Cloud Expo | Maximizing the Small Things: Efficiencies for Cloud Hardware

Most of today’s hardware manufacturers are building servers with at least one SATA Port, but not every systems engineer utilizes them. This is considered a loss in the game of maximizing potential storage space in a fixed unit. The SATADOM Series was created by Innodisk as a high-performance, small form factor boot drive with low power consumption to be plugged into the unused SATA port on your server board as an alternative to hard drive or USB boot-up. Built for 1U systems, this powerful device is smaller than a one dollar coin, and frees up otherwise dead space on your motherboard.
To meet the requirements of tomorrow’s cloud hardware, Innodisk invested internal R&D resources to develop our SATA III series of products. The SATA III SATADOM boasts 500/180MBs R/W Speeds respectively, or double R/W Speed of SATA II products.

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SugarCRM’s New Private Cloud Piggybacks on Amazon

SugarCRM is launching a turnkey Private Cloud, a dedicated SugarCRM-managed private instance of its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications using Amazon for its cloud.
It claims “exceptional” service levels of between 99.5% and 99.95%.
It’ll be available in the US, Ireland, Singapore, Japan, Australia and Brazil.
The widgetry employed includes Amazon’s load balancing, MySQL database, S3 storage, VPN and master-to-master replication. Sugar expects international accounts will “follow the sun” for the sake of data governance.
It says it’s been competing against in-house widgetry stuck together with bubble gum and bobby pins as well as Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.com.

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Cloud Expo NY: Network Transformation = High-Performance Cloud Enablement

Gain insight on how network transformation plays a role in enabling enterprises to migrate and better support a cloud environment.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Mark Casey, President and CEO of CFN Services, will discuss network transformation use cases illustrating how you can significantly improve cloud’s end-to-end performance tackling the challenges of performance, capacity and availability, while controlling sprawl across globally distributed applications. Learn how transforming your network and preparing it for cloud, makes it more effective and affordable maintaining cloud’s promise of on-demand service provisioning, economies of scale and a service-level driven customer experience.

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Employees, Cloud, and Company Data: Problem or Reality?

Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Apple iCloud. Chances are if your employees have Internet-connected mobile devices, they are using these and other services to store and transmit your company data — with or without your approval. That’s according to a new study from Enterprise Strategy Group, which found that while more than 75 percent of companies it surveyed had policies that prohibit the use of online file sharing and related tools, by and large their employees went ahead and used them anyway.

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ICT remains mostly in-house, but cloud services adoption is growing

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia Pacific

Ovum publishes Australian CIO Survey: ICT Challenges, Investment Priorities, and Sourcing Approaches

Our survey of 63 Australian CIOs across a range of sectors reveals a slightly surprising picture of the reality of ICT management compared to the media hype.

While alternative sourcing approaches such as shared services, outsourcing, and cloud services are much discussed at conferences and in the media, the reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded as one of the major challenges.

However, outsourcing and cloud services are projected to account for one-third of ICT activities overall in the next 1–2 years. Change is definitely coming, while perhaps more slowly than expected, and momentum for cloud services in …

Adding Security to Cloud-Based Storage

Boston-based startup nCrypted Cloud recently launched software of the same name designed to address the security and privacy concerns that have emerged with the use of popular cloud-based storage services.

Available in consumer basic, consumer pro, and enterprise editions, nCrypted Cloud encrypts information stored on popular cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The software is as simple to use as the services it works with, says Nick Stamos, the CEO and Co-Founder of nCrypted Cloud, while offering the robustness and controls that enterprise IT departments need.
Stamos says nCrypted Cloud’s security privacy protections fill a glaring gap in cloud storage services today.
The promise of the cloud is ‘put everything in the cloud and it will be available’ – but that’s the problem as well as the promise.
“The promise of the cloud is ‘put everything in the cloud and it will be available’ – but that’s the problem as well as the promise,” says Stamos, who is also principal and founder of The Stamos Group.

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NETWAYS Partners with C12G to Provide OpenNebula Services

NETWAYS GmbH has just announced its partnership with C12G Labs to provide services, consulting, and private- and hybrid-cloud-services based on OpenNebula. NETWAYS has been an active promoter of OpenNebula and a collaborator of C12G Labs since 2011 when they organized the first OpenNebula Workshop at OSDC 2011 in Nuremberg.
NETWAYS has been supporting companies to manage complex, multifaceted IT infrastructures for more than 15 years. Specializing in enterprise grade open source tools, they ensure the smooth operation of networks, servers and applications. NETWAYS has chosen OpenNebula for its implementation of standards, efficiency, availability, and scalability. NETWAYS has been successfully using OpenNebula in various production environments for several years.

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ZOOcore Moves Media Production Workflow to the Cloud

ZOO Digital, a provider of workflow management software and services for creative media production, has launched its new Cloud-based platform, ZOOcore.

ZOOcore is a workflow and collaboration platform for creative and production businesses designed exclusively for the Cloud, enabling tailor-made workflow management systems to be configured and deployed very quickly at a fraction of the cost of bespoke software development. It is a centralized system to organize and control production information and brings significant efficiencies to project tracking, online review and approval which enable a reduction in email traffic and spreadsheet management.

ZOO has already deployed ZOOcore systems for a number of clients in diverse business areas including a major film studio for review and approval of artwork, a global TV network for co-ordination of advertising campaigns, a major US book publisher for preparation of eBooks, a post production facility for management of DVD, Blu-ray and digital product creation, a marketing agency for campaign management, and an international printer for job processing.

Such existing clients report that the use of the product eliminates many administrative overheads and enables robust and reliable collaboration, giving shorter time to market and lower operating costs.  It is fully configurable and deployments of the ZOOcore Enterprise Edition can be tailor-made to support each client’s unique workflows.  For smaller workgroups, ZOOcore is available in simplified pre-configured versions.

ZOO will be showcasing ZOOcore at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas between 8 – 11 April 2013at booth N-CP2.

Gordon Doran , President of ZOO, commented: “We have been delighted with the feedback from early adopters of ZOOcore, who are already reporting significantly reduced administrative overheads in creative and production workflows.  We believe that this new platform will enable us to license and deploy workflow systems more quickly and widely than before, delivering highly cost-effective solutions to our clients.”

HP Launches Moonshot

Hewlett-Packard Monday distracted the press and the market from its executive suite dramas by putting out its promised Project Moonshot, the energy-sipping Atom-based microserver it expects to change its flagging server fortunes and be altogether disruptive.
The widgetry, cast as a new class of server for social, mobile, cloud, Big Data and general scale-out use cases, is supposed to sell into the new hyper-scale data center, where HP claims the traditional 25-year-old server architecture doesn’t suit and has, in fact, created a crisis of economics.
“With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the Internet and predictions for exponential growth, we’ve reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable,” CEO Meg Whitman said. “HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices.”

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Cloud Expo New York: Scaling Big Data in the Cloud

Need to scale your data tier? The foundation of every application is the database layer, and today application architects have more choices than ever. With these choices come new questions: Which database technology is best for your application? How can your application take advantage of Big Data technology? Can you run your relational database at Big Data scale? What does it take to implement a comprehensive data infrastructure, including your core database, incorporating SQL, No SQL and Big Data platforms?
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, will answer these questions and more. You will learn exactly what it takes to scale your data tier, and how to keep it reliable – despite the challenges presented in Cloud environments. You will also enjoy a quick review of the primary types of database platforms, enabling you to choose the best technology for your application challenges. We will close with a high volume social application/gaming case study, showing exactly what it takes to run a high-volume, multi-terabyte database infrastructure in the cloud.

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