s get right down to it. Both Playstation 4 and Xbox One have the ability to incorporate Cloud services into their console and yet, where one brand seems to be investing more into the PR of their Cloud infrastructure, the other brand seems to be investing more in the actual usage and game play of their Cloud incorporation. First, the bad. As taken from a report filed by Forbes.com, Microsoft originally had plans to allow Xbox One gamers to play legacy Xbox games via the Cloud – essentially to steam content, much like users steam content from Netflix, through their home console. The steaming content would maintain save points, have additional CPU cores for higher processing power and have Cloud storage built in. Microsoft originally had plans for this yet now, Microsoft officials have been stating gamers can use the Cloud however they will not be able to play legacy games via the Cloud. For that, the original optical drive disk will be needed. So, we hope you have your old games. Now, the good. While Microsoft is touting its Cloud solution, PS4 has quietly built its Cloud infrastructure with the help of recently Sony purchased Gaikai. Gaikai, the leading Cloud gaming company, was purchased by Sony in 2012 for their 200 plus titles, their already well established Cloud gaming infrastructure and their experience in Cloud gaming. A direct result of the purchase: PS4 gamers will be able to play legacy games via the Cloud. Along with playing new games (full titles will be available) Sony made the choice to release the entire library of PS games via the … Continue

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EMC’s Buying ScaleIO to Manage Flash

EMC is buying ScaleIO and its scalable server-based Elastic Converged Storage (ECS) software.
It said it’s paying cash but not how much although the chatty Israeli business press put the price at between $200 million and $300 million.
The start-up is supposed to strength EMC’s Flash portfolio by combining ScaleIO’s software with PCIe Flash cards, such as EMC’s XtremSF, in enterprise private cloud and Service Provider environments.
The acquisition, when it closes, is bound for EMC’s Flash Product Division where its widgetry will become part of EMC’s XtremSW Suite.

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