Two years ago, Rackspace joined a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists to create an open source cloud computing platform that can be used with both private and public cloud formats. Now the code for the program, OpenStack, is freely available and is being used by a number of corporations, service providers, researchers, data centers, and others. Based on the growing numbers of companies turning to OpenStack, the original developers were obviously onto an idea that has proven popular. But why have companies turned to it? "We chose OpenStack because we want to help enterprise IT deploy and manage applications on OpenStack clouds. Scalr builds enterprise open source Cloud Management software designed to allow IT administrators to set quotas, budget alerts, and access control to their users, and introduce automation and agility tooling,... (more)

Data Center Fabric for Cloud Computing at Cloud Expo New York

Cloud Expo New York $500 Savings here! Enterprise IT organizations want to deploy a virtualized data center fabric that will provide the foundation for agile private cloud computing. Getting there does not have to be difficult, but it does require a new approach to data center infrastructure design - an approach that is non-disruptive, vendor-agnostic, and very adaptable to changing business requirements. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Bruce Fingles, Chief Information Officer and VP of Product Quality at Xsigo, will look at the limitations of traditional thi... (more)

GM to Pull Facebook Advertising: WSJ

Here we are less than three days before Facebook's historic $100 billion IPO and General Motors or "people familiar with the matter" let slip to the Wall Street Journal that GM's going to stop advertising on the social networking site because the paid ads are ineffective. The big American carmaker still reportedly intends to do marketing through Facebook but that's not going to put any money in Facebook's pocketbook. The paper says GM started having doubts earlier this year and met with Facebook managers, leaving the meetings "unconvinced advertising on the web site made sense." ... (more)

Application-Aware Firewalls by Andy Thurai

You may have heard this term recently and wondered what it meant. When it comes to security, everyone thinks of Firewalls, Proxies, IPS, IDS, Honeypots, VPN devices, email security and even Web security, but most people don’t think in terms of application level security unless either you are the developer, admin, or user of those specific services or perhaps a hacker. Especially when your traditional network boundaries disappear you can’t carry all of those devices with you. When you move out of your traditional boundaries, towards the cloud, you trust the cloud provider to provi... (more)

Infrastructure Was Then, Private Cloud Is Now and Beyond

Seven years of research with 15,000 data points, as shown below, provides overwhelming evidence that there is a noticeable increase in efficiency with a significant reduction of TCO by moving IT from Basic intothe  Rationalized stage in the IO (Infrastructure Optimization) model. And cloud, or more specifically private cloud computing, offers a roadmap to facilitate enterprise IT transforming from Basic or Standardized into Rationalized. A transition from a traditional infrastructure-focused deployment model into a cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, and service-centric delivery vehicle ... (more)