Companies are moving forward with cloud deployments at a rapid rate, according to Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream: 2014, a Microsoft Corp.-commissioned study conducted by 451 Research LLC. The new study showed that more than 45 percent of organizations surveyed are beyond the pilot phase, and 32 percent now possess a formal cloud computing plan as part of their overall IT and business strategy. The data also highlights that on-premises private cloud adoption accounted for 26 percent of on-premises infrastructure spending in 2013, and hosted private cloud is expected to experience the highest rate of growth for off-premises infrastructure, accounting for 32 percent of hosted spending in the next 24 months.
Telstra takes Cisco’s global cloud platform local in Australia
Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology
Telstra and Cisco have announced a first-of-its-kind alliance that signals an inflexion point in the evolution of the global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market.
Even as Australia’s largest telco, Telstra has decided that the economies of scale required for sustainable success as an IaaS provider are beyond its means. It has determined that it is better to cease investing in potentially sub-scale home-tailored cloud computing infrastructure and instead partner with a global provider of ready-to-use cloud platforms.
The alliance is a win-win arrangement: Telstra has found a way to play a stronger local game in Australia by leveraging Cisco’s global cloud muscle, while Cisco has found a way to sell its global offerings into the Australian market without needing to invest in local services capabilities on the ground.
Cloud services winners will deploy global scale locally
One of the most significant impacts …
Connectloud’s uCloud Provides Multi-Tenant Automation Across Clouds
Connectloud’s uCloud empowers enterprises with quickly scalable, secure, multi-tenant automation across Clouds of any type, for clients from any segment, across geographically dispersed data centers.
“CIOs today face paradoxical demands and challenges in both constructing an agile IT infrastructure, and reducing IT operating costs,” said Zeeshan Naseh, CEO of Connectloud. “At Connectloud, our mission is to deliver a unified Cloud solution that provides true business value, and uCloud™ is our initial step in that direction.”
The Internet of Things – Under the Covers
In previous articles I predicted that wearable technology would be powered by light-weight operating systems, citing Samsung’s decision to go with Tizen instead of Android. This decision was apparently based on battery life and user interface considerations. However, just after the article hit the Internet, Google executive Sundar Pichai announced the Android SDK for Wearables. Android is used in many different ways as demonstrated by Kindle and Nokia X (Nokia X seems to have deployed a Windows 8 look and feel on top of Android). Indeed, for this very reason Android 4.4 has moved a lot of key APIs into the Cloud.
New Relic Announces Real-Time Analytics Platform
New Relic on Wednesday announced the arrival of New Relic Insights, a real-time analytics platform that collects, stores and presents valuable data directly from modern software, and transforms the data into insights about customers, applications and the business. Delivered as a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and using New Relic’s lightning-fast and custom-built Big Data database platform, New Relic Insights empowers application developers and business users alike to make ad hoc and iterative queries across trillions of events and metrics and get answers in seconds
OpenNebula 4.6 Beta Released
The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 4.6 Beta (Carina). This release brings many new features and stabilizes features that were introduced in previous versions.
OpenNebula 4.6 introduces important improvements in several areas. The provisioning model has been greatly simplify by supplementing user groups with resource providers. This extended model, the Virtual Data Center, offers an integrated and comprehensive framework for resource allocation and isolation.
Another important new feature has taken place in the OpenNebula core. It has undergone a minor re-design of its internal data model to allow federation of OpenNebula daemons. With OpenNebula Carina your users can access resource providers from multiple data-centers in a federated way.
Meeting the Challenges of Effectively Managing a Recurring Revenue Model
Today the ability to increase revenue by utilizing recurring revenue models is driving new business for companies in all market sectors. However, delivering the features, benefits, and capabilities necessary to enable companies to offer products or services on a recurring basis can be a challenge. At the same time, companies prefer to augment their existing systems and services rather than replace them.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Brendan O’Brien, co-founder of Aria Systems, will examine the key issues for executives and their IT staff who are mandated to leverage their legacy systems and services in order to drive new recurring revenue.
AppZero Launches New Release of Self-Service App Migration Tool on AWS
AppZero, a fast, flexible way to move enterprise applications to the cloud, announced on Tuesday a new version of AppZero Service Provider Edition for use on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. AppZero’s award-winning application migration tool enables customers to move server applications onto AWS simply, fast, and with no code changes — at the push of a button.
New features in this release include a «single view» of a migration, the ability to conduct multiple, concurrent migration, and simplified dashboard/navigation.
EVault Cited as a Leader in Disaster Recovery as a Service
EVault, Inc., a Seagate company (NASDAQ:STX), has announced that Forrester Research, Inc. has recognized EVault as a leader in Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) according to the January 2014 report, The Forrester Wave™: Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service Providers, Q1 2014[1]. Forrester evaluated vendors based on their current offering, strategy, and market presence. EVault tied for the second highest scores for its core DRaaS offering and security, and the highest score possible for recovery objective capabilities. EVault also achieved the highest score possible for planned service enhancements and again tied for the second highest score for value proposition and vision.
Stanford Researchers Create Tool to Triple Cloud Server Efficiency
Two Stanford engineers have created a cluster management tool that can triple server efficiency while delivering reliable service at all times, allowing data center operators to serve more customers for each dollar they invest.
“This is a proof of concept for an approach that could change the way we manage server clusters,” said Jason Mars, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Kushagra Vaid, general manager for cloud server engineering at Microsoft Corp., said that the largest data center operators have devised ways to manage their operations but that a great many smaller organizations haven’t.
“If you can double the amount of work you do with the same server footprint, it would give you the agility to grow your business fast,” said Vaid, who oversees a global operation with more than a million servers catering to more than a billion users.
How Quasar works takes some explaining, but one key ingredient is a sophisticated algorithm that is modeled on the way companies such as Netflix and Amazon recommend movies, books and other products to their customers. Instead of asking developers to estimate how much capacity they are likely to need, the Stanford system would start by asking what sort of performance their applications require.
Read much more detail here.
