Have you heard of a community cloud?
Cloud computing including cloud storage and services as products, solutions and services offer different functionality and enable benefits for various types of organizations, entities or individuals.
Public clouds, private clouds and hybrids leveraging public and private continue to evolve in technology, reliability, security and functionality along with the awareness around them.
IT professionals tell me they are interested in clouds however they have concerns.
Cloud concerns range from security, compliance, industry or government regulations, privacy and budgets among others with private, public or hybrid clouds. Peer, cooperative (co-op), consortium or community clouds can be a solution for those that traditional public, private, hybrid, AaaS, SaaS, PaaS or IaaS do not meet their needs.

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Scott Bils has a post on the “Five Mistakes that Enterprise Cloud Service Providers are Making” over on Leverhawk. Points four and five were particularly interesting because it seems there’s a synergistic opportunity there.
Point number four from Scott:
Omitting SaaS and PaaS: Cloud infrastructure service providers have little incentive to migrate customers to public cloud SaaS offerings such as Salesforce.com or Workday. For many customers, migrating legacy apps to SaaS models will be the right answer. Many enterprise cloud service providers conveniently omit this lever from their transformation story and lose customer credibility as a result.

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Piston Cloud Computing, the OpenStack disciple, has gotten an $8 million B round to accelerate OpenStack adoption from Cisco, Data Collective, Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures and True Ventures.
The money will be used for product development.
Cisco, Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures are new investors.
Piston got a $4.5 million A round in July of 2011 and launched the first commercial OpenStack distribution for building, scaling and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware.
The widgetry also integrates with the open source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service.

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Oracle is going to buy Acme Packet, a Massachusetts networking gear player that sells secure IP video conferencing, data and voice calling to SPs and the enterprise.
Acme is a company, described as a “one of Boston’s recent success stories,” as well as a rival of Cisco and Juniper, more likely to be acquired by Cisco than Oracle, that Oracle is picking up for $2.1 billion in cash or $29.25 a share, a 22% premium over Acme’s Friday close.
Oracle will wind paying $1.7 billion, net of Acme’s roughly $363.4 million in the bank.
Acme reportedly has 1,900 service provider and enterprises customers worldwide including 89 of the world’s top 100 communications companies.

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Oracle is going to buy Acme Packet, a Massachusetts networking gear player that sells secure IP video conferencing, data and voice calling to SPs and the enterprise.
Acme is a company, described as a “one of Boston’s recent success stories,” as well as a rival of Cisco and Juniper, more likely to be acquired by Cisco than Oracle, that Oracle is picking up for $2.1 billion in cash or $29.25 a share, a 22% premium over Acme’s Friday close.
Oracle will wind paying $1.7 billion, net of Acme’s roughly $363.4 million in the bank.
Acme reportedly has 1,900 service provider and enterprises customers worldwide including 89 of the world’s top 100 communications companies.

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Remember when Twitter went out for 40 minutes last July? Twitter was so contrite that it posted the following statement:

“The cause of today’s outage came from within our data centres. What was noteworthy about today’s outage was the coincidental failure of two parallel systems at nearly the same time…We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.”

Glitches like this have consequences – many of which aren’t immediately obvious, and often aren’t public. Many are much more serious, because their business value is more intense for any one customer. I can think of four cautionary tales right off the bat.

1) Silent but deadly financial claw-backs

When one firm’s systems experienced serious performance degradation during the holiday season (at precisely the time when traffic was expected to peak), savvy customers took financial action behind closed doors.

“We did issue …

By Sharon Florentine

Sharon Florentine is a freelance writer who covers everything from data center technology to holistic veterinary care and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification.

Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) to quickly load static elements of your site to hasten access can deliver quicker gratification for customers. And stickier eyeballs — and greater profits — for you.

Basically, a CDN is a number of highly optimised web servers located around the globe, explains Joost de Valk in an article posted to Yoast.com. Though de Valk’s article deals specifically with using a CDN to speed performance of WordPress sites, a CDN is beneficial …

Elastichosts, a British Amazon wannabe, is setting up in Silicon Valley to be
near potential cloud customers like start-ups and other small to mid-sized
concerns.

It’s already got a data center in Los Angeles. The new San Jose site will give
it redundancy.

It’s also opening new data centers in Hong Kong, Sydney and Amsterdam,
expanding out of London, Toronto and San Antonio, Texas.

read more

Elastichosts, a British Amazon wannabe, is setting up in Silicon Valley to be
near potential cloud customers like start-ups and other small to mid-sized
concerns.

It’s already got a data center in Los Angeles. The new San Jose site will give
it redundancy.

It’s also opening new data centers in Hong Kong, Sydney and Amsterdam,
expanding out of London, Toronto and San Antonio, Texas.

read more

Piston Cloud Computing, the OpenStack disciple, has gotten an $8 million B round to accelerate OpenStack adoption from Cisco, Data Collective, Divergent Ventures, Hummer Winblad, Swisscom Ventures and True Ventures.
The money will be used for product development.
Cisco, Data Collective and Swisscom Ventures are new investors.
Piston got a $4.5 million A round in July of 2011 and launched the first commercial OpenStack distribution for building, scaling and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware.
The widgetry also integrates with the open source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service.

read more