The Social Cloud: Twitter’s Top Cloud Titans It’s fair to say that a sizable percentage of cloud-savvy folk maintain active social networking profiles, one of which being an account on mega microblogging titan Twitter. Facebook may tout a larger membership, but few social networks (besides, perhaps, Pinterest) can brag of as compellingly quick growth as that cute little blue bird mid-song. Twitter’s popularity stems from two of its manifold assets: the ability to receive news before the press or media, and the democratization of users (i.e., even Joe Schmo from Saskatchewan can tweet with Justin Bieber, albeit not necessarily mutually).
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HP Seeks To Give Amazon Competition with a New Public Cloud Service For several years now, Amazon has held sway over the cloud computing heap, especially in IaaS. HP, in contrast, though being one of the largest traditional IT infrastructure players, had been slow to jump onto the cloud computing bandwagon. However, over the last year, it had tried to overcome its late start with furious action. From expensive acquisitions (See: HP’s Revised Proposal of $33 per Share Values 3PAR at $2.4 billion and HP acquires data software firm Stratavia) to partnerships (See: SAP Certifies HP as its Cloud Services Provider and
Making The Leap From Public To Hybrid Cloud Computing While the Private vs Public Cloud debate continues to plod along, a major Public Cloud user struck an equally massive blow for Hybrid Cloud when Zynga decided to make the move from AWS to their own zCloud private servers. In a move which flipped 80% of their Public Cloud usage to specialized Private Cloud servers which Zynga have dubbed zCloud, the move illustrates one potential path for small startups and SMBs to follow in their pursuit of massive exponential growth on a Cloud Computing based platform. Just a few years ago,
Some Recent Cloud Computing Acquisitions As an industry matures, consolidation occurs and some prominent players emerge. With big companies already staking their claims in this space – a phenomenon which I had argued differentiated the cloud computing fervor from the dotcom bubble (See: Are Cloud Computing Stocks Overvalued?) – it was only time that the bigger fish started swallowing the small ones (See: Is Consolidation Coming to Cloud Computing?). While startups are always on the acquiring companies’ radars (See: Acquisitions of Cloud Computing Startups Speed Up), some mid-size companies are also attracting considerable interest. This article features two such recent
(Super)computing On the Cloud $1279 an hour – seems a lot to hire a computer, right? What if it’s a supercomputer capable of performing 240 trillion calculations per second, or 240 teraflops (a flop is the acronym for floating point operations per second, the universal measure of a computer’s performance)? This is the performance promised by the latest innovation from the Amazon stable – the supercomputer on the cloud. This cloud supercomputer runs on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and features Intel’s Xeon 8C 2.60 GHz processor with 10G Ethernet interconnects providing 65,968 GB of capacity and 17,024
Best Cloud Computing Apps You’ve Never Heard Of This article’s title may arguably mislead you. Cloud connoisseurs will express familiarity with one app featured here. And even your grandmother has heard of yet another. But no matter where you are in your grasp of cloud computing, you should find something new here to inspire you – maybe even warm your heart. Amanda/Zmanda. Let’s start with its name: we can’t think of any other app whose title arrested our attention as quickly as this did. Maybe it’s the A-through-Z allusion therein, or its gentle rhyme: whatever the source of its attraction
