Cloud computing is increasingly changing the education landscape.
Thanks to could computing, students from different locations around the world can collaborate on assignments, rendering them interactive among their peers in education.
The ability to bring together students and teachers via device and to enable them to accomplish entire learning tasks as if they were together in one classroom is just one benefit of cloud computing in education.
Yet this is not even the entire capability of the cloud effect in education. There is the whole aspect of ‘information durability’ which allows information to be stored in the cloud indefinitely, according to CloudTweaks.com.
Many schools have moved their resources online with libraries filled with hundreds of thousands of books that students can access at any time. The advent of online video has made the idea of cloud in education even more exciting because schools can produce teaching videos in any subject, upload them to their libraries in the cloud, and make them available to their students, according to the article.
Monthly Archives: September 2012
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Prepare Your Enterprise IT Talent for the Cloud
One of the cloud’s biggest draws is the capability to virtualize computing resources, allowing it to be consumed with the click of a mouse. But behind that simple click is an enormous infrastructure challenge that has recently been cited as a major cause for slower enterprise adoption. Enterprises can better prepare for this shift and take full advantage of future computing benefits. Between architecture design and migration planning, the road can be long, so what do you do with your talent?
In her General session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Technical Sales at Rackspace, will discuss how you can best prepare your IT talent for this seismic shift in computing.
Cloud Computing: Citrix Backs CumuLogic
Citrix has put an undisclosed amount of money in CumuLogic, the angel-backed private Java Platform-as-a-Service start-up founded last year by Sun Microsystems veterans with Java’s father James Gosling as an advisor.
Citrix took the money out of its Citrix Startup Accelerator fund, which invests in early stage start-ups.
By transforming virtualized environments and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds into a high-value PaaS cloud, CumuLogic technology is said to simplify the development, deployment and runtime management of mobile, web and enterprise Java applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Big Data Analytics: Thinking Outside of Hadoop
In the recent release of ‘2012 Hype Cycle Of Emerging Technologies,’ research analyst Gartner evaluated several technologies to come up with a list of technologies that will dominate the future . “Big Data” related technologies form a significant portion of the list, in particular the following technologies revolve around the concept and usage of Big Data.
These areas are just representative but in general many of the emerging technologies revolve around the ability to process large amounts of data from hither to unconventional sources and extract meaning out of them.
Citrix Fosters Innovation with Investment in Cloud Startup CumuLogic
Citrix Startup Accelerator, a corporate initiative investing in early stage startups, today announced an investment in CumuLogic, an innovative new Cloud Application Platform software provider that enables enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs to develop and deploy Java applications in public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Focused on entrepreneur-led innovation, the Citrix Startup Accelerator program provides seed investments, office space, and mentorship to select startups from around the world, enabling them to benefit from the global Citrix presence, its entrepreneur-friendly environment, large customer base and seasoned go-to-market strategies. The IT landscape is in a period of dramatic change, shifting expectations, and transformational new computing capabilities. As mobile workstyles and cloud services redefine the technology landscape, many of the best ideas will come from innovative startups with the flexibility to approach programs in entirely new ways. The Citrix Startup Accelerator is designed to tap into the innovation of most promising of these entrepreneurs, while helping them come to market successfully.
CumuLogic was selected by Citrix because of its unique ability to bridge between traditional datacenters and clouds at the application level. As a result, enterprises and cloud providers can begin deploying enterprise-class applications in cloud environments today, without waiting for all the development standards to evolve and mature. By transforming virtualized environments and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds into a high-value Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, CumuLogic technology simplifies the development, deployment and runtime management of mobile, web and enterprise applications in public, private and hybrid clouds.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Creating a Secure Hadoop Initiative
In today’s business environment, enterprises of all sizes are looking for new ways to leverage large amounts of accumulated data. In order to manage this data, many have turned to the cost-effective Hadoop framework. However, Hadoop poses a key challenge: security.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Christian is Co-founder and CTO at Zettaset, will explain how Zettaset’s secure Hadoop initiative called SHadoop is challenging currently held data analytics assumptions by providing a secure, affordable and user-friendly Big Data Hadoop platform.
What Will 9/11 Ultimately Mean?
On this very solemn day in the US, the small aggravations of daily work and life recede as we ponder the toll exacted by hatred and violence throughout the world. The events of 9/11 in the US were global in their implications – not only did people from 60 countries die in the attacks on US soil, but untold thousands more people have died, and continue to die, in the wars that followed.
Violence begets violence, and the words of wisdom from Isaiah 2 (“…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…”) are heeded no better today than when written more than 2,700 years ago.
I’ve written extensively and recently about my fear and loathing of the nascent police states and unending wars spawned by 9/11, and the use of much of the great technology that our industry produces to maintain it. In the US, UK, and elsewhere, blanket use of the word “terrorism” to justify all manner of suppressive vigilance transcends political parties. This disease has permeated media coverage as well; every violent act by a crazed loner these days is first reported through the lens of possible terrorism.
As I was traveling through the US recently, I lost track of my laptop bag for a few seconds. Prior to 9/11, the fear would be that someone might steal it. Now, the fear is someone might report it, and it might be confiscated and destroyed. Be sure to analyze that contents in that bottle of Tums while you’re at it, folks. The truly sad thing is, if I ever space out and leave that bag in a mall somewhere, or on a city bench, or in a parking lot, the response will likely be the same.
September 11, 2001 will never be forgotten in the US as long as there is a US. It’s an iconic date, along with July 4 and December 7. My hope is some day its lesson will be a more positive one.
July 4 proved that the US can be a nation of one out of many. The post WWII aftermath of December 7 has proven that even the most horrific of wars can be reconciled among nations. When can September 11 come to symbolize a resolute strength in the face of terror, one that does not cower in fear and make suspected criminals of everyone, but dispenses justice to those deserving of it then carries on as before?
The Cloud: Floor Wax or Dessert Topping?
The end result of this ongoing specialization trend is that selecting the right product won’t get much easier. It used to be that when you needed a software product, you could consider the big suites or the smaller specialists, rank them according to quality and price, and make your selection based on those criteria—essentially comparing apples to apples. But with the Cloud, you have a number of specialty players who each solve different problems well, and you need to figure out the right tool—or combination of tools—for the problems you’re trying to solve.
Certainly part of this move toward specialization is a result of the emerging nature of the Cloud and NoSQL marketplaces, but the CAP Theorem won’t go away once the products mature. As a result, ZapThink expects the maturation of these markets to take a dramatically different tack than the SOA Suite market from the last decade. If you’re waiting for some big vendor suite to solve all your Cloud problems, dream on.
ProfitBricks: Live Virtual Scaling by the Minute
A two-and-a-half-year-old Berlin-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) start-up you never heard of called ProfitBricks thinks it can take on Amazon Web Services and win.
By its lights the likes of Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis and GoGrid are all first-generation and it’s not.
It claims to have completely re-engineered cloud computing and went GA with its widgetry in the US on Monday. The stuff’s reportedly been running in Europe for six months and has amassed 70,000 servers.
It says it’s first to offer live vertical scaling of CPU cores and RAM without forcing the user to reboot the server.
Nobody has been able to add resources to an instance (a virtual machine) without taking the server down before, it says.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: This Is Your Career on OpenStack
In a little over two years, OpenStack has shattered adoption benchmarks set by previous open source projects and gained acceptance as the future of the data center, but has your career kept up with its blistering pace?
In her session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Niki Acosta, Product Evangelist for Rackspace Private Cloud, will explain how they have already made a career out of the OpenStack movement and how you can make the transition into making OpenStack your full-time job, from becoming more familiar with the code to selling on the opportunity to the C-suite and startups alike.