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Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

However, adding flash is just par for the course for CloudSigma, which has been making a name for itself on high performance and customer choice since launching in the United States recently. The company’s U.S. presence is based out of the mind-blowing SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, and CloudSigma chose 10 GbE interconnects as its standard to ensure its cloud can fully utilize the throughput horsepower of new technologies like flash. A couple weeks ago, it announced support of Oracle’s Solaris operating system, which also is unique among cloud providers (although Amazon Web Services does support OpenSolaris).

Although SSDs in the cloud are cool enough by themselves, they’re part of a larger trend toward making cloud computing a more palatable delivery model for all types of workloads. What began as a platform for hosting web applications has expand to enterprise apps such as ERP software from SAP, and even into massively parallel HPC workloads. AWS even offers GPU instances on an HPC cluster, which has resulted in several companies benchmarking AWS as among the fastest supercomputers in the world. Jenkins said CloudSigma will “absolutely” offer GPUs at some point, and might even go as far as to expose specific processors for rendering digital media.

Amazon's cloud services are vulnerable to attack via a "massive security gap" that enables hackers to access user accounts and data, a team of German researchers has revealed.

Security researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) found that Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services was vulnerable to different methods of attack, including signature wrapping and cross site scripting, Those security holes have since been closed.

But similar security holes may still be open in other cloud infrastructure offerings, the RUB team found.

IBM is opening a cloud computing laboratory in Singapore to help businesses, government and research institutions and institutes of higher learning to design, adopt and reap benefits of cloud technologies. The new lab housed at Changi business park is part of it’s expansion of its cloud computing capabilities, and puts Singapore and the ASEAN region on the map as the eleventh cloud computing lab. This new addition will be part of the network of labs in Hong Kong, Ireland, Vietnam, China, South Africa, Japan, Brazil, India, Korea and the US.Through briefings, technology deployment and development sessions, the Singapore lab will work closely with businesses, government and research institutions and institutes of higher learning to design and deploy their own cloud environments.Read more at www.info

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

Peer 1, the hosting provider, has joined the ranks of Rackspace, GoDaddy and other hosting companies that have decided to get into the cloud. On Monday, it launched its Zunicore service, which combines the elements of an Infrastructure-as-a-Service with those many would consider more akin to a Platform-as-a-Service.

For example, instead of a virtual machine, a customer buys a “resource pool” that they can customize to fit their needs, as opposed to buying a small, medium or large virtual machine.

The company also offers auto scaling, a feature more common in Platforms-as-a-Service such as VMware’s Cloud Foundry, Microsoft’s Azure or Heroku. However, the service is pay-as-you-go and deployed on demand. It includes a dashboard that functions as a fuel gauge for compute resources that shows IT pros when to spin up additional resources.

Cloud computing has been eyed for some time as a solution for business continuity needs, as the thought of setting up new virtual servers on an automated, on-demand basis seems highly appealing. But when it comes to figuring out the kind of cloud offerings that will work best for business continuity, typically private cloud options are usually the ones considered. The reason for this bias is the configuration of the virtual machines themselves. While public cloud services can afford business clients a lot of computing power in a hurry for a low rate, that combination does not always equate to a continuity friendly environment.

Then there are the security concerns. If you are patching your own systems diligently, is the cloud provider providing the same patched for their own base operating systems? What other kind of security protocols are in place? On the legal side of the equation, does the cloud provider meet compliance in the areas of data breach notification, data retention, auditing, and whatever other compliance regulations you need to follow? What are the local laws for the datacenter and how do they comply with your own corporate needs in terms of security?

The financial services industry is warming up to the idea of using the cloud for some of its critical computing needs. More than half of bank transactions will be supported by cloud-based infrastructure and software by 2015, according to a recent report from Gartner.

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

For banks, the cloud can offer far greater computing power and scalability. Migrating critical operations there won't be without its risks, however. Security and stability are always a concern when moving to the cloud, and that's especially true when highly sensitive data like financial transactions are involved. It simply requires that systems are architected in a secure and fail-proof way.

picture a world where software platforms are available online and easily customizable. Picture a world where compute power is generated off site, available in quantities when and where you need it. And picture a world where information is safely stored, efficiently managed and accessible, when and where you need it. These are cloud infrastructures. The economies of scale, flexibility and efficiency they offer will not only save organizations massive amounts of capital and maintenance costs but emancipate them to apply and use information as never before. An unbelievable opportunity to raise productivity while creating unprecedented opportunities for businesses and workers.

Now picture a health-care system where a doctor has medical records at his fingertips, can see x-rays with the click of a mouse, is able to learn and apply the latest diagnostic and surgical technique from anywhere in the world. Think of the efficiencies in hospital supply chains, the delivery of prescription drugs, the processing of billing and insurance claims, reductions in fraud, and the application of best practices for cost controls. The capacity for improvement is endless.  As a matter of fact, these innovations are already being applied in isolated pockets. But for us to seize the opportunity before us it’s imperative that we move from isolated centers of excellence to connected systems of excellence. Pick any industry and systemic improvements like these are available.

A new age of innovation and technology advancement is within our grasp – an opportunity for job creation, greater productivity and economic growth. The time for cloud computing is now. We need government and industry to accelerate broad scale adoption of cloud infrastructures so we can reap the rewards of a true information based economy.

Cloud Computing is both an abstract concept which can reffer to every logical grouping of software services provided by one or more companies which may or may not be on the same hardware architectures. ted ar It also stands for the physical architectures involving SOA (services-oriented architecture) systems, server farms and a lot of hardware to provide on demand services 24/24 no matter what may happen. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk. Not matter how one sees it, it’s all about regrouping services and taking responsabilities off from our good old PC or laptop standing on our desk.  Of course it’s a 2010 buzzword and I am personally seeing some kind of Terminal Server (Mainframes anyone?…) à la sauce New Millenium coupled with web technologies. The thing is… Cloud Computing along with Software Virtualization are really promising.  I put the second one with it because everything is about having almost nothing on the client side. ore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be ga The idea of having every service in the Cloud is to ensure that eveything you need is always available from wherever you are on the planet.  You don’t need your PC or Laptop anymore.  You just log into the cloud and there you have your account and your services, may they be games, movies or any software.  And with the huge Mobile market, you’re about to have any of your services right there in your pocket. Read more at www.gamasutra.com 

Best Buy will send its Geek Squad into the cloud, after purchasing Boston-based mindSHIFT Technologies in a deal valued at $167 million.

MindSHIFT provides online applications and data center services for small to medium-sized businesses, boasting over 5,400 clients across the U.S., and with the purchase, Best Buy plans to extend its reach into the business world, including the legal, healthcare, financial, nonprofit, and education markets.

With its ubiquitous brick-and-mortar stores — and its Geek Squad driving Volkswagon Bugs from IT issue to IT issue — Best Buy believes it’s well positioned to offer cloud computing services to businesses with neither the time nor the resources to support their own IT infrastructure.

Popular SaaS startup New Relic made its name monitoring application performance, but has added server monitoring to the mix to make the service more functional. It’s actually a natural fit for New Relic, though, as what’s going on with the servers can have a big impact on how an application is running.

The new server-monitoring information is displayed in context with application-performance data so that users can drill down to the cause of a problem once they see performance start lagging. On the server side, New Relic monitors CPU, disk and memory utilization, network activity, and processes, which SVP of Product Jim Gochee told me lets the company keep an application-performance focus while hitting the key metrics that affect system health.

New Relic claims more than 13,000 active users.

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

“You know,” said a good friend of mine last week, “there’s really no such thing as big data.” I sighed a bit inside. In the past few years, cloud computing critics have said similar things: that clouds are nothing new, that they’re just mainframes, that they’re just painting old technologies with a cloud brush to help sales. I’m wary of this sort of techno-Luddism. But this person is sharp, and not usually prone to verbal linkbait, so I dug deeper.

And this was his point about big data: that given how much traditional companies put it to work, it might as well not exist. Companies have countless ways they might use the treasure troves of data they have on us. Yet all of this data lies buried, sitting in silos. It seldom sees the light of day.

Small, agile startups disrupt entire industries because they look at traditional problems with a new perspective. They’re fearless, because they have less to lose. But big, entrenched incumbents should still be able to compete, because they have massive amounts of data about their customers, their products, their employees, and their competitors. They fail because often they just don’t know how to ask the right questions.

Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData: WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are:

Post-revolution Egypt is in a state of flux overlooked by outsiders. New political parties are forming while various factions hustle for power. As Egypt gears up for free elections, tech-savvy geeks are betting that their projects will have a major impact on how people will vote.

A combination of academics and entrepreneurs recently worked with Egyptian activists on a “Hackathon for Egypt” that provides some interesting--and fascinating--clues.

Participants in the hackathon were organized by Cloud to Street, a project dedicated to aiding Egyptian activists through technology. Cloud to Street is headed up by a loose group of primarily Canadian scholars and diplomats. Approximately 75 programmers took part, as well as Egyptian activists who attended both in person and via teleconference

many ways mobile technologies are derivative of their desktop brethren. Your iPhone's e-mail app is like the e-mail client on your desktop, for example. The mobile world is the desktop world in miniature, a "lite" version. But the mobile world is no longer just following; it's leading.

we can expect to see certain aspects of desktop and laptop operating systems start imitating the little upstarts that had initially imitated them.

"It's very likely that PC operating systems will be affected by mobile devices' operating systems—and more broadly, that the lines between the two will increasingly blur," says Michael Dahlin, a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, who has expertise in operating systems. "Things have evolved to the point today where the difference between the smart-phone OS and the laptop and desktop OS is narrowing—and really already pretty narrow in terms of capability and core architectures," he