ReadWriteCloud

Businesses are finally realizing there's a way to recoup some of their costs for building out their private cloud infrastructures. It's hybridization, but in the opposite direction: taking their residual compute power and storage capacity and making it public, reselling it back upstream.

This morning, VMware is introducing a kind of cloud service assembly tool called vCloud Integration Manager (VCIM) that enables businesses to gather their available resources together, from both private pools and participating public cloud resellers, and then present them to their own customers as cloud services. Suddenly, unused capacity is not a cash drain but a potential cash cow.

Amazon is looking to continue its rapid growth for S3. While hard drive costs are staying steady or going up due to limited supply, Amazon is actually dropping pricing for S3 storage.

The pricing changes were announced on the AWS blog yesterday. The first tier of storage starts at $0.125 a month per GB for the first 1TB of storage, then pricing drops to $0.11 per GB/month up to 50TB, and so on. Note that there's no change in pricing past the 4,000TB+ tier, so really heavy users of S3 (like Dropbox) aren't really going to see a lot of pricing relief from the change.

If it's a feature your customers are asking for, it's difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American.

It's still the most controversial provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, signed into law in October 2001. Because of this, European cloud customers specifically request that their service providers (CSPs) block any live migration to U.S. servers. And because it's such a frequent request, CSPs including Zurich-based CloudSigma are offering what they call "Patriot-proof" clouds as a feature.

Today, Alfresco today launches its Enterprise v4, perhaps the biggest update since they began operations. The new software comes with mobile and tablet apps, business app integrations and is loaded with social features that help users share, comment on and collaborate on content. The software is built around an open source content management system that is used by more than 2500 enterprises in 55 countries around the globe. They call it cloud connected content.

Like other social Intranet products, Alfresco users can like or follow particular content streams. Enterprise v4 has integrated connectors to Google Docs, Microsoft Office, QuickOffice, Adobe Creative Suite and Apple's iWork app. You can also publish your content to YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Pricing for an Alfresco Enterprise subscription starts at about $25k for the typical enterprise. You can download the new software here.

On Tuesday, we introduced you to CA Technologies' Private Cloud Accelerator for Vblock platforms, and if you're a frequent reader of ReadWriteWeb, you might still be wondering, "What's a Vblock platform?" It's an emerging contender in the out-of-the-box, full-service cloud server category from a company called VCE.

And if you're wondering how a relatively unknown company goes up against the likes of HP, Oracle, and IBM, the answer is by integrating hardware and software from specialists in their respective fields. Consequently, compute power and networking switches comes by way of Cisco UCS, storage capacity is supplied by EMC Symmetrix, and the virtualization layer is supplied by VMware. Yesterday, by way of a new strategic alliance, the VCE convoy added BMC Software's management software to this illustrious list.

"I like to describe the roots of all evil being unplanned, or poorly planned, changes," states Jimmy Augustine of HP Software. "Somewhere between 70% and 80% of all service disruptions are caused by faulty changes. Somebody goes in and makes a security change to a network device, and brings down the service. Downtime equates to costs and, in some cases, lost revenue."

You would think Step #1, or something close to Step #1, for any kind of asset migration or disaster recovery plan would be to know what it is you have that you may want to recover when a disaster happens. There's an art to this, it turns out, and it's called dependency mapping. Last December, a VMware engineer we talked to listed it as #2 among his ten tips for disaster recovery planning, just after running a business impact analysis.

The "G" in its name used to stand for "Graphics." A few decades ago, the most delightful room for one to be in during a computer conference was the one where Silicon Graphics was showing a demo. It was like one of those dreams where you knew you weren't really on-board the Starship Enterprise, but you forced yourself to ignore that fact and look at the pretty lights and colors. When SGI ceased to be a company unto itself in April 2009, most folks wrote off the SGI brand as an historical remnant.

Wrong. It's wonderful to see a brand that never says die. Ever since Rackable Systems adopted the SGI name, it's been lucky. It's finding its way back as a high-density storage provider. This afternoon, the company is introducing a very high density storage server platform designed, its engineers tell us, to pack the maximum number of terabytes into a 19-inch rack while staying cool.

Ever since human beings landed on the moon, the state of technology in government appeared to be on a downward slope. Never mind that it was really the U.S. Government that facilitated the original Internet; in public sector offices, the state of computing started lagging behind the private sector ever since IBM mass-produced the microcomputer.

That slope may have bottomed out two years ago, with the urgent need to cut costs, reform practices and save jobs leading to an extraordinarily rapid adoption by federal and state governments of private cloud infrastructure. Now a government IT survey commissioned by MeriTalk, and funded by Microsoft and NetApp, reveals the extent of progress: Among just the agencies whose IT managers were surveyed, federal, state and local governments report saving a total of about $15 billion from their fiscal year 2011 budgets.

Need support for Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux or Microsoft Windows on AWS? Amazon is now offering support for setup, configuration and troubleshooting of system software as part of its support program. The company is also adding a “trusted advisor” feature to inspect AWS environments and offer help ranging from performance improvements to security suggestions.

Today CloudPassage boosts security for your cloud-based servers by announcing an enhanced version of its Halo SaaS security tools called NetSec. The new version brings two-factor authentication methods for remote terminal access, as well as improvements to cloud firewall policy creation and management. As with earlier versions, the tools only work on Linux-based instances, since you need to install their agents on each cloud-based server. The tools are being used by Foursquare, for example, to help manage their increase in weekend check-in traffic.