ReadWriteCloud

Just a month ago, Amazon introduced Direct Connect for establishing a direct connection from a customer site to Amazon Web Services. Initially, Direct Connect was rolled out just in the US-East region. Today the company announced that it was turning on the lights out West.

AWS is now offering Direct Connect via Equinix's San Jose Facility for the US-West region.

Unlike Johnny Carson's Carnac character (pictured at left), there are serious and legitimate ways to predict how your traffic will respond to your site's content. A new service from Adobe's SearchCenter+ and features from the existing service from Visual Revenue are both trying to be more helpful in optimizing your content and ad buys for your site. Both services can boost your traffic by a 25% or more, which is a welcome note for just about everyone concerned with their site stats these days.

Today HP announced a private beta program for its Cloud Compute and Cloud Object Storage services based on Open Stack. This is their first implementation, and follows on their announcements last month about joining the consortium, which we first covered here.

Some of the larger-scale data deployments are handled by cloud software vendor Appistry and today they announced a new line of products to make massive data manipulations easier. Called (unfortunately) Ayrris, it will replace its existing CloudIQ line and focus on open scalable solutions for this space. The line includes Ayrris/Bio for next generation gene sequencing tasks, Ayrris/Defense for government and intelligence data apps, and Ayrris/Finance.

We've written before about Backupify.com, a backup service for several cloud-based apps such as Google Docs, Facebook and LinkedIn. A new service from Spanning Backup that does the same for corporate Google Docs accounts launches today.

Ask, and you shall receive. Well, maybe. Today Red Hat announced that it is opening up a discussion group to ask what customers want in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

RHEL 6 was released late last year, and RHEL 6.1 came out in May. It will be a while before RHEL 7 sees light of day, but now is as good a time as any to start getting customer feedback for the next release.

Google is finally getting around to adding offline access back to Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar.

Today the company announced that it was adding offline capabilities immediately to Gmail, and offline features for Calendar and Docs will be rolling out over the next week starting today. The catch is, you might have to switch browsers or wait even longer.

ReadWriteWeb presents exclusive embedded video of the Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco, with running commentary by Scott Fulton. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff leads the festivities, and he's beginning by driving home the message that PCs have held users back the way Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Khadafi held back Egypt and Libya, respectively.

A new Salesforce database feature Benioff is announcing today enables data centers to store selected data locally without using it to populate the Salesforce database.

Citrix is moving fast since acquiring Cloud.com in July. After less than two months with Cloud.com, Citrix has decided to bet heavy on the open cloud by merging all code into the open source release of CloudStack.

CloudStack is similar to Amazon EC2, but it allows organizations to run a private cloud rather than depending on managed software from a provider. But CloudStack has a number of important differences between EC2 and other proprietary solutions like VMware vSphere.

Yesterday's VMware announcements were all about the data center and the global cloud ecosystem. Today the announcements are more end-user focused. Today the company took the wraps off VMware View 5 and updates to VMware Horizon.

Aside from a scenic theme to the announcements, what's going on with View and Horizon? VMware View lets organizations provide personalized virtual desktops to users as a managed service. Users can get their desktop on a mobile device, laptop, desktop, or thin client.