The web has gone from integration via hypertext to integration via hyperdata.
A friend shared a recent C|Net article discussing the use of 404 error pages to feature missing children notices. Following links leads to a European effort to integrate information about missing children into 404 pages (and others, there’s no restriction that it be on a 404). By signing up, you’re offered some fairly standard HTML code to embed in the page. It’s very similar to advertising integration.
So I jumped on over to the US’ National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) hoping to find something similar or even better, an API. I was disappointed to find no real way to integrate the same data – not even simple dynamic HTML. All that data – all those children – are missing out on opportunities for exposure. Exposure that might mean being found.

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Traditionally, IT departments have organized their processes, employees, and business relationships around owning and operating the core IT assets. The introduction of cloud services can offer significant cost savings and operational efficiencies but to recognize these benefits, IT departments will have to integrate new ways of thinking about how IT resources are delivered.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jim Anthony, Vice-President of the Tier II Solution Architecture Team at Terremark, will discuss the major factors driving cloud adoption for the enterprise, relate how the adoption of cloud technologies is changing the way IT departments will operate, and review case studies about businesses that have successfully used cloud services to meet their business goals.

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The OpenNebula Project has just announced a new release, OpenNebula 3.8 Beta (Twin Jet), of its fully open-source, widely-used cloud platform for managing a data center’s virtual infrastructure. As in previous releases, the software brings countless valuable contributions from many industry, research and academia members of its large user community. Twin Jet brings many new features cloud management and stabilizes features that were introduced in previous versions.
OpenNebula is fully open-source software distributed and licensed for use under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0. An important effort has been made to synchronize the packaging format used by the OpenNebula project and those used by the Linux distributions. This will make even more easier to get and set OpenNebula up and running. Binary packages are available for the main Linux distributions.

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Nubefy launched of its IT service management platform, addressing the challenges faced when adopting cloud services such as reliability, scalability and manageability. Nubefy’s integrative platform provides a wide array of offerings including support for building, deploying, managing and monitoring servers, databases, data stores and virtualization components for building your cloud computing environment. We talked to Nubefy’s CEO at Fall Demo 2012.

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I met up with SoftLayer Chief Scientist Nathan Day a few weeks ago, while attending VMworld in San Francisco. The Dallas-based company was founded in 2005 and provides hosted and cloud-computing services to a wide variety of 25,000+ customers. It employs Citrix CloudPlatform (powered by Apache CloudStack) as part of its services.
SoftLayer wasn’t exhibiting at VMworld, which was no surprise and which made for an obvious question…
Roger: What do you think of the event?
Nathan: “VMworld is a great event. It includes more than just the VMware community, but also is applicable to the IT delivery ecosystem. I found it a great place to meet vendors, partners, and customers.”
Roger: So give us an update on SoftLayer’s activities.
Nathan: “SoftLayer continues to innovate by releasing new products each month. This year we introduced Object Storage, which is a redundant and highly scalable cloud storage service that allows users to easily store, search and retrieve data.  Another example is our new Message Queue Service to give our customers the a scalable and reliable message queue and notification service.”
“Perhaps the most significant is our turnkey Private Clouds offering. This is a breakthrough offering allows users to easily deploy fully configured, single tenant private clouds based on Citrix CloudPlatform.”
Roger: So what has SoftLayer already found to be advantageous about integrating (Citrix) XenServer rather than VMware. Is there an open-source philosophy behind how you build your infrastructure to serve your clients?
Nathan: “We use XenServer for our public, virtual machine cloud offering. Its attraction was as a affordable, enterprise-grade hypervisor with a great API that we could integrate to our own orchestration engine.”
Roger: How has your customer base changed over the past year or so, specifically, are customers asking different questions now? On the other hand, are you still looking at vast untapped opportunities from customers who are only now thinking about cloud computing?
Nathan: “We still see plenty of untapped opportunities. Some customers are still looking for raw infrastructure, but the vast majority are looking to run more complex solutions. We are seeing more examples of scalable architectures being built out that take advantage of our ability to rapidly provision both bare metal and virtual compute capability.”
“On the international front, we opened up two major data centers late last year – one in Amsterdam and another in Singapore. Both are fully staffed and offer customers our complete portfolio of services. We’re also seeing customers manage larger, more complex and distributed environments. They are turning to SoftLayer to help support their Internet-scale applications and architectures.”

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Savvis on Wednesday announced the availability of Savvis Symphony Database, a cloud-based database platform, in Europe.
Symphony Database, which Savvis unveiled in October 2011 in North America, brings the advantages of cloud computing to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server environments without long-term licensing or server provisioning.
With just a few clicks, Symphony Database supplies everything necessary for a complete, secure database solution. Performance levels can be scaled up or down based on business needs, without interrupting operations, while providing performance guarantees and reduced costs compared with hosted database solutions.
«Savvis clients choose Symphony Database because of its quick availability, pay-as-you-go model and instant scalability translates into reduced database expenses and complexity,» said Neil Cresswell, EMEA managing director at Savvis. «We bring Savvis’ mission-critical expertise to the Symphony Database, providing performance levels and availability on par with your traditional data center.»

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Compuware Corporation on Wednesday announced a new generation performance analytics solution that raises the intelligence of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application performance management (APM). Outage Analyzer provides real-time visualizations and alerts of outages in third-party web services that are mission critical to web, mobile and cloud applications around the globe. Compuware is providing this new service free of charge. Check out Outage Analyzer here.
“Compuware’s new Outage Analyzer service is a primary example of the emerging industry trend toward applying big data analytics technologies to help understand and resolve application performance and availability issues in near real-time,” noted Tim Grieser, Program VP, Enterprise System Management Software at IDC. “Outage Analyzer’s ability to analyze and visualize large masses of data, with automated anomaly detection, can help IT and business users better understand the sources and causes of outages in third-party web services.”

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Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, will discuss:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available

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Perspecsys are a vendor offering technologies for ‘Cloud Privacy By Design’ best practices, or what they call ‘Cloud Data Protection’. They are pioneering a key segment of the Cloud industry, the ‘On-Site Cloud Gateway’ device. Although Cloud value is conveyed by the centralized and shared hosting of applications, there are a number of factors that […]

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Scott Houston, chief executive officer for GreenButton, and Stephen Spector, cloud evangelist for Dell, Inc., will be co-presenting «Game Changer – High Perfomance Computing in the Cloud For Everyone,» at the 11th International Cloud Computing Expo. Scott and Stephen will discuss how companies of all size and budgets can best leverage cloud based high performance computing, without breaking the bank. They will also demonstrate the simplicity and cost efficient methodology for running a rendering workload in the cloud in a matter of minutes instead of hours.

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