Verizon Communications has acquired CloudSwitch, whose software makes it possible to move applications and workloads between public and internal datacenters. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The company's gateway appliance includes software that allows administrators to move workloads from enterprise datacenters to public clouds without changing the application or infrastructure layer. Applications maintain policies when moved between various cloud environments and internal datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/26/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
VMware's Cloud Foundry project released a beta version of its open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) for developer laptops and desktops.
The Micro Cloud Foundry is software for developers who want to build and test applications locally without having to connect to the cloud. Developers can download a virtual machine image of Micro Cloud Foundry, which is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X, VMware Workstation and VMware Player for Linux and Windows. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/26/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Eucalyptus Systems disclosed plans to roll out the third version of its open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private cloud software.
The new release, dubbed Eucalyptus 3, adds high availability (HA) to its cloud platform, meaning customers will be ensured uptime in the event of a hardware, software or network failure. The system will fail over if it goes down for any reason, including a failed disk drive, memory corruption or even a power outage. In any such event, the software will fail over to a "hot spare" service running on different hardware. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/25/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched a new Web caching service that lets customers deploy an in-memory cache for applications running in the cloud.
The company says its new ElastiCache service lets customers add an in-memory cache to their application architectures. That will enable them to boost the performance of applications by letting customers retrieve information from the in-memory cache rather than from slower disk-based databases.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/23/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
It's not every day that a company plunks down $10 billion and the news becomes a sidebar. But that's what happened last week when Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will acquire Autonomy for that amount.
The deal was overshadowed by the news that HP is weighing the sale or spinoff of its PC business, that it was shutting down its webOS hardware business and that it was lowering its revenue outlook for the year. All of that, and questions about the merits of its Autonomy acquisition, led to analyst downgrades and a 20 percent drop in HP's share price Friday (it recovered a bit Monday, gaining 3.6 percent). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/22/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Cloud-based business intelligence (BI) startup GoodData has landed $15 million in venture funding, bringing the total it has raised up to $28.5 million.
The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners also contributing to the latest round. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/18/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
To say cloud providers are less than forthcoming on their approach to cloud security would be an understatement. Call it paranoia or prudence, customers are demanding more transparency about security practices before making the leap to the cloud.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) this fall will launch a searchable registry that existing or prospective customers can access free of charge to query how cloud providers are approaching security. Customers will be able to look up cloud providers and review their security practices. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/18/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
VMware Inc.'s Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) has signed on several new supporters of its open-cloud effort.
Cloud Foundry, which runs atop VMware's vSphere and vCloud platforms, went into beta in April. It is striving to offer a platform by which customers can develop and deploy applications to multiple clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/17/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Intuit this week said it will "double down" on its partnership with Microsoft to integrate its Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) with the Windows Azure platform for those looking to build Software as a Service (SaaS) apps.
The two companies had jointly announced in January 2010 that Intuit would name Windows Azure as a preferred platform for cloud application development on the IPP. To facilitate that, they developed and released the Windows Azure SDK for the IPP. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/11/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Are your non-technical friends and family members familiar with the term cloud computing? If they're not, don't despair. Most people aren't, either.
Only 22 percent of consumers are familiar with the term cloud computing, according to a study conducted by NPD Group. But that doesn't mean they aren't using cloud computing to conduct various tasks and activities. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/11/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services' woes continued on Tuesday as the cloud provider worked to recover from a bolt of lighting that caused power outages in its Dublin, Ireland datacenter over the weekend.
The lighting strike brought down Amazon's EC2 and RDS services, as well as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Services. Microsoft's outage reportedly lasted several hours on Sunday and has since been restored, the company said on its Twitter feed. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/10/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Cloud service provider Skytap has come up with a way to automate the launching of servers without requiring third-party management tools.
The company has added "cloud orchestration" to its flagship service, which it says will eliminate the need for software from the likes of CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard and IBM that manage the sequencing of servers.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/10/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments