Microsoft said Tuesday that it’s going to buy privately held StorSimple and its Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) solutions to advance its Cloud OS vision and help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing more efficiently.
It did not say what it’s paying.
As a gauge, the start-up raised at least $31.5 million in VC funding from such companies as Ignition, a retreat of ex-Microsofties.
StorSimple is a partner of Microsoft’s and its widgetry works with Windows.
It integrates cloud storage for on-premises applications and offers a single appliance delivering high-performance tiered local and cloud storage, live archiving, cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery.
Ironically, it also supports VMware and OpenStack, the latter by integrating with Rackspace’s underlying Cloud Files.
Contrarian: Building, Colocating Your Own Servers, No Cloud Involved
Jeff Atwood has a great post at Coding Horror talking about his penchant for building his own servers to rack at a colo. It tries to compare to the Amazon Ec2 alternative, all the while admitting it’s pretty much apples and oranges.
I want to make it clear that building and colocating your own servers isn’t (always) crazy, it isn’t scary, heck, it isn’t even particularly hard. In some situations it can make sense to build and rack your own servers, provided …
- you want absolute top of the line server performance without paying thousands of dollars per month for the privilege
- you are willing to invest the time in building, racking, and configuring your servers
- you have the capital to invest up front
- you desire total control over the hardware
- you aren’t worried about the flexibility of quickly provisioning new servers to handle unanticipated load
- you don’t need the redundancy, geographical backup, and flexibility that comes with cloud virtualization
It’s worth reading in its own right, but also because he does a pretty good job of outlining the pros and cons of cloud versus self-hosting. It’s also good thing to remember that no matter how “virtual” we get there’s still gotta be a bunch of hardware somewhere to make it all go.
Nuance Adds Voice to Epic Mobile Electronic Health Record Apps
Nuance Communications, Inc. today announced that Epic electronic health record (EHR) customers can now use voice-enabled clinical information capture through Epic Haiku for the iPhone™ and Canto for the iPad™.
“Epic’s mobile applications provide valuable EHR access both inside and outside the hospital or clinic environment,” said Dr. Jeffrey Westcott, medical director, Cardiac Catherization Lab, Swedish Medical Center. “For me, it’s important to have the on-the-go accessibility provided by tablets and smartphones. Using voice recognition to document a note in Haiku or Canto allows me to seamlessly dictate the patient narrative into the electronic healthcare record using a workflow that suits my style and ensures my focus can remain on patients.”
Nuance’s cloud-based, medical voice recognition builds off of its proven success with the more than 450,000 clinicians worldwide who use Nuance’s Best-in-KLAS clinical documentation solutions on the desktop every day. By leveraging the existing desktop-focused interface, Nuance enables Haiku and Canto customers to connect to Nuance Healthcare’s voice recognition in the cloud. This connectivity will provide maintenance-free access and automatic updates of personal speech profiles, medical vocabularies and user-defined shortcuts. Customers can also enter progress notes, histories and physical exams via voice.
“Clinicians’ work lives are not conducive to a desk and chair; they need the flexibility of a mobile environment to support their workflow – between exam rooms, clinics and hospitals – and all at a moment’s notice,” said Janet Dillione, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Healthcare. “Still, issues surrounding the adoption of mobile technologies remain, including limitations surrounding laborious touchscreen keyboards. With voice-enabled mobile EHR applications, clinicians can enjoy the benefits of the Nuance-powered functionality anytime, anywhere.”
Index To Sessions at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley
Who is speaking about what next month at the largest cloud computing and big data event in the world? Here’s a quick reference guide for those working out which sessions they most want to attend November 5-8 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA…once the doors open in under 3 weeks’ time to 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley – co-located with 2nd International BigDataExpo.
Oracle Joins Personalized Cancer Care Consortium
Worldwide Innovative Network (WIN) in personalized cancer medicine consortium announces dthat Oracle Health Sciences has become a member of the consortium. Oracle will provide access to its data management, clinical trials, genomics and analytics expertise to help WIN advance its mission of increasing the efficacy of cancer care globally through personalized therapy and early diagnostics.
The development of personalized therapies requires new collaborations between industry, healthcare and academia. This includes the ability to access and build upon the collective knowledge and data of the entire cancer community, including clinical, genomic and patient data leveraging modern information technologies.
Oracle Health Sciences has developed a portfolio of integrated, cloud-based software applications that help advance personalized medicine by enabling new collaboration models between research institutions and healthcare organizations. Specific to the work of the consortium, the Oracle Health Sciences Network accelerates translational research, healthcare analytics, and health information exchange by allowing these organizations to more efficiently share and analyze de-identified data across organizational boundaries.
“To advance personalized cancer care, collaboration among the health sciences community is absolutely essential, but achieving it, from a technology perspective, has presented challenges. Oracle is helping organizations to break down these barriers and lay a foundation for expanded collaboration and new insight. We welcome Oracle’s knowledge and innovation as it joins our ranks,” said Dr. John Mendelsohn, Chairman of WIN Consortium and past President, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
“Our overarching goals are to achieve groundbreaking personalized cancer medicine discoveries and to significantly improve the outcomes and quality of life for cancer patients,” said Professor Alexander Eggermont, General Director, Institut Gustave Roussy and Vice-Chairman of WIN Consortium. “With the dropping cost of whole genome sequencing, technology is essential to helping us analyze this rich data and achieve our goals. We welcome Oracle, one of the world’s leading innovators in this field, to our organization, and look forward to its many contributions.”
There’s No Business Like Cloud & Big Data | CEO Power Panel at Cloud Expo
This fast-moving “CEO Power Panel” at the 11th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan features industry thought leaders and will discuss the business-related issues that are currently front of mind with chief executives of today’s foremost Cloud and Big Data based companies.
Topics include what are the commercial and fiscal benefits of building a business on the cloud? What’s the business potential of real-time Big Data analytics? What Cloud companies will have disappeared by the time we hold 12th Cloud Expo next June…into other, larger players – and why does such consolidation always happen? What industry vertical is least exploited as yet, by Cloud players?
Security and Automation in the Cloud
One of the biggest concerns IT managers have about moving business-critical applications into the cloud and away from the data center is the issue of security. What you may not realize, however, is that the same tools for automation and provisioning that function in cloud implementations also offer a significant opportunity to improve security.
The first concern, of course, is whether the cloud in question is private or public. If you’re using a public cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, you know you’re looking at Level 1 PCI DSS compliance. If you’re running a cloud solution in-house, however, you need to make sure you’re handling all of that security via firewalls and network and storage management.
How businesses can engage the hybrid cloud
What is a “hybrid cloud”?
Is it 1) an environment where applications and processes exist both in the public and private cloud and on premise? Or is it 2) a combination public/private cloud without an on-premise component?
For the sake of this discussion, we’ll concede definition 1.
Clarifying this concept is important because the vast majority of cloud-adopting organisations – which is to say the vast majority of organisations, period – are about to become hybrid-cloud-adopting organisations, and for good reason: they’re not ready to simply switch off their existing on-premise systems – legacy systems that already have significant business and operational value – and re-invent them in the cloud.
Let’s clarify this hybrid notion with a simple example of a business process nearly all organisations are familiar with: the HR onboarding process.
- Onboarding begins: A cloud-based recruiting system is used to identify a candidate. When the candidate is hired …
AWS Boring into Government & Ed
Amazon Web Services says it’s got more than 300 federal, state and local
government agencies and 1,500 education institutions leveraging its cloud
for Big Data analytics, HPC, web and collaboration applications, archiving
and storage, and disaster relief.
That being so, it’s got new services and features available in the AWS
GovCloud (US) region, including the addition of High Performance
Computing capabilities.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Keynote Speaker Profile: John Engates – Rackspace
With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in just under three weeks’ time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA – co-located with 2nd International BigDataExpo – let’s introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference…
We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing & Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud and/or Big Data solutions that are transforming the world of Enterprise IT?