Iaas News & Articles

While clouds are on every enterprise’s horizon, they’re mostly internal clouds. That’s a key finding in an annual study conducted by 451 Research about the state of cloud computing for businesses. 

It seems as if every year IBM Connect always throws in some interesting items -- and this year is no different. In what almost appears to be a timed response to Oracle’s outline of its cloud strategy, IBM has given its SmartCloud a lot of attention, including a great big dollop of SAP love.

In the past it has often been difficult to get information out of Oracle. In fact, it was often the case that enterprises outside of the US knew more about what was happening at Oracle than those within, as executives toured the globe for the launch of one product or another. However, Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, has said he will remedy that by giving regular press briefings. The first one held last night focused on the cloud, Oracle’s business vision for the cloud, and that old chestnut from yesteryear, Sun.

In the world of cloud computing a lot has changed over the past 12 months, it looks like things won't be slowing down any in 2013. James Staten of Forrester took a look at the state of the cloud computing industry and offered ten predictions for the coming year.

There have been numerous reports over the years on how cloud computing has developed, how businesses are taking to it, and how it is being used in the home. However, little enough research has been done to assess what vendors think about it. A new report aims to remedy that.

Oracle has announced a new infrastructure-as-a-service, as CEO Larry Ellison termed it, and a Private Cloud service that is an extension of the existing Oracle cloud.

If anyone has any doubts about the level of uptake of cloud services across the business sector the figures contained in the most recent Gartner survey of the cloud services worldwide will put the argument to bed. Among the figures that stand out is that the market is predicted to grow by close to 20 percent worldwide by the end of year.

OpenStack is opening up opportunities for a whole new array of cloud platforms. This week, several OpenStack community members have announced the launch of the first ARM-powered cloud platform, which is currently being tested through the TryStack sandbox implementation.

OpenStack is gaining momentum. This week, OpenStack turns two, and with the "terrible twos" stage comes growing pains. Rackspace, which has partnered with NASA and a few other cloud computing industry players in developing the open-source project, is switching its codebase to OpenStack. But with this second-year anniversary, the open-source cloud computing platform faces new challenges altogether.

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to expand the breadth of its cloud offerings. Last month, the company enhanced Azure with several features, most notably, Linux support. Now Microsoft has its sights set on the private web. Microsoft has released a new set of tools that make it easier to create private cloud environment on Windows Server2012.

More enterprises have begun to see the cloud as a viable option for everything from physical servers to end user facing applications. This increased user demand is allowing companies such as data platform-as-a-service provider Cloudant to grow rapidly. The company announced that it is further expanding its data centers globally to improve reliability and performance.

Far be it from me to spread gossip and rumor BUT… well, yesterday when we took a look at the new upgrade to v2.1 of IBM’s SmartCloud, we came across a number of references to the fact that Google is building a c loud computing offering that is to compete with Amazon’s EC2 cloud.

It took a while to figure it out from the press release, but IBM has upgraded its SmartCloud 2.1, which comes with a number of enhancements that is going to make working with Big Blue‘s cloud a lot easier, and to all appearances, a lot more productive.

There are few ways better to dispel rumors that your baby might be ugly than taking your carefully incubated bundle of joy out for the entire world to see. That’s precisely what Rackspace has done with its open source progeny, OpenStack.

Amazon Web Services has released its cloud search offering, CloudSearch, which has been rumored for months. The new service is based on the same technology that powers product searches on Amazon.com. Amazon is the first company to offer search-as-a-service, but something tells us the Internet giant’s competitors will soon be scrambling to keep up now that Amazon has entered the market.