Swiss cloud service supplier CloudSigma, in partnership with CompatibleOne, lets customers provision and track multiple cloud workloads through a single interface. Top 10 Retail CIO Priorities For 2014 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) CloudSigma, a eu cloud supplier with its foot in North America’s door, has teamed up with open source code company CompatibleOne SAS for a shot at becoming a player alongside Amazon. CompatibleOne’s system allows cloud users to access multiple cloud through a single interface. Through the CompatibleOne interface, a CloudSigma user could deploy workloads to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace, HP Cloud, Joyent, GoGrid, OnApp, and Dimension Data. CompatibleOne users provision workloads on OpenStack clouds and VMware’s Hybrid vCloud Service. It also allows access to 2 PaaS providers: VMware/Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s Open Shift. That means an existing CloudSigma user could easily become an Amazon user — or vice versa — without changing provisioning platforms. CompatibleOne is produced by the French open source project CompatibleOne.org... Read More »

Solid state alone can’t solve your problems — in spite of the fact that you could afford it. Think scale-out, virtualization, and cloud. Business users worry about storage growth just like the NSA worries about your privacy. Sure, users might pay lip service to the virtue of restraint, but if it comes all the way down to it, they need their stuff. And their stuff? It’s digital content, and it’s feeding double-digit annual growth inside the amount of information under management, in keeping with our 2014 InformationWeek State of Enterprise Storage Survey. At 27% of businesses, it’s wrangling 25% or more yearly growth. The most culprit: databases or data warehouses. Money’s still tight, with 25% saying they lack the money even to satisfy demand, less optimize performance by loading up on solid state. IT leaders face a troublesome “pick two” conflict among performance, capacity, and price. Data growth is an inescapable trend. In its “The Digital Universe in 2020” report, IDC estimates that the entire... Read More »

Technology group requires “Geneva Convention” to handle complex maze of knowledge laws that affect growth of cloud computing and global trade. As IT leaders get more well-off moving their data operations into the cloud, concerns are growing about conflicting international laws that govern data generated in a single country and stored in another. Policymakers around the globe are fueling those concerns. Anxious to offer protection to data privacy and security, they’re advocating requirements to store particular types of knowledge domestically, says Daniel Castro, a senior analyst with the data Technology and Innovation Foundation. Those policies, however, aren’t only creating headaches for technology managers moving data around the globe, they’re also bumping up against delicate free trade agreements that involve senior government officials well past the reach of the common CIO’s office. “We’re finding that businesses are being caught within the middle [between conflicting privacy and security laws],” said Castro in an interview with InformationWeek. The commercial stakes have grown so significant that the ITIF recommended... Read More »

Cloud pricing scheme in line with performance levels, as opposed to units of time, will be interesting play against rivals along with Amazon Web Services. Microsoft In 2013: 7 Lessons Learned (Click image for larger view and for slideshow.) Two Microsoft employees have applied for a patent on a cloud pricing scheme in response to the customers’ ability to set the performance levels of a cloud service. Customers will be guaranteed the designated level of performance, in keeping with the quoted price. The patent application illustrates how guaranteed performance levels may play a bigger role in future use of cloud services than they do currently. a typical criticism of on-demand pricing, together with that utilized by Amazon Web Services, is that it provides an hour of service time with none guarantee of the way well the system will run. Specific things including I/O levels is also set with a number of Amazon’s larger servers, together with a fee for that guaranteed performance. Performance metrics could... Read More »

As municipal needs get more sophisticated, more cities turn to cloud services. Want a wise city without cloud services? Good luck with that. The cloud approach, wherein providers outside city government deliver a technological platform for gathering and mining data and producing city applications over the general public Internet or a virtual private network, has become the well-liked means for municipalities to transport to a higher level. “While it’s possible for cities to enable smart technology without using cloud-based services, it’s unlikely it is possible for you to to take action in any meaningful way,” wrote Brian Robinson on GCN last month. Why is that this? Why can’t cities just get smarter with none involvement with cloud services? a more in-depth look turns up several reasons. For something, most city networks aren’t equipped to work with real-time input from sensors, smartphones, electric and water meters, or other sources of input concerning the functions of cities. Doing so requires specialized hardware and software to collect data,... Read More »