Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Mary Shacklett.

Cloud and SaaS services are rapidly gaining traction with enterprises and SMBs -- yet IT, which is usually responsible for negotiating contracts with these service providers, may fall short in critical areas of contract negotiation and legal skills. The stakes are high. In a worst case scenario, you can simply realize that you made a mistake, and that you must get out of a contract. In less dire cases, you can find yourself relying on a vendor that doesn't execute to your business SLAs as your internal staff would. The best way to set expectations is by laying them out clearly in the contract that you sign with your vendor. This provides a platform for ongoing discussions about service levels...

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (tase:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, and Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology innovation and green computing, today announced that a major Asian cloud provider selected Supermicro servers and Mellanox’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) solution to form one of the world’s largest cloud solutions. Mellanox’s 40GbE NICs and switches, and FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapter and switches connect the 5,000-node based cloud, delivering the highest cloud performance, flexibility and simplicity...

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Paul Venezia.

I find it puzzling whenever I come across any reasonably sized IT infrastructure that has little or no virtualization in place, and my puzzlement turns to amazement if there's no plan to embrace virtualization in the near future. Whether it's due to the "get off my lawn" attitude that eventually killed off many AS/400 admins or simply a budget issue, clinging to a traditional physical infrastructure [1] today is madness.

For one thing, what are these companies buying for servers? If they're replacing old single- and dual-core servers with new quad-core boxes (at minimum) and simply moving the services over, then they've got a whole lot more hardware than they need. Each of their server workloads is running on hardware that could easily handle a half-dozen virtual servers, even with free hypervisors. Are these companies only going to embrace server virtualization [2] when the rest of us have already moved past it?...

Grazed from Washington Post.  Author: Marjorie Censer.

Move over cloud computing. The term with the most buzz these days for information technology contractors is “big data,” or large chunks of information too huge to be easily managed by typical computer programs.

The Obama administration announced late last month a new big data initiative meant to help the government better analyze large collections of information. The government’s big data can range from the claims filed by Medicare and Medicaid users to video footage collected by unmanned vehicles on the battlefield.

The initiative kicked off with more than $200 million in projects at six agencies in an effort to advance the technologies needed to collect, store and share the troves of data and expand the needed workforce...

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Alexander Haislip.

We’re at a technological inflection point, a major branch of computing is splitting off and everyone from the sysadmin to the CEO is wondering what it will mean.

The usual cabal of vocal technologists isn’t helping the situation. The chatterboxes maintain a constant chant of change: “Cloud, Cloud, Cloud!” Yet they fail to contextualize it in the overall IT architecture. They imagine a bright future where all servers will hum along in ultra-efficient datacenters (preferably solar powered) diligently tended to by the infrastructure-as-a-service providers. Why would you ever host your own server?...

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Erika Morphy.

Dan Dixon is certain that state revenue authorities will soon start up more ambitious efforts to tax online commerce.

How does he know this? Well, for starters he is a state tax attorney at Reed Smith LLP and hears about back room deliberations in various state government offices. Then there this this, he says: his mother has recently become aware that Apple offers cloud services. She saw it on TV. “When companies like Apple start promoting the cloud to every day consumers on television, that tends to get the attention of state tax officials.”

In short, whether they have said so publicly or not, collecting sales and use taxes from cloud computing customers via their providers has become a topic of interest for state tax officials. Many states have been studying the issue for at least a year and  it won’t be long before they start to collect...

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Mike Fratto.

Since Citrix gave Cloudstack to the Apache Software Foundation, there has been a lot of blogging, tweeting, and arguing about whether cloud computing software vendors should simply let Amazon AWS drive cloud computing standards. My answer is no. First, I don't think Amazon even wants to be the standard and second, standards should be developed independently of any single vendor. It's time for the stakeholders--enterprises, vendors, open source projects, and anyone else interested to start scoping, developing, and implementing standards that everyone can use. If that doens't happen, the cloud landscape will continue to be fragmented to everyone's detriment...

Grazed from ReadWriteCloud.  Author:  Joe Brockmeier.

If you've any doubt that cloud storage is a huge market, Amazon's numbers ought to be very persuasive. The latest figures from Amazon indicate the company has added about 143 billion objects to S3 in one quarter. But it also looks like Amazon's growth may be slowing - somewhat.

Amazon reported tripling the number of objects stored in 2011. By Amazon's figures, the company added about 500 billion objects to S3. That's roughly 125 billion per quarter, though it's unlikely it's an even split per quarter.

If the pace remains the same, Amazon would be on track to add another 429 billion through 2012 - or a total of 572 billion for the full year. That would leave Amazon with 1.3 trillion objects and change hosted in S3...

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

As business use of cloud computing rises, those businesses need to keep tabs what they’re using. Now, roughly 175,000 Rackspace cloud accounts can use Cloudability services for free to monitor how much they’re spending on their cloud services.

Cloudability, which launched at our Structure event last June, generates daily, weekly and monthly emails detailing a company’s cloud spending and provides a graphical dashboard of that spending. The goal is to make cloud IT spending as efficient as possible. Normally, it’s is free for companies spending less than $2,500 per month in the cloud, and the price after that is based on overall spending...