Stories by Brandon Butler

New bare metal cloud offerings emerging

Sometimes, for either performance or security reasons, customers don't want to use a public or a private cloud with virtualized infrastructure. Service providers are increasingly responding to this, and one analyst says there is increasing demand for bare metal clouds.

Amazon outage one year later: Are we safer?

Amazon Web Services last April suffered what many consider to be the worst cloud service outage to date - an event that knocked big name customers such as Reddit, Foursquare, HootSuite, Quora and others offline, some for as many as four days.

Report: Some cloud providers have "dirty disks"

A forensic IT study by a U.K. security consultancy found that some multi-tenant public cloud providers have "dirty disks" that are not fully wiped clean after each use by a customer, leaving potentially sensitive data exposed to other users.

Government moves to the cloud, slowly

A year and a half after the U.S. Office of Management and Budget declared a "cloud first" strategy requiring government organizations to at least consider cloud-based services when launching new applications and IT services, experts say the government is only moving slowly to the cloud, and it has a long way to go.

Xerox throwing cloud computing coming out party

Xerox for the past few years has steadily, and quietly, been building out its cloud offerings. Now officials from the venerable printer and copier company are ready to make some noise about it.

Zynga CTO: Making infrastructure cool again

Allan Leinwand is an infrastructure guy. He's CTO for infrastructure at Zynga, which during the past few years has built the zCloud, which powers some of the most popular social games today, such as "FarmVille" and "Words with Friends." It works by combining the capacity of Amazon Web Service's public cloud with the company's custom-built private cloud. And Leinwand says Zynga's evolution from relying on the public cloud to building a custom-made hybrid cloud, is one he hopes other enterprises can learn from. Leinwand is also excited because finally, he says, infrastructure is cool again. During the dot-com bubble all the talk was all about the Web, networking and storage. Now, with the increasing popularity of the cloud, infrastructure is once again front and center. This year Leinwand will be one of the keynote speakers at Interop (May 6-10 in Las Vegas) where he will discuss the evolution of zCloud and the state of cloud computing today.

Mobility, cloud computing, security issues to dominate Interop

One of the premier technology shows of the year once again hits Las Vegas from May 6-10 and many of the themes IT leaders grapple with on a daily basis will be the hot topics at this year's forums and panel discussions. The show focuses on nine subject areas this year including: cloud computing, networking, wireless and mobility, virtualization, data center, storage, collaboration, information security and risk management, and IT management. Mobility is a dominant discussion point at this year's show though with 14 sessions on the topic.

Amazon CTO: 'You should be able to walk away' from cloud providers

At an Amazon Web Services summit event in New York City on Thursday, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels said one of the core philosophies related to the company's market-leading suite of infrastructure as a service products is that customers should be able to opt out whenever they want.

Efforts afoot to advance cloud standards

Launching a public cloud deployment is no "plug and play" matter for most business users, says Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, one of dozens of companies that help manage cloud deployments for businesses.

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