Google Cloud Ventures – Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

To best capture the primary value of Cloud Computing I always recommend looking at the scenario of a new entrepreneur launching their online business.
The Cloud has made entrepreneurism itself more accessible to more people, lowering the barrier to entry by lowering the costs it takes to launch a new online venture by a magnitude, while simultaneously improving the quality of the apps you can produce, and how quickly you can produce them.
Combined with the continuing explosion of online users and how much they grow their daily use of social media, e-commerce etc., this is a massively potent combination.

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HP Forms New Cloud Unit

HP has hired Margaret Dawson out of Symform to be VP of product
marketing and cloud evangelist for HP Cloud Services, a new start-up unit
inside HP.

She claims that “much of the negative hype reported around HP does not
match reality. HP has a strong foundation to compete and win in the cloud
and is building out the right leadership team, ecosystem, cloud platform and
solutions to escalate that process.”

It’s unclear how many people will believe her.

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Enterprises ripe for Network as a Service

Four out of five European enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS), reflecting rapidly increasing or spiking bandwidth requirements faced today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model. The findings were published this week in a survey carried out by Vanson Bourne on behalf of network specialist Ciena.

Okay, Let Me Say It – Generic PaaS Is Not Disruptive

This article argues whether the generic paas offerings from established giants today are not disruptive enough and at best they are incremental.
Change. Continuous change is what we have witnessed, since Computing began way back in 1960s, we have had many transformational waves on how the Software is built, deployed and accessed; From the COBOL & mainframes to Client-Server & PCs, to the web, to multi-tier and the whole 9 yards of how code was written, arranged, deployed and managed.

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Rackspace Launches New Private Cloud Reference Architectures

Rackspace, co-developer of the OpenStack cloud platform, has created a more direct path for large, full-service IT providers to deploy the popular open source-based software in large-scale private cloud projects, according to an article on eWEEK.
Rackspace released three new blueprints, called Private Cloud Open Reference Architectures, to fuel the initiative, which is designed specifically for such companies as EMC, Dell, IBM, NetApp and Hewlett-Packard.
The new blueprints primarily are directed at Big Data-type private cloud projects, which are ramping up in many different verticals around the globe.
According to an article on TalkinCloud.com, “reference architectures are one way toward achieving maturity in a business technology, and that’s what Rackspace is hoping to do. At the same time, it may give it and the channel partners that deal in private OpenStack cloud infrastructure and deployments an advantage, as the references should, ideally, make it easier for them to design private clouds for their customers.”

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Leveraging Cloud and Virtualization for Disaster Recovery

With cloud computing, more users and an increase in data bring with it the challenges associated with disaster recovery and business continuity. All distributed systems have to be checked and the data points must all be monitored. In working with these more complex data centers, many administrators are turning to the cloud and virtualization to help them create a more robust DR plan, according to an article on DataCenterKnowledge.com.
A well-planned out cloud and virtualization solution can truly help any organization create a more agile environment. There are inherent benefits to working with specific types of cloud models and virtualization platforms. A large part of IT is creativity – that’s why using new types of technologies can help reduce management costs and keep an environment running longer.
One way to prepare for disaster is using cloud for replication. Site-to-site replication has become easier with the utilization of both private and public cloud technologies. With better storage systems and more control over the WAN, organizations are able to better replicate their environments. This can be entire virtual machines, specific databases or just data points.

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The cloud news categorized.