A project underwritten by the Linux Foundation this week released the first open source tool for software-defined networks (SDNs).
The software, called Hydrogen, was released by the foundation's OpenDaylight Project at its first summit held in Santa Clara, Calif.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/06/2014 at 4:45 PM0 comments
In its latest round of price cuts, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is reducing pricing for its S3 and Elastic Block Storage Service (EBS).
The cloud provider will reduce S3 pricing by 22 percent and EBS will cost up to 50 percent less.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/23/2014 at 3:35 PM0 comments
IBM on Friday said it will invest $1.2 billion to extend the global footprint of its public cloud infrastructure.
Big Blue will add new datacenters in 13 countries across five continents. By the end of the year, IBM said it will have 40 datacenters.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/17/2014 at 3:35 PM0 comments
Oracle kicked off the new year with a noteworthy deal to acquire a cloud infrastructure provider. The company has agreed to buy Corente, whose Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) connects enterprises that operate as service providers with other private and public clouds over IP networks.
Terms of the deal, slated to close later this quarter, were not disclosed.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/09/2014 at 3:35 PM0 comments
Rackspace today said it will offer cloud automation services for organizations with agile software development processes -- particularly those with dynamically changing business requirements.
The company sees its new DevOps Automation Service as an evolution in cloud computing services. It will offer live, real-time management of an organization's managed cloud infrastructure, allowing customers to automate their processes, including test and development, deployment and maintenance.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/12/2013 at 5:20 AM0 comments
OwnCloud, a rapidly growing startup offering IT managers an answer to the bane of their existence (Dropbox), is on the verge of closing on its first round of financing and has upgraded the community version of its offering.
Founded just two years ago, ownCloud raised $4.4 million this week, the Boston Business Journal reported on Monday, and is slated to close on a full round of $7 million.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/11/2013 at 2:16 PM0 comments
Healthcare.gov, the Department of Health and Human Services site for the federal health insurance marketplaces offered under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), will be finding a new home next year.
The agency has awarded Hewlett-Packard a $38 million contract to host Healthcare.gov starting in March, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Verizon's Terremark unit now hosts the site but the decision to move to a new provider was made before the Oct. 1 public launch of Healthcare.gov, which has suffered ongoing and widely criticized outages. The Verizon datacenters have experienced numerous outages since the launch and, according to the report, agency members were aware of prior problems.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/05/2013 at 12:29 PM2 comments
Salesforce.com and Hewlett-Packard have inked a deal to let customers build virtual instances of the Salesforce.com CRM platform.
The companies announced the pact at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference, taking place this week in San Francisco. Using HP's "Converged Infrastructure" of servers, storage and network gear, the companies will collectively build the Salesforce.com Superpod.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/21/2013 at 1:13 PM2 comments
While there's little hard data to show market share for the use of public cloud computing services, most would agree that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is by far the most widely used Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to date.
Analyst Ben Schachter of Macquarie Capital said AWS' revenues this year could hit $4 billion. The Wall Street Journal reported this week, though, that Schachter's figure sounds much higher than prior estimates, which pegged revenues in the $1 billion to $2 billion range. As rivals such as Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Rackspace and Microsoft are gunning for that business by expanding their own services, Amazon is clearly getting under Big Blue's skin, in particular.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/14/2013 at 11:31 AM0 comments
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) yesterday launched an initiative that aims to pave the way for organizations to use cloud computing services to protect their own infrastructures.
A new working group called the Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) project represents a departure for the organization that was formed with the mission of improving cloud security. The SDP Working Group seeks to provide a standard way to use cloud services to protect their infrastructures in the age of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) and employees' own use of cloud services.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/14/2013 at 11:40 AM1 comments
Amazon Web Services said it wants to shake up the struggling VDI market with a cloud-based alternative that requires no hardware, software or datacenter infrastructure. Amazon's solution is Amazon WorkSpaces, which it claims it can offer services at half the cost with better performance than traditional virtual desktop infrastructure platforms today.
Amazon Web Services senior VP Andy Jassy revealed the new cloud-based VDI offering in his opening keynote address at the company's second annual re:Invent customer and partner conference taking place in Las Vegas.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/13/2013 at 12:00 PM0 comments
Red Hat Software released an upgraded version of its CloudForms tools used to deploy and manage private and hybrid Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds with support for OpenStack. The new CloudForms 3.0 debuted at the OpenStack Foundation Summit, taking place in Hong Kong this week.
Also at the large industry event, Red Hat said its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) software can now be deployed on OpenStack clouds. The move lets developers and IT pros use OpenStack infrastructure to create PaaS environments.
More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/07/2013 at 11:11 AM0 comments