CA Technologies on Tuesday said it will offer its popular ARCserve backup and recovery solution as a service using Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform.
The move makes CA the latest traditional backup and recovery software company to launch its Software as a Service (SaaS). Just last week, CA's key rival in the backup and recovery field, Symantec, said it will offer a version of its popular Backup Exec as a cloud-based offering. The new Symantec service, called Backup Exec.cloud, will allow customers to stream their backups to Symantec datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/10/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
Internap plans to launch a dual-hypervisor compute cloud service giving customers the choice of a VMware-based stack or the open source OpenStack platform.
The move marks the company's first foray into the public cloud. Its current portfolio consists of colocation service, managed hosting (including dedicated private clouds) and a content delivery network (CDN). More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/09/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
With its beta of Office 365 now out, Microsoft has once again come out swinging against its arch rival Google, this time arguing that the lower cost of Google Apps for Business may be a mirage.
Google Apps for Business costs $50 per year. Microsoft's equivalent offering, the forthcoming Office 365 Plan P1, which includes Exchange Online, calendaring and Office Web Apps, will cost $72 per year. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/05/2011 at 1:14 PM5 comments
More information on Hewlett-Packard's public cloud strategy came to light on Tuesday when The Register's Cade Metz stumbled upon a key HP executive's LinkedIn profile.
The exec, Scott McClellan, chief technologist and interim VP of engineering and cloud services at HP, has since removed the info from his profile. But The Register captured the information, which reveals that McClellan was responsible for helping build a distributed object storage business from scratch, a service that offers compute, networking and block storage, and what appears to be a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that is optimized for Java, Ruby and other open source languages. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/05/2011 at 1:14 PM2 comments
Rackspace Hosting is shutting down its Slicehost service within the next 12 months, the company said in a letter to customers.
Acquired by Rackspace in 2008, Slicehost is a managed hosting provider that Rackspace maintained as a separate business unit. The move is likely to be unwelcome news to those who must migrate from the Slicehost service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/04/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
One of the most popular PC and server backup and recovery software products is Symantec's Backup Exec and the company said this week that cloud-based support is on the way.
Symantec announced Backup Exec.cloud at its annual Vision conference in Las Vegas. The new offering is targeted at small and medium businesses and branch offices of larger enterprises that want to offload backups to a cloud-based service. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 05/04/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
[UPDATE: Amazon released a detailed report explaining the cause of the outage on Friday. Read the story here.]
Amazon Web Services' four-day outage was a defining moment in the history of cloud computing -- not only for its impact but for the company's deafening silence.
The widely reported outage at Amazon's Northern Virginia datacenter left a number of sites crippled for several days, though Amazon most recently reported that service has been restored. However, the company has acknowledged that .07 percent of the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes apparently won't be fully recoverable. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/28/2011 at 1:14 PM4 comments
Boomi, the provider of cloud integration software acquired by Dell late last year, has upgraded its AtomSphere software with improved middleware connectivity, support for large datasets and extended monitoring capabilities.
AtomSphere is designed to connect Software as a Service cloud offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com, NetSuite and others to on-premises systems. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/27/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
BMC Software has upgraded its Cloud Lifecycle Management platform to support creation and management of complete private and hybrid cloud stacks.
The introduction of CLM 2.0 comes a year after the first release, which focused on virtualization management and datacenter automation, thanks to the company's $800 million acquisition of BladeLogic. BMC describes CLM 2.0 as a cradle-to-grave cloud provisioning and management platform. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/27/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Microsoft International President Jean-Philippe Courtois earlier this month told Bloomberg that the company will spend a whopping 90 percent of its $9.6 billion research and development budget on cloud computing this year.
That brings up the question: Is Microsoft putting all its eggs in one basket? Sourya Biswas asks that same thing in a blog post this week. A proponent of cloud computing and, according to his LinkedIn profile, an MBA student at the University of Notre Dame and a former risk analytics manager at Citigroup, Biswas wonders if Microsoft is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He writes in his blog: More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/21/2011 at 1:14 PM2 comments
Hewlett-Packard Co. last week released Cloud Services Automation 2.0, an upgraded version of its toolset aimed at simplifying the transformation of premises-based apps to those that can run in the cloud.
CSA 2.0 not only accelerates the deployment of cloud infrastructure but it expedites the deployment and configuration of the applications, said Paul Muller, VP of strategic marketing for HP Software products. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/20/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Rackspace Hosting this week added a new load balancing service aimed at letting customers rapidly scale capacity.
Called Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers, the service is intended for those with mission-critical Web apps. It lets customers configure cloud servers or dedicated hosts with more capacity as workloads require. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 04/20/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments