What Does Verizon Expect from the CloudSwitch Acquisition? Verizon is betting big on cloud computing. After this year’s $1.4 billion acquisition of data center operator Terremark, Verizon has once again loosened its purse strings to buy cloud computing startup CloudSwitch. The latter develops software that eases the transition of company applications from in-house servers to the cloud. So, what does Verizon expect from this acquisition? For one, Verizon expects to use CloudSwitch’s capabilities to offer its customers seamless migration to the cloud. CloudSwitch integrates with cloud providers’ public application program interfaces (APIs) to make moving an application or workload to the cloud
Run Microsoft Windows on Amazon EC2 Cluster Instances Starting today you can run Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Windows SQL Server Standard 2008 R2 on Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU instances for Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute Instances provide customers with high CPU capability within a high bandwidth, low latency network for IO intensive computing. Cluster GPU instances allow customers to additionally take advantage of NVidia Tesla GPUs for general purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing using the CUDA or OpenCL programming models. A number of customers with database workloads and applications in areas such as media processing, rendering, and computational
Cloud Computing: Risks vs Benefits – Part 1 “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain (1835-1910), noted American author and humorist. By quoting the most famous American author on how statistics are often used to bolster unreasonable arguments, I may have showed my hand prematurely, but here are a few figures that do give one cause for thought: on the average, over the last decade more than 40,000 people have been killed annually in automobile accidents in the United States. Now, this may give the impression that road travel is dangerous, and, if
8×8 Acquires Cloud Call Center Services Provider Contactual 8×8 has acquired cloud-based call center and customer interaction management solutions provider Contactual acting on its intent to buy the company on September 12, 2011. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Contactual provides small businesses and enterprise departments with an efficient way to improve customer satisfaction while lowering costs. The company has been acquired for 6,700,000 shares of unregistered 8×8 common stock on September 15, 2011. The companies note that this share amount was reduced at closing by 215,100 shares as 8×8 agreed to pay statutory tax withholding on behalf of five former
HP CloudSystem Matrix: Managing at a Higher Level This Illuminata Spotlight discusses HP CloudSystem Matrix and its use as an out-of-the-box platform for private clouds suited to enterprise IT. Many now look to the idea of “cloud computing” as their future ideal state. Clouds emerged first as a mechanism for Web and network computing, but have rapidly captured the imagination of enterprises and service providers as well. But what suits Web and network computing isn’t necessarily what enterprises and service providers need. This Illuminata Spotlight discusses HP CloudSystem Matrix, a ready-to-run IT infrastructure, and its use as an out-of-the-box platform
Vyatta Supports the Amazon Web Services Cloud Vyatta Network OS 6.3 is now available as an Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The new release offers comprehensive network security for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud with new AMI custom support packages, notes Vyatta, a specialist in software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. For those unaware, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software that aid in creating a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). According to Amazon, AMI serves as the basic unit of deployment for services










