Industry News Desk

Start-Up Encrypts Data in the Cloud

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST

A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that’s just hit the radar says it’s got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It’s supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing keys. It promises that a user’s data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual Private Data (VPD) System, a combination of the start-up’s Virtual Appliance and Virtual Key Management Service, comes complements of its patent-pending homomorphic split-key encryption technology, which is supposed to increase security by an order of magnitude through hosted key management.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Ajay Budhraja – U.S. Dept. of Justice

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and 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 that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

Deltacloud Graduates to TLP

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Apache Deltacloud, the Red Hat-contributed ReSTful API that abstracts differences between clouds so services on any cloud can be managed – provided of course there’s a driver – has graduated from the Apache Foundation’s incubator and is now a full-fledged Top-Level Project (TLP). There are drivers for Amazon, Eucalyptus, GoGrid, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack and Rackspace. GoGrid CIO Mark Worsey said developers only have to code to one API. Besides the API server, the project also provides client libraries for a variety of languages. Apache Deltacloud software is released under the Apache 2 license.

Microsoft Slashes Price of Its Cloud Database

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:06:00 EST

As a result, it said, of “customer feedback and evolving usage patterns,” Microsoft cut the price of its cloud-ified SQL Azure database 48%–75% for databases larger than 1GB and introduced a new entry-level 100MB model. It blogged that it’s noticed that many projects start small but need to grow quickly so now as the user’s database grows the price per GB will decline significantly. It also said that many cloud adopters and customers with smaller workloads want an inexpensive option so that’s where the 100MB option comes from. Amazon may have made them do it.

Cloud Expo New York: Copyright and the Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

Wide and cheap availability of cloud-based media services is upon us. With the transformations these services are already bringing to the consumption of music, video and interactive media, change has likewise come to professional workflows. Documents in 2012 are read, written, collaborated on, and distributed anywhere an Internet-enabled device can reach – which is to say, everywhere. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Christopher Kenneally, Director of Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), will discuss how among research institutions and other knowledge-intensive enterprises (e.g., R&D units, medical research teams), widespread adoption of this new cloud functionality will bring dramatic changes in the ecology and characteristics of content use and re-use. Repertory-style licensing is already an important component to facilitate this shift in knowledge workers’ and researchers’ workflows. Indeed, as cloud-based content usage increases, repertory-style licensing will likely become an ever more critical and indispensable part of the toolkit for collaboration and content-sharing.

Rackspace Buys SharePoint Expertise

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 11:16:00 EST

Fresh off a happy quarter, Rackspace said Thursday that it’s bought SharePoint911, one of those you-never-heard-of-them outfits that does SharePoint consulting, training and JumpStart services so it can deliver newfangled SharePoint services along with its existing SharePoint hosting. It didn’t say how much it paid for the self-funded unit so it’s obviously immaterial. Eight-year-old SharePoint911 includes six Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and the authors of over 10 SharePoint books and nine SharePoint training courses. It’s thought Rackspace is fattening up because of AWS. Microsoft’s SharePoint operation is a billion-dollar-a-year business with tens of millions of users. As popular as it is, the software can be crotchety to set up and handle.

Enterprise Transformation Using Cloud and Cloud Platforms at Cloud Expo NY

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:58:00 EST

Cloud is a shift from the focus on underlying technology implementation to leveraging existing implementations and further building upon them. Cloud orchestration or a network of clouds is the wave of the future where these clouds can operate with elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. Effective service management is an important aspect of managing such networks. The transition to the cloud will enable the further aggregation of composite web services and enhanced business-to-business capabilities for integrating processes and applications. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Ajay Budhraja, CTO at the Department of Justice, will discuss how, for example, the requirement to access multiple clouds will cause a shift toward utilizing identity management services and single sign-on capabilities. With cloud services, a traditional project that just obtained survey information from customers and provided reports was transitioned to leverage an authentication service, cloud customer information service, cloud reporting service and other cloud services to provide a scalable, highly integrated solution quickly.

Citrix Floats CloudStack 3

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:18:00 EST

Citrix has opened up a beta of its CloudStack 3, the first release of the open source cloud platform under the Citrix brand. Citrix acquired the Java-based cloud management last year when it bought Cloud.com. A full production version of the branded stuff is supposed to be available later this quarter. Citrix said CloudStack is already handling over $1 billion in revenue for more than 85 large-scale production clouds, including Zynga, IDC Frontier and Nokia Research. CloudStack 3 is supposed to be for any size customer that wants to transform virtualized datacenter resources into automated, elastic, self-service clouds in the IaaS fashion of Amazon.

Atos, EMC, VMware Start Cloud Company

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:37:00 EST

EMC and VMware are going into the cloud business with Atos, the big, publicly owned, Paris-based global IT services firm, intending to take an equity position in Canopy, an end-to-end cloud company Atos is setting up using EMC and VMware technology. The companies said Wednesday when Canopy was announced that their shareholder agreement wasn’t set in stone yet and wouldn’t be until early Q2 but the Americans are talking about kicking in tens of millions of dollars. At least EMC is. The object of the game is to cash in on what is projected to be a $267 billion cloud market by 2020, up from $59 billion this year.

Big Data: "An Even Bigger Deal than Cloud," Says Expert

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

"The volume of data we're generating now from machines pales in comparison to the volume of data we'll soon generate from our own bodies," says data security expert Dave Asprey. Writing in a Trend Micro blog, Asprey - who is one of the leaders in the emerging Quantified Self movement - explains his vision of a world in which personal biometrical data is shared via the cloud.

Rackspace Acquires SharePoint911

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Rackspace Hosting, the service leader in cloud computing, on Thursday announced its acquisition of SharePoint911, an industry leader in SharePoint consulting, training, and "JumpStart" services within SharePoint. The unification of both companies provides capabilities to deliver unparalleled SharePoint hosting solutions along with expert services to the enterprise market. "For several years, Rackspace has focused on providing managed SharePoint infrastructure," says John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace. "We are thrilled to have the world-class expertise of SharePoint911 on our team to give us greater application delivery service capabilities. SharePoint911 will add the talent and expertise to our teams to make SharePoint deployments easier for our customers while increasing their scalability and performance through better integration of the workload and infrastructure."

The Resilient Cloud for Defense

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Skill at computing comes naturally to those who are adept at abstraction. The best developers can instantly change focus—one moment they are orchestrating high level connections between abstract entities; the next they are sweating through the side effects of each … Continue reading →

Swisscom Floats Red Hat Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Swisscom, the Swiss telecom, is going into the cloud business. Its subsidiary Swisscom IT Services AG has signed up with Red Hat as a Certified Cloud Provider and launched a public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud targeting enterprise-class customers primarily in the Swiss market. It’s offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the hour or year for virtual machine consumption on the IaaS cloud. Swisscom just posted its first quarterly loss in 10 years, losing $911 million largely because of a write-down in its Italian fixed-line unit impacted by the Italian debt crisis. It also pinched guidance on expectations of lower revenues and price erosion in its core market, which might explain it’s interest in diversifying.

Jill T. Singer, NRO CIO, Named One of Ten Top Women in Cloud Computing

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

CONGRATULATIONS to National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) CIO Jill T. Singer for being selected as one of the 10 winners of the first annual CloudNOW awards presented in Santa Clara, California earlier this week.

From the NRO Press Release:
"Considered one of the top women leaders in Federal IT, Ms. Singer was recognized for her innovative and inspirational leadership in the area of Cloud Computing. She is known not only for her presentations and writings on technologies and business changes needed for technological success, but her ability to mentor and grow the next generation of IT leaders to deliver long-term, sustained success."

Over the years I have personally admired Ms. Singer for her GovCloud leadership. This admiration comes from having the pleasure to work directly with her on "the QUAD" and the subsequent Intelligence Community Common Operating Environment (IC COE). Her ability to understand and communicate the complexities and value of cloud computing have been crucial to the Intelligence Communities adoption of this exciting operational and economic model.

Ms. Singer said upon receiving the award,“I am deeply honored to be recognized by CloudNOW with this leadership award. Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it.”

The other CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awardees were::

•Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco

•Lauren States, CTO of Cloud Computing, IBM

•Vanessa Alvarez, Analyst, Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research

•Jamie Dos Santos, President of Terremark, a Verizon company

•Becky Swain, Founder of the Cloud Security Alliance

•Lori MacVittie, Senior Technical Analyst, F5 Networks

•Ellen Rubin, Founder of CloudSwitch, Terremark, a Verizon company

•Dawn Leaf, Senior Executive for Cloud Computing, NIST

•Jamie Erbes, Cloud Labs Director, HP Fellow, HP

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

Big Data Gold Mine in Cloud Governance and Automation

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

I've been working on Enterprise Cloud Strategy and in the course of this work identified some interesting and non-obvious opportunities in the Cloud. One solution I’ve examined is the well-crafted solution that is enStratus. enStratus has built a SaaS Cloud Management / Governance product focused on providing critical management, monitoring, governance capabilities tailored to the needs of the Global 2000 market, rather than the startup market. As I have worked with a current Fortune 500 client to identify Cloud solution components, my assessment is that enStratus is uncannily well designed for the enterprise market. Yet as a result of working with the enStratus team and product I found not just a management tool, but also a deeply insightful perspective as to the how and what of the Cloud.

Oracle Wheels Out Its Big Data Appliance Ahead of Schedule

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:30:00 EST

In a surprise move on Tuesday, January 10, Oracle wheeled out its Big Data Appliance. That’s the one it said in October would be ready sometime in the first half. Only nobody believed it meant early in the first half. Heck, it’s not even clear anybody thought Oracle could make the first half at all and it probably couldn’t have met so early a date if it hadn’t been secretly closeted for months with Cloudera. It’s using Cloudera’s version of Hadoop in the thing rather than lose time dicking around rolling its own. Cloudera is the oldest, most established of the Hadoop start-ups whose ranks now include MapR (tight with EMC, its Greenplum database and the EMC Data Computing Appliance) and Hortonworks (buddies with Microsoft and SQL Server 2012) and it’s assumed to have more customers and more experience than anybody else. Observers say Oracle’s use of Cloudera shows it’s serious. Big Data is supposed to be a $70 billion industry growing at maybe 20% a year and Oracle wants more than its fair share so it’s not letting any grass grow under its feet. To prove it’s serious, Oracle is low-balling the highly engineered system. Rather than charge millions like it does for its Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics appliances, Oracle’s Big Data Appliance will go for a mere $450,000 a rack with maintenance on both the hardware and software running only 12% a year. The price is a third less than expected. For the money customers will get a full rack of 18 Sun Fire x86 servers with 216 CPU cores, 864GB main memory, 648TB of raw disk storage, 40 Gb/s InfiniBand internal connectivity and 10 Gb/s Ethernet connectivity, perfectly sized for the greatest number of customers. Users also get Cloudera’s open source Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager software, Cloudera’s Google Big Table-ish HBase, an open source distribution of R, the programming language, the Community Edition of Oracle’s NoSQL Database, Oracle’s HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux, the Oracle fork of Red Hat. The widgetry can be used in multiple ways. Oracle and Cloudera are going to split support, with Cloudera getting the hard software questions. Oracle’s also got a bunch of separately priced connectors so users can integrate data stored in the CDH Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or Oracle NoSQL Database with Oracle Database 11g. The four connectors cost $2,000 per server processor. Betcha Oracle figures it can up-sell Big Data Appliance users on Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytics since everything’s tightly integrated. It’s also possible that Oracle might want to buy Cloudera eventually depending on how things go and how its vision of itself as a database company morphs. Currently they’re bound together by a non-exclusive multi-year alliance. A huge win for Cloudera, the start-up is reveling in the validation it’s getting from Oracle and all the feet Oracle can put on the street. It can probably anticipate an uptick in its consulting and training business. It also figures the Oracle ecosystem will produce new tools, applications, systems and services in support the CDH platform.

CloudLinux Releases Virtualized File System for Shared Hosters

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:12:00 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., on Thursday released CafeFS 3, a virtualized file system for shared hosters that cages each customer within its own virtualized file system. CageFS becomes part of CloudLinux OS at no additional charge. CloudLinux OS, the only commercially-supported Linux OS made specifically for shared hosting, substantially increases server stability, density and security to bring far greater efficiency to the Web hosting business. To eliminate potential security issues, CageFS ensures that users will not see any other users and will have no way to detect the presence of other users on the server. As an additional precaution, users are not able to see server configuration files, such as Apache config files. Meanwhile, the user's environment is fully functional and is not restricted in other ways. Beyond providing safe Web hosting, CageFS offers the necessary functionality and security to provide safe IRC, shell and backup hosting.

Wyse Accelerates Adoption of Cloud Connected Classrooms

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, on Thursday announced it's working with Microsoft to market school IT labs and one-to-one computing solutions that allow a cost effective delivery of innovative IT enabled education. These solutions are available through Wyse and Microsoft education channel partners to educational institutions worldwide. Among the solutions for education are: an entry level shared computing option for school computing labs combining Wyse zero clients and Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2011, or a powerful and scalable cloud PC solution using Wyse WSM software, providing schools with centrally-managed, scalable one-to-one computing for students. Both solutions are secure and easy to set up and run, delivering a great Windows 7 desktop experience for students. For mobile students, Wyse offers the popular PocketCloud mobile cloud software family delivering access to student desktops and content from a variety of handheld devices.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Sinclair Schuller – Apprenda

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and 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 that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?

CRM at Its ‘Most Social’ and Nimble on Nimble?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nimble, the social CRM platform has announced the launch of Nimble 2.0, billed as the “most social” CRM platform on the market today. Nimble was designed entirely with social CRM in mind and is the first social business platform that empowers companies with the ability to get closer to their customers through listening and engagement. Over the past year, Nimble has listened to the feedback of its community – many of whom are on the forefront of social business adoption – and incorporated it into Nimble 2.0 to make it easier, smarter and more flexible. New enhanced features such as social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration have all been added to the product.

Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for application integration and dependency management technologies to take center stage and accelerate enterprise application workloads into the cloud with single pane-of-glass view and control.

NRO CIO Jill Tummler Singer Among Top Ten Women in Cloud

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:30:00 EST

"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.

Cloud Expo New York: Big Data, Colocation and the Cloud

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:45:00 EST

As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Chris MacGown – Piston Cloud Computing

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architectures Require Scale-out Storage

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will discuss how Ethernet SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability – no forklift upgrades required. With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualization or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture. Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Arun Gupta – Oracle

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:15:00 EST

Big Data Expo New York Speaker Profile: Eric Baldeschwieler – Hortonworks

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:30:00 EST

With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...

Bringing Cloud to the Business at Cloud Expo New York

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:45:00 EST

Can you bring services from the cloud to your customers faster and have them adopt it with ease of use or bring the power of bundled services to the fingertips of your clients without creating new rigid ‘apps stove pipes'? Do you want to prevent your business running away to public and unmanageably immature cloud services? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Hans van de Koppel, Sr. Enterprise Architect at Capgemini, will take Cloud Expo delegates to the developing world of cloud services brokerages and cloud orchestration. He will analyze challenges and presents practical results. Finally he will present his view on the practical implementation of cloud orchestration combined with event processing and maybe even “learning agents.”

Cloud Expo New York: The Compliant Cloud

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST

Many organizations have embraced, or are considering, the benefits of cloud computing – speed, flexibility, increased expertise, shared workload, reduced costs, etc. The benefits are many – but so are the risks. What are the threats to cloud security? Which parties assume responsibility for securing the environment? What about the data? Which type of cloud deployment offers superior security benefits? In her session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kristin Lovejoy, Vice President of Information Technology Risk for IBM, will examine cloud computing from a security and compliance perspective.

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Paul Rubell – Meltzer Lippe

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:15:00 EST

HP’s Voyager Project Bears Fruit

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:15:00 EST

HP Monday claimed to have the most self-sufficient line of servers, the x86-based HP ProLiant Generation 8, the first fruits of a two-year Project Voyager meant to eliminate error-prone, downtime-creating manual tasks and cut data center costs. HP says it’s spent $300 million on Gen8, managing to automate 50% of a data center’s manual operations such as server administration, application deployment, and power and cooling management. On average that means it can save a 10,000-square-foot data center an estimated $20 million a year. It says the Gen8 servers, previewed late last year, adapt to their environment in real-time and by continuously analyzing thousands of system parameters, they optimize application performance and proactively improve uptime. Naturally the automation increases productivity, reduces errors, and simplifies operations for virtualized, cloud, and other dynamic computing models. (HP’s just gotta pray customers don’t forsake the bulk of their big on-premise boxes for the public cloud.)

HP Announced a New Generation of Automated and Efficient Hardware

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:15:00 EST

HP on Monday took direct aim at the ever-increasing costs of data centers and managing an explosion of data by announcing a new generation of automated and efficient hardware. The new generation of ProLiant servers includes better internal management, powerful automation features, and improved energy conservation. The ProLiant Gen8 servers are part HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, and represent the first step in the company's Project Voyager, a two-year, $300-million effort to redefine the economics of the data center. At the heart of the new generation of servers is ProActive Insight architecture, which includes integrated lifecycle automation, dynamic workload acceleration, automated energy optimization, and proactive service and support. Data has become a differentiator in business, and with an ever-expanding growth in storage needs, enterprises are feeling the pinch in personnel costs, energy, and facilities. Supporting data as a lifecycle may be IT's fastest growing cost worldwide.

SoftLayer Introduces Searchable Object Storage

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

SoftLayer Technologies on Tuesday announced the immediate worldwide availability of SoftLayer Object Storage, a redundant and highly scalable cloud storage service that allows users to easily store, search and retrieve data across the Internet, with optional CDN connectivity, or across SoftLayer’s global private network. According to Marc Jones, director of product innovation for SoftLayer, “Object Storage gives our users an easy, scalable way to store and retrieve data. With our search functionality, SoftLayer Object Storage customers can efficiently find and retrieve objects from the store based on user-definable tags, extending their data management capabilities beyond traditional object storage services.”

Porticor Launches to Protect Data in the Cloud

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:43:00 EST

Porticor, a cloud data security company delivering a cloud-based data encryption solution that infuses trust into the cloud by ensuring customer keys are never exposed, on Wednesday formally launched to make available a solution combining data encryption with patented key management to protect critical data in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Since Porticor addresses the fundamental cloud security issue of data encryption with keys managed in the cloud, companies are now assured that their private data stored in the cloud across a variety of storage types, including virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems, is fully protected. "Many organizations have already realized the advantages of cloud infrastructure, but security hazards and regulation prevent many more from truly leveraging cloud benefits," said Gordon England, general partner at Glilot Capital, former U.S. deputy Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Navy. "Porticor solves a major cloud security problem and has the right team and technology to best address customers' needs. Its combination of uncompromising security with ease of implementation and full cloud operations are very important for cloud users. The highly innovative approach being fielded by Porticor will be critically important for a wide range of organizations. As such, the business prospects for Porticor are very promising."

SHI Annual Revenues Up 28% in 2011

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

In August 2011, SHI Enterprise Solutions (ESS) division launched the SHI Cloud, offering reliable and cost-effective industrial-grade cloud computing platforms. That same division achieved an 82 percent increase in revenue over 2010.

OCZ Launches Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

OCZ Technology Group, a provider of high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing devices and systems, on Tuesday announced the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCI Express (PCIe) flash storage solution, designed to accelerate cloud computing applications and reduce operating expenses in the data center. The new Z-Drive R4 CloudServ features monumental data throughput, and raises the bar in performance and capacity. Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology, notes that "the Z-Drive R4 CloudServ PCIe solid state drive delivers game-changing performance and enables clients to process massive data-sets with up to 16TB of storage capacity on a single, easy-to-deploy card." With increasing emphasis on cloud computing and the sheer growth in data, PCIe-based flash storage systems have the ability to bypass traditional storage overhead by reducing latencies, increasing throughput, and enabling efficient processing of massive quantities of data. The Z-Drive R4 CloudServ is capable of transferring multiple gigabytes per second and delivering over a million IOPS with a level of concentrated performance that enables system architects to design more productive infrastructures while lowering costs associated with hardware failure, maintenance, structural footprint, and energy consumption.

OpTier Always-on APM 4.5 Now Available

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:09:00 EST

OpTier, a provider of business transaction-driven application performance management (APM), on Wednesday announced OpTier Always-on APM version 4.5 with significant enhancements that enable today's always-on business. Always-on APM 4.5 is the first release that reflects the company's rebrand to Always-on APM. (Editors, please see separate press release titled: "OpTier Rebrands APM Product, Signifying Industry Need for New Approach to APM to Assure Today's Always-on Business," dated February 14, 2012). OpTier has rebranded its entire offering to reflect what OpTier brings to the market- an APM software solution that enables the business to be "always-on," which means making every user interaction count, wherever users are, however users interact, over any IT architecture. OpTier helps businesses deliver immediate user response with faster transactions, and be dynamic to resist impact of changes. Businesses can then be more agile to take advantage of new opportunities.

Barracuda Networks Integrates Next-Gen Firewall and Cloud Web Security

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:09:00 EST

Barracuda Networks Inc., a provider of security, networking and data protection solutions, on Wednesday announced the integration of the Barracuda NG Firewall and Barracuda Web Security Flex. This integrated offering marks the first solution to combine powerful cloud-based Web filtering technology with next-generation firewall capabilities, providing maximum protection both on- and off-network, while offloading intensive security and reporting functions to the cloud. This integrated offering allows enterprises to regain control of today's dynamic networks-protecting a myriad of users with disparate devices, accessing applications and network resources, both on- and off-network.

Rethinking Storage for the Cloud Era

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 01:08:00 EST

Storage at scale pioneer Scality's success in 2011 secured its position as a trailblazer for truly scalable, high performing, yet cost effective object based storage. 2011 was a landmark year for the San Francisco-based storage start-up that has invigorated the cloud storage space with the new concept of organic storage. The year's highlights started with a new multimillion dollar round of funding to fuel global expansion, a great deal of industry recognition, and ended with a raft of new customers and partners less than two years after the company's inception. "The storage industry has never looked so alive and dynamic, and Scality is excited to be part of the step change happening at the heart of it," said Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality. "When we burst onto the cloud storage scene just 18 months ago, we determined to rip up the old storage rulebook. We wanted to address the real challenges the industry is facing: Achieving performance and scalability and reducing TCO simultaneously. This has always been seen as a storage nirvana, but we have led the charge to make it happen."

Cloud Expo New York: Clouds Are All About APIs

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:00:00 EST

Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud computing? Mårten Mickos is CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. From 2001-8 he was CEO of MySQL AB, which was then bought by Sun. In September 2009 he became Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital. He joined Eucalyptus as CEO in March 2010.