Cloud storage provider Nirvanix has announced it has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as expected, following the news earlier this month it was to shut down effective September 30.

The Nirvanix website paints a sorry picture this morning, with a company update put almost out of the way at the bottom of the page stating that bankruptcy was sought “in order to pursue all alternative to maximise value for its creditors while continuing its efforts to provide the best possible transition for customers.”

A statement on the website also details the efforts the company is taking to make sure its customers don’t lose out, either returning data or transitioning it to other providers. Nirvanix state they are “working hard to have resources available through October 15” to aid the transition process.

The CSP is working particularly closely with IBM, with a team from Big Blue on hand to …

Steve Wozniak says he’s “a fan” of the cloud, yet he’s still worried about what could happen if consumers and companies don’t back things up locally.

This may come as something of a surprise to the tech fraternity, for whom the general consensus was that Woz wasn’t too keen on cloud – to put it politely.

Last August, after a showing of the Mike Daisey monologue ‘The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’, Wozniak was quoted as telling a packed theatre audience: “I think cloud’s going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”

Yet 12 months on the Apple co-founder, who is speaking at Apps World Europe in October, said that the position was “unclear” and things needed to be clarified.

“I am actually a fan,” Wozniak told CloudTech. “The advantages of the …

Today marks the opening of the online enrollment of government-approved health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

As we previously explored, though the law has been a lightning rod for partisan controversy and bickering, one undeniably positive impact of the law has been its emphasis on utilizing burgeoning IT approaches for healthcare, including cloud computing, to enable more people to access insurance coverage.

As Andrea Tse of TheStreet.com reports:

“Within this budding area of lucrative business opportunities is a sweet spot garnering more and more attention thanks in part to a key, fast-approaching October healthcare implementation deadline mandated under President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): healthcare cloud computing.”

Through the extension of insurance promised under Obamacare, healthcare IT innovation is set to accelerate, through the exchanges themselves, as well as the digitization of patient data for advanced levels of information sharing and collaboration between …

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure has been given the sought after FedRAMP accreditation for US federal cloud computing.

As the American government is trying to go ‘cloud first’, this represents an important milestone for Redmond – if perhaps a little late.

Back in June, competitors HP and Amazon announced that their clouds were secure after gaining federal approval, joining the likes of Akamai, AT&T and Lockheed Martin, with the first accreditation coming from Autonomic Resources back in December 2012.

Yet Microsoft claims that, unlike those other vendors, theirs is the first public cloud platform to be credited with the more specific JAB P-ATO (Joint Authorisation Board Provisional Authority to Operate) – in other words, attaining competency for both IaaS and PaaS.

“This not only opens the door for faster cloud adoption, but helps agencies move to the cloud in a more streamlined, cost-effective way,” wrote Susie Adams …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

The recently released Teradata 14.10 platform adds several features that one-up and surpass some of its newer analytic platform rivals. Highlights include dynamic tiering of hot data into memory, increased support for in-database analytics, better connectivity to Hadoop, and new optimizations for R implementation that fully exploit parallel processing.

Some of the enhancements, such as in-memory tiering, in-database analytic functions, and tighter Hadoop integration, are not necessarily unique to Teradata, but the implementations are. As for R scale-up, Teradata is uniquely applying MapReduce-like enhancements to enable R to better utilize the platform’s massively parallel architecture.

In sum, the enhancements are essential for maintaining Teradata’s premium positioning for scalability and performance for workloads that still require the service levels and data protections offered by the SQL environment.

Taking advantage of memory

This is an ongoing theme for all data platforms, both …

By Lee Fisher, Vice President, Abiquo

Most households have many services to keeping things ticking. No two households are the same; they have different priorities, values and structures, and different services suit different households. Water, gas and electricity all come from separate service providers, so if the electricity goes down in a house, it is not left in the cold.

Like a household, organisations are unique and something that works for one organisation, may not work for its competitors.

Choices, choices, choices

Like household utility services, cloud services are designed to bring agility, simplicity, efficiency and self-service capabilities to a business.

Organisations have freedom of choice in terms of selecting infrastructure and services; but in order to make the right choice it is vital organisations have an understanding of what the business requires and the capabilities of existing infrastructure.

Despite the complexity of business requirements and the variety of choices …

Defining Cloud-Enabling Technologies (CET) as those that are installed, delivered and consumed on-premises, Market Monitor a service of 451 Research recently released their annual forecast of virtualization, security and automation and management revenue through 2016.

The report, Market Monitor Cloud-Enabling Technologies has taken a bottoms-up approach in defining the three primary categories they include in their definition of cloud-enabling technologies.  Market Monitor’s methodology is explained in the report’s summary here.

Here are the key take-aways from this report:

• Cloud-Enabling Technologies defined as virtualization, security and automation and management global revenues will grow from $10.6B in 2012 to $22.6B in 2016, attaining a 21% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR).

• Cloud-as-a-Service revenues will grow from $5.7B in 2012 to $19.5B in 2016, attaining a 36% CAGR.  Market Monitor defines Cloud-as-a-Service as externally delivered services, specifically 3^rd party, that are hosted and pay-as-you-go with the cloud …

The database wars are about to kick off in spectacular style. Not just Oracle vs SAP – as Big Red announced its new in-memory database at the start of this week – but relational vs NoSQL.

Oracle and SAP have been making plenty of noise about their in-memory capability; SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott once claimed that its HANA technology was “the fastest growing software product in the history of the world”, whilst in his recent event keynote, Larry Ellison claimed that data would move at “ungodly speeds” in the Oracle 12c database.

But that’s all relational, SQL database technology – and the NoSQL brigade is coming up fast.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out which side Bob Wiederhold, CEO and president of NoSQL database provider Couchbase, sits on. And his company’s ready for the battle ahead, with the release earlier this month of Couchbase Lite, claimed as the …

By David Linthicum

We all know that cloud computing provides business agility.  For many enterprises, that means they have the ability to keep up with new and emerging markets.  In the world of healthcare, cloud computing also provides the ability to keep up with ever-changing regulations.

This double value that healthcare cloud computing brings is rather interesting, given that many in healthcare are suspicious of the value of cloud computing.  Ironically, the same folks who push back on cloud computing are the same ones who are typically killing themselves in an effort to keep up with the forthcoming regulatory changes.

Core to this situation is the need for healthcare organizations to plan for the need to change.  In other words, they need to fully understand the driving forces that will make them change as the cost of non-compliance escalates to include fines as well as knocks on the reputation of …