India’s major tech firms have become competitive enterprise outsourcers and systems integrators on a global scale. Firms such as Cognizant and Tata Consultancy Services are looking for technology to provide the next competitive advantages in the market. The cloud provides that opportunity on several levels. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon is adding a new region based in Sydney to offer lower-latency services to customers in Australia and New Zealand. The addition brings total regions worldwide to nine at a time when cloud competitors with global reach are coming online. Read more »
IT departments need not go away in a computing world increasingly concerned with cloud computing and complex service-oriented systems, but they will have to change. IT has to let go of trying to control everything and focus on coordinating and enhancing things that other people control. Read more »
In the wake of several glitches at the Amazon Web Services’ US-East data centers in recent months, RedisToGo opens shop in US-West, will others follow? Also in cloud news: Rackspace and Savvis seek critical mass for their new cloud service offerings. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you weren’t clicking on news sites on election night, you were probably better off. Yottaa’s monitors showed that almost every major online news site fared very poorly when the results started to flow in with page load times hitting 50 seconds. Read more »
Joyent has named a new CEO and announced the altest generation of its infrastructure as a service software. The moves are in preparation for a big play in the coming months as the company looks to build the right computing platform for data and cloud applications. Read more »
The first version of the CloudStack open-source cloud platform carrying the Apache Foundation imprimatur is now available for download. The new “Incubating release” 4.0.0 integrates CloudBridge Amazon API support and support for Ceph and Caringo storage options. Read more »
LinkedIn’s popular career building and job search site has been offline for a short time Monday morning. There’s not a ton of information available yet, so stay tuned. Read more »
SpringboardIoT, a new accelerator program focused on startups working on hardware and the Internet of Things, has launched in the UK. The scheme’s founder joins forces with an experienced insider to explain why it’s a necessary and useful development. Read more »
By 2016, there will be fewer data centers but those that are built will be much bigger, according to IDC research. Cedexis launches tool to help AWS customers route computing loads around Amazon EC2 regions to mitigate service problems. Read more »
Another busy week for Amazon Web Services which added new compute instance types, cut prices on others, and upped the limit on provisioned IOPS for EBS volumes. Amazon is getting busier as more public cloud options come on line. Read more »
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group recently shipped its 1 millionth server just five years after coming into existence. It’s proof of how important webscale buyers have become to the server market, as well as how different their demand are than those of traditional IT buyers. Read more »
Streaming media powerhouse Netflix says its experience with Amazon Web Services outages led to best practices and technology that can insulate Netflix — and potentially other companies — from the impact of weather-related and other events. Read more »
AMD, which has fallen behind its chief rival Intel in the x86 processor business, announced on Monday plans to make new 64-bit chips based on ARM’s chip technology that will target data center and cloud computing companies. AMD will continue to make x86 processors as well. Read more »
Data centers up and down the eastern seaboard went into emergency mode to keep up and running as Hurricane Sandy churned northwards. But the key to survivabilty is not last-minute prep but long-running practices. Read more »
At just a few months old, Google Compute Engine is seen as a threat to public cloud leader Amazon Web Services. At least that appears to be what Amazon thinks given its lawsuit against a former exec who is joining Google. Read more »
It was a busy week in cloud, bookended by Amazon and Google App Engine outages. In between those snafus, OpenNebula updated its cloud and stealthy startup Yottabyte launched technology that it says will let companies yoke commodity hardware into clouds of their own. Read more »
Google says it resolved whatever ailed its platform as a service. It was Black Friday for the web with Tumblr, Dropbox and Google App Engine all going down. It was unclear if these issues were related and/or due to a broader systemic problem. Read more »
When companies such as Google and Facebook design their own servers, switches and data centers, it’s more a business decision than it is a test of their hardware-hacking skills. Custom gear means lower power bills, better performance and the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen situations. Read more »
Which type of Amazon Web Services Reserved Instance should your company deploy and for what time period for any given job? These are the kinds of questions Cloudyn’s new calculator can help you sort out for yourself, the company said. Read more »
Why is it that Heroku, Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram et al are still so heavily dependent on Amazon’s aging and problematic US-East region? Very good question. Here are some potential answers. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
Rackspace’s new OpenStack-powered Cloud Block Storage comes in spinning disk and faster SSD tiers and lets customers mix and match block size with compute instances as needed, says company CTO John Engates. Read more »
Facebook’s breaking up with hardware OEMs, Europeans distrust the cloud and it’s anyone’s guess whether there will be an Amazon of Europe. Those were among the key takeaways from the first-ever Structure Europe event in Amsterdam last week. Read more »
Google Apps for Business users need to be protected from their own downloaded apps, according to Waltham, MA-based CloudLock, which on Monday launched a firewall for just that purpose. Read more »
When cartoonist Scott Adams decides that cloudwashing has become too much to take, maybe it’s time to give this annoying practice the boot. Sooooo … what do you say Oracle, HP, IBM, Microsoft? Can we agree to put the mindless use of the C-word on ice? Read more »
Facebook is planning to rely more on flash drives in places where most companies have used spinning disk, and based on conversations with sources and hints from Facebook, I think one of those places will be in Facebook’s cold-storage photo facility it’s building in Oregon. Read more »
When it comes to realtime JavaScript frameworks, developers love Meteor. But they want better security features and user controls. With Meteor 0.5.0, it looks like they’re getting what they asked for. Read more »
Microsoft’s lackluster first quarter earnings news actually came as a relief after a raft of bad tech sector news from IBM, Intel and Google this week. The software giant missed expectations but not by all that much for the quarter ending September 30. Read more »
What sort of amazing cloud services could Amazon have up its sleeve? Werner Vogels ain’t saying anything in detail but here are five things to watch out for where the public cloud services giant is concerned. Read more »
Hadoop is getting closer to business intelligence thanks to a slew of new products ranging from a SQL database built atop Hadoop to an appliance packaging the two alongside a full complement of servers. On Wednesday, Birst, Teradata and Splice Machine got into the act. Read more »
Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire. Read more »
Although older generations might still view cloud computing as an emerging trend, their children take it for granted, largely forgoing physical devices for cloud services. We might as well come get on board and maybe change the world in the process. Read more »
Software-defined networks and data centers are the future if enterprises want to manage their infrastructure with the agility of cloud computing providers, but they’re nowhere near ubiquity yet. However, according to two senior VMware executives, the pieces are in place and maturing every day. Read more »
The consumerization of IT has led to the growth of cloud, a big shift for the major hardware players and new opportunities for startups to build a business using IT without huge up-front costs. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels explains what’s going on at Structure:Europe. Read more »
CIOs that try to thwart user demand for latest-and-greatest consumer technologies in the workplace could be an endangered species, according to speakers at Structure Europe. Better to accommodate and bring that new technology under IT’s big tent. Read more »
European hosting companies and service providers are hurting their cause by offering the same old services but with the word “cloud” attached, according to Flexiant founder Tony Lucas. Read more »
Federated clouds, the idea that customers can span different clouds with their computing and data, decided on cost, location or other variables, isn’t really available today, but there’s hope that it will emerge in the future and help service providers compete against Amazon. Read more »
