“With Couchbase Server 2.1, our multi-threaded persistence engine provides customers dramatic disk read and write performance, allowing them to extend the scope and scale of their applications,” said Yaseen Rahim, Sr. VP Products at Couchbase, as the NoSQL database leader today announced the general availability of the latest release of its NoSQL document-oriented database.

“We continue to invest in strengthening and optimizing the core architecture of Couchbase Server,” Rahim continued, “further differentiating us as the NoSQL solution that delivers reliability at scale for customers and users.”

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Cloud computing ownership is traditionally seen as the province of CIO or CTO, and where those roles don’t exist in an organization, the VP or even Director/Manager of IT oversees cloud implementation.
However, with more business units accessing cloud platforms for a variety of purposes, the range of required buy-in has similarly increased: the CFO is now a primary consideration in the way a business integrates with the cloud, as do marketing, sales, as well as other business unit heads within the organization.
But the CEO isn’t concerned about the technical aspects of what cloud delivers in the way that it is germane for even marketing and sales to understand how cloud process work at least on a fundamental level. Those groups utilizing Salesforce or different automation platforms need some technical ability to sync systems or specialize the platform.

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Many small businesses are realizing that cloud computing isn’t just for large corporations. Many providers offer services that are targeted at the small business owner. Cloud computing presents unique opportunities for small businesses, giving them access to infrastructure that had traditionally only been available to much larger organizations. There are several options perfectly suited to small businesses.
Small businesses with larger than average hosting needs tend to require some sort of dedicated server hosting system. Basically you rent a private server virtualization from a provider so you can customize the server software at the operating system level. The problem with this setup was the waste of resources when the hardware was running at anything but maximum load.
A Virtual Dedicated Server is a cloud-based service that mimics the customization of a dedicated machine, but with the easy scalability and redundancy of cloud computing. It provides business owners with the ability to modify and control all aspects of their hosting service.
It’s beneficial for the service provider because there are no wasted resources. Any processing power not being used during a period of low activity for one user can be immediately tasked to another virtual server on the same machine. This allows providers to offer VPS at a cost that is lower than traditional dedicated servers.
There is one major difference between a cloud-based VPS and true Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). While both provide flexible and scalable hosting services, a VPS still must operate within the confines of a single machine. IaaS is a broader system that has the resources available that far exceed any single machine. A VPS running as IaaS has none of the confining issues of a single machine server. The scalability and processing power available is only limited by the size of the provider’s network and the budget of the client.
Most small scale businesses won’t have a need for a system as robust as Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS is intended for those companies that need to deploy a full customized software application, but lack the hardware resources and storage space to make it happen. The client will handle the creation and deployment of the app. The service provider supplies access to a network, server, storage and programming libraries.
Application PaaS is an extension of PaaS whereby the client builds the customized applications within the PaaS service itself. It further reduces the amount of resources a business must have to develop a custom application. Most of what is needed is provided within the aPaaS framework.

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That’s some serious savings, even in a state where just about everything seems to cost just a bit more.
A recent study has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough energy annually to power Los Angeles for a year.
The six-month study was led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and conducted with Northwestern University.
The report looks at three common business applications – email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing). Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut IT energy consumption by up to 87 percent – about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles, according to an article on DailyFusion.net.

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This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform.
Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges.

In this article, I’ll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I’ll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs.

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This chapter introduces and describes several of the more common foundational cloud architectural models, each exemplifying a common usage and characteristic of contemporary cloud-based environments. The involvement and importance of different combinations of cloud computing mechanisms in relation to these architectures are explored.
IT resources can be horizontally scaled via the addition of one or more identical IT resources, and a load balancer that provides runtime logic capable of evenly distributing the workload among the available IT resources (Figure 1). The resulting workload distribution architecture reduces both IT resource over-utilization and under-utilization to an extent dependent upon the sophistication of the load balancing algorithms and runtime logic.

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The use of big data with predictive analytics systems layered on top has a tremendous amount of potential in the healthcare market. Indeed, when paired with cloud-based platforms, there is the potential to become more cost effective, and much better at delivering healthcare services.

The fact of the matter is that most healthcare providers are under-funded, which leads to being under-automated and under-innovative. Moreover, there seems to be a growing chasm between those who deliver healthcare to patients, and those who drive IT within healthcare provider organizations.

The statistics back this up. According to Gartner, anticipated growth opportunities put some industries at the top when it comes to global IT spending. However, Healthcare Providers were not in the top for growth opportunities, coming in at $15,311M. Even Utilities beat them out by a projected $18,756M. Think about the number of changes in the world of healthcare providers. These numbers are surprising at best, or very scary at worst.
The solution to this problem of “too much to do and not enough resources to do it” is to leverage the right new technologies, apply careful planning, and move from a reactive to proactive state in the world of healthcare IT.

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Tod Nielsen, whose name is probably more recognized because of his dozen years at Microsoft than his recent turns at VMware, Borland or Oracle, is now CEO of Heroku, the cloud application development platform that’s part of saleforce.com thanks to its $212 million acquisition in 2010.

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Earlier this week we got to speak with Sanjay Mehta, VP of Product Marketing, and Clint Sharp, Senior Product Manager, Big Data; concerning the (beta) launch of a new product, “Hunk”, making exploring data stored in Hadoop easy.

In fact, one of the taglines randomly generated on the company’s website is “taking the ‘sh’ out of IT”, solutions which work for clients in the real-world is a clear priority.

Sanjay gives an interview of the company’s background: “What we are all about is making machine-generated data accessible using a valuable to different kinds of users in an organisation.”

To re-affirm their current products are a trusted solution used by many businesses already, Sanjay states: “We have a flagship product called Splunk Enterprise, which is deployed to around 5,600 customers around the world.”

So how is Splunk’s current, industry-leading platform being used today? He explains: “It’s …

It is often said that Europeans are more conservative in their outlook with regard to change.

There are occasions when this is a useful cultural trait, like limiting the rampant commercialisation of fine heritage sites or taking care to uphold a traditional method for creating a really good cheese. But when it comes to technology resistance to change it only brings disaster.

Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to cloud computing. The “readiness for the cloud’ debate is so bound up in what we think it is today NOT what it actually delivers and the clear and unambiguous direction it is heading towards – That if they keep debating instead of doing, swathes of business will still be pontificating in empty boardrooms as the bailiffs come to take their chairs away.

For many the ‘cloud’ means re-writing their apps, putting their data somewhere outside, and in some cases it will …