Cloud scalability and performance should be at the heart of every successful Internet venture. The infrastructure needs to be resilient, flexible, and fast – it’s best not to get caught thinking about architecture until the middle of an emergency, when it’s too late.
In his interactive, no-holds-barred session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will dive into how to design and build-out the right cloud infrastructure.

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Red Hat on Monday announced OpenShift Marketplace, a one-stop shop that will enable customers to find and try solutions for their cloud applications. The OpenShift Marketplace will bring the power of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) partner ecosystem directly to OpenShift Online customers, enabling them to experience the benefits of enterprise PaaS with tightly integrated, complementary solutions developed for the public cloud – all without losing time on technology integration.

With its OpenShift Marketplace, Red Hat aims to reduce the search time and cost of finding the perfect solution for customers seeking value-added OpenShift partner add-ons. Customers will be able to find the information, tools, and community they need to discover and procure the right solution. They will be able to securely access and manage leading OpenShift application technologies from a single location. Customers and developers will be able to search for third-party OpenShift solutions and add-on productivity offerings, including database, email delivery services, messaging queues, application performance monitoring and more, all managed from a central location. Several OpenShift partners have already signed on to add their solutions to the OpenShift Marketplace, including BlazeMeter, ClearDB, Iron.io, MongoLab, New Relic, Redis Labs, SendGrid, and Shippable.

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Now, up to five existing Windows or Linux servers can be migrated to Windstream Hosted Solutions vCloud infrastructure at no cost via Racemi’s cloud migration technology.
Racemi, a provider of automated server migration software that streamlines the process of migrating workloads to public, private, and hybrid clouds, has announced the availability of Windstream Cloud Path, a Software as a Service (SaaS) that facilitates the on-boarding of customer workloads to Windstream Hosted Solutions Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
This Windstream-branded version of Racemi Cloud Path provides a self-service portal that automates the migration of existing Windows and Linux servers to the Windstream IaaS, which leverages the VMware vCloud platform. Using Windstream Cloud Path, Windstream customers can migrate their server workloads quickly and easily with no disruption to their business. There is no infrastructure to deploy or manage on the customer’s site, and key features such as Live Capture and CPU (central processing unit) throttling ensure there is no server downtime.

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Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Practice, Jens Butler, Principal Analyst, IT Services

Cisco has announced its creation of a global cloud platform, branded Intercloud. It has also named some of its initial partners, which include a variety of cloud infrastructure players: Telstra, Allstream, Canopy, Ingram Micro, Logicalis Group, MicroStrategy, OnX Managed Services, SunGard Availability Services and Wipro. Although it is not a large group, it does include a mix of telcos, managed services providers, IT services providers, distributors, and resellers. As you would expect, they all have longstanding relationships with Cisco and were developing cloud services independently prior to this announcement.

Cloud services will become part of the Cisco Powered program, and Cisco plans to sell them through its channel partners and directly to enterprise customers. These cloud services will be more complex than those that Cisco sells today. This is not Cisco’s first attempt at providing global cloud …

Setting up a deployment process on the cloud means a variety of choices. Most likely you’re prepared to make some tradeoffs. But getting a view across these potential tradeoffs can be difficult. Here are six popular deployments and advice for making the best choice for your organization’s needs.
Let’s assume you want a deployment for a small startup with fewer than 20 developers, each needing to host a web app that’s gaining traction and for which rapid growth is expected. Its requirements are as follows:
Autoscaling support to handle expected surges in demand
Maximizing developer efficiency by automating tedious tasks and improving dev flow
Encouraging mature processes for building a stable foundation as the codebase grows
Maintaining flexibility and agility to handle hotfixes of a relatively immature codebase
Counting on a few sources to fail, because any of them can cause deployment failure – imagine GitHub failing or a required plugin becoming unavailable

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Not too long ago, it took even the most successful entrepreneurs several centuries or at least decades to reach a valuation of a billion and thus become a member of the exclusive Billionaire Boys Club*. Families like the Rothschilds, the Waltons or the Brenninkmeijers have indeed built up impressive capital wealth, but because it took them several generations, it often became quite diluted among brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, and even third-degree-nephews.

With the advent of first: IT; then the Internet and now the cloud, that time frame has rapidly shrunk. Today companies with as little as 50 or even 13 employees reached valuations where reputable companies and world-renowned artists can only dream of. This acceleration is even more poignant when we look at applications in the heart the nexus of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Analytics (SMAC), such as Instagram , Tumbler and recently WhatsApp. And just like in the music industry there is a lot of interest in the tip parade: the list of runner ups; ideas and products getting ready to become the next mega hit.

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Zetta.net is an enterprise-grade backup and disaster recovery provider. We have been in business for over five years, and we have over 800 enterprise customers and managed service providers (MSPs) that use or resell our product, as is the case with MSPs.
In terms of the IT challenges, the biggest issue companies’ face is loss of business critical data. Zetta.net provides a secure and reliable cloud and local backup, archiving and disaster recovery solution to backup and restore data in the event of data loss.
Today, with rapid data growth, a lot of businesses are struggling with using online or cloud backup for backing up data, because many solutions usually top out in a couple hundred gigabytes, and can’t back up data within 24 hours. With that said, the key advantage of our solution is performance.

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The world of cloud and application development is not just for the hardened developer these days.
In their session at 14th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, will pull back the curtain of the architecture of a fun demo application purpose-built for the cloud. They will focus on demonstrating how they leveraged compute, storage, messaging, and other cloud elements hosted at SoftLayer to lower the effort and difficulty of putting together a useful application. This will be an active demonstration and review of simple command-line tools and resources, so don’t be afraid if you are not a seasoned developer.

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By David Linthicum

Healthcare providers and payers that utilize cloud platforms to store and access personnel records (and like data) are probably storing protected health information (“PHI”), which is protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”). Rules now in place govern the use of cloud computing to store health-related data, including personnel-related data.  The consequences for failure to comply can be severe to a company’s bottom line, including some heavy fines and PR nightmares.

In March of last year, the Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”) finalized the HIPAA Omnibus Rule, which made the regulation more cloud friendly.  This rule expanded HIPAA’s applicability beyond covered entities (health care providers and/or payer) to business associates. By definition, a “business associate” is a person or entity that creates, receives, maintains, or transmits PHI in the course of fulfilling certain functions or activities for …