Cloud provider Skytap is looking to simplify use of its service, particularly as it applies to providing compatibility with in-house datacenters.
Skytap said it is providing support for the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standard for packaging and distributing virtual machines. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/29/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
AT&T has extended its cloud portfolio with a Platform as as Service offering (PaaS) aimed at letting business users, enterprise developers and ISVs build, test and run their apps in the telco's hosted environment.
Launched this week, AT&T Platform as a Service will allow application developers and tech-savvy business people to build and deploy apps using either AT&T-provided tooling or Eclipse-based development tools. Those using AT&T's Web-based tools and templates don't require coding expertise, according to AT&T. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/17/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
CA Technologies wants to help enterprises determine what applications may be suited to move to the cloud.
The company launched Cloud 360 at its annual CA World conference, which took place this week in Las Vegas. Cloud 360 is a portfolio of consulting services bundled with CA's software to model and perform cost-benefit and performance analyses of moving apps to the cloud. It also is intended to help customers develop migration plans. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/16/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
ScaleXtreme, a company that lets IT administrators and service providers manage public and private clouds, this week updated its service to allow customers to model, configure and launch servers.
The company's new Dynamic Server Assembly lets IT pros who use ScaleXtreme's Web-based Xpress and Xpert services build templates that represent how a machine is built, rather than binding it to a specific cloud provider or virtual machine stack. Administrators can use those templates to manage systems and apps running on multiple public and private clouds. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/16/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Amazon Web Services has opened its seventh global datacenter and its second on the west coast of the United States. The new facility in Oregon offers a lower-cost alternative to the cloud computing provider's Northern California location.
Like Amazon's other datacenters throughout the world, the Oregon facility will offer multiple Availability Zones, Amazon said on Wednesday. The addition of another datacenter should appeal to customers who want further redundancy, an issue that has come up more after the spate of Amazon outages this year. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/10/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Google said it is pulling support for the native Gmail app for the BlackBerry, a move not likely to be popular among users of that smartphone. But it doesn't mean Google is walking away from providing connectivity to the BlackBerry for enterprises users.
In a brief blog post on Tuesday, Google said it will no longer support the Gmail App for BlackBerry effective Nov. 22. Users can still run the existing app but it will no longer be supported, Google said. It will be available for download for the next two weeks. Google said BlackBerry users can still access their Gmail through the mobile Web app via the device's Web browser. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/09/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
Rackspace is a company synonymous with dedicated hosting and cloud computing services. While hosting and cloud services are different, the company's business model over the past 13 years has been predicated on customers using Rackspace's datacenters.
That has changed this week with the launch of Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, an offering by which the company will help customers build clouds within their own datacenters. The debut of this new offering has been anticipated for some time. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/09/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Last week a group called the Open Compute Project held its first summit in New York, where it laid out its agenda for creating power-efficient and lower-cost datacenters based on open source hardware designs.
The OCP was formed by Facebook back in April as an effort to share the hardware design of its datacenter in Prineville, Ore. The social networking giant said at the time that its datacenter improved efficiency by 38 percent and lowered costs by 24 percent. Facebook said it achieved a power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.07, compared with 1.5 for its other datacenters. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/03/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
A group of seven Google partners this week formed an alliance that plans to work closely on helping customers to add different third-party business applications that run with Google Apps.
The Cloud Alliance for Google Apps claims it represents the most heavily deployed applications in the Google Apps Marketplace and appears to be looking to leverage its combined strength to jointly try to reach enterprise customers through outreach and ensuring interoperability where it makes sense. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/02/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Business continuity has long been an afterthought for many small and mid-sized enterprises. Even those that do run backup and recovery software on their networks don't have a setup that allows them to recover from a disabling disaster at a given location.
The cloud is making it easier for companies of all sizes to establish disaster recovery plans without the cost and complexity associated with it. And just about every supplier of backup and recovery software is offering services to enable customers to use the cloud to store their data. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/02/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments
Application stores and marketplaces are becoming a popular means of distributing software and cloud-based apps for PCs and mobile devices.
Made popular by Apple with the iTunes App Store, now it seems every major software and cloud provider has released one or has one in the works. App stores and marketplaces will be among the top 10 strategic technologies for enterprises next year, according to a forecast released by Gartner last week. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/27/2011 at 1:14 PM1 comments
Internap on Thursday said it is offering the first public cloud service based on the compute service of OpenStack, the rapidly growing open source platform aimed at providing interoperable public and private clouds.
More than 100 companies have signed on to the OpenStack project, founded by NASA and Rackspace. Internap's release of what it calls Open Public Cloud is a noteworthy milestone in the evolution of OpenStack, which consists of open APIs that allow portability between cloud providers. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/27/2011 at 1:14 PM0 comments