Oracle Announces Availability of Cloud Application Foundation

Introducing new products faster, reducing costs and increasing productivity continue to be top priorities for companies around the world and many of them are looking to Cloud computing to help meet these goals. Oracle’s Cloud Application Foundation provides a unified platform across conventional and Cloud environments, which helps customers deliver next generation applications, simplify operations, accelerate time-to-market, lower their total cost of ownership and derive more value from their current application infrastructure.

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Red Hat Goes To War Against VMware

Red Hat put the full cavalcade of its new cloud widgetry on the market

Wednesday priced at roughly a third what it would cost to use VMware, the

private cloud rival Red Hat is out to unseat.

Red Hat announced the widgetry last month but it wasn’t quite ready for

general availability then so it withheld pricing until now.

First comes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which

combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (good ole RHEL) with the

company’s newfangled Grizzly-based OpenStack distribution in a single

product aimed at advanced cloud users.

read more

Red Hat Goes To War Against VMware

Red Hat put the full cavalcade of its new cloud widgetry on the market

Wednesday priced at roughly a third what it would cost to use VMware, the

private cloud rival Red Hat is out to unseat.

Red Hat announced the widgetry last month but it wasn’t quite ready for

general availability then so it withheld pricing until now.

First comes the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which

combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (good ole RHEL) with the

company’s newfangled Grizzly-based OpenStack distribution in a single

product aimed at advanced cloud users.

read more

One in three businesses have ‘multiple’ outages a week

Companies are failing to update their software, meaning that because of the strain being put on old data centres, they suffer debilitating network outages on a weekly basis.

That’s the verdict from Brocade, whose latest research found that one in three businesses suffer “multiple” network downtime instances per week. Further, more than nine in 10 (91%) of IT decision makers admit that they have to ‘substantially’ upgrade their infrastructure in order to keep up with the demand of cloud computing. Shockingly, 16% of those surveyed said they experienced daily outages.

On average these outages last around 20 minutes – according to the research 2% of those polled say they’ve encountered downtime of more than an hour.

And in terms of the consequences, more than one in three said that these outages meant their SLA wasn’t hit, which in some cases led to customers looking for reimbursement.

Companies upgrade …

For the enterprise cloud, the future is hybrid

Attention CIOs – the hybrid cloud is enterprise ready. In fact, according to a GigaOM article, the hybrid cloud has been enterprise ready for the past couple of years, and that in 2011, the majority of participants in a cloud-use survey anticipated moving to the hybrid cloud in the future.

The future is here.

To prove that enterprise is using a hybrid cloud infrastructure, consider this. According to a Rackspace blog post, more than 50 percent of cloud buyers are planning hybrid deployments to take advantage of cloud efficiencies and satisfy security and compliance needs.

“It truly delivers the best of both worlds: the elasticity, scalability and agility that the public cloud brings, but also the control, visibility and security that the private cloud offers,” said Larry Lang, CEO of Quorum. “In addition, it offers the ability for enterprises to pay only for what they need, adding to its cache.”

However …

Big data and “data communities” are key in crisis response and prevention

Nishant Shah, Analyst, Government Technology

Using connection technologies to facilitate response to humanitarian emergencies has become a well-established and rapidly evolving practice by governments, international organizations, non-profit organizations, community groups, and individuals. Using such technologies in the preventionof violence and catastrophe has been more difficult, owing to lack of political will, operational gaps between receiving warnings and mounting responses, and the difficulty of measuring the results of prevention efforts in the face of more austere budgets.

The first generation of network technologies used in crisis response were primarily designed and deployed top-down by governments. The generation that followed added technical, bottom-up hackers and volunteer groups, such as Ushahidi.

The next wave is being influenced by a broader humanitarian technology community of practice and the growing popularity of open source approaches. These embrace open source tools, put a premium on effective visualizations and maps, and use crowdsourcing techniques to improve …

Coming to a City Near You: Microsoft CityNext

«Cities play a vital role in our lives – both now and in the future. Microsoft’s CityNext initiative puts people first and builds on this new era of collaborative technology to engage citizens, business and government leaders in new ways,» said Laura Ipsen, corporate vice president of Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector, as Microsoft today announced CityNext, a global initiative empowering cities, businesses and citizens to re-imagine their futures and cultivate vibrant communities.

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Strategies for Application Delivery in the Cloud Era

Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as enterprises of all sizes and across all industries seek to harness the business agility promised by this computing model. Despite its long-accepted benefits, the cloud has also fallen victim to performance and reliability challenges, combined with a perceived lack of security. As a result this has led to slower predicted growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology.
In his Lunchtime Focus Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Neil Cohen, Akamai’s Vice President of Global Product Marketing, explains how to these challenges, and the role application delivery solutions play in optimizing public and hybrid cloud architectures without sacrificing performance, security or control.

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AWS Starting New Enterprise Unit

Amazon Web Services is starting up a new unit focused on getting the Fortune 2000/mid-market segment to adopt its widgetry.
According to Network World, it has also raided VMware for the guy who’s going to be its VP of worldwide commercial sales, Mike Clayville.
Clayville has been VP of product marketing for VMware’s cloud infrastructure offerings for the last year having previously been VP of North American sales.
What’s still unclear is whether Amazon means to chase after VMware’s private cloud business while VMware tries to step on Amazon’s toes and go into the public cloud business.

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