Founded by the team that developed Amazon EC2, Nimbula delivers a cloud operating system that combines the scalability and operational efficiency that we’ve grown accustomed to with the public cloud, but with the control that enterprises require for within their own data centers.

While many commentators are scornful about private clouds, claiming that the concept doesn’t meet their test for “the true cloud,” more moderate commentators, myself included, would contend that so long as it’s scalable and abstracts management away from the user, it constitutes a cloud product.

What separates Nimbula from the myriad of private cloud companies, however, is the pedigree of its executive team. Nimbula was founded by Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, the execs who led the development of the Amazon EC2 public cloud service. These high-profile founders have attracted high-profile VCs to boot: Accel funded such big names as AdMob, Facebook and ComScore while Sequoia Capital, an existing investor that also took part in this round, backed big names Yahoo, Google and YouTube.

Nimbula’s product, Director, seeks to manage both on-premise and off-premise resources. Director is a cloud operating system that is designed for scalability, ease of use, flexibility, reliability, and security, as well as:

• Installs on bare metal
• Allows for a heterogeneous configuration
• Provides an automated control panel
• Is reliable and distributed
• Needs minimal configuration
• Includes dynamic Resource Discovery

The size of this funding round, and the pedigree of the backers, should be taken as a real vote of confidence in Nimbula’s ability to execute on this space.

Article Location GigaOM

"You'll be able to go into a multi-hypervisor host environment, where you can choose from among Xen, KVM, or vSphere," Cloud.com director of marketing Peder Ulander tells The Reg.

CloudStack is designed to create not only Amazon EC2-like "public clouds" that serve up scalable, on-demand processing power to world+dog, but also "private clouds" that offer such infrastructure for use behind the firewall, within a particular enterprise. And according to the company, it's designed to work without major changes to your underlying data center setup. "We were founded with the goal of creating a software platform that would enable anyone with a data center to turn their environment into a cloud," Ulander explains.

The company bills itself as an open source outfit, but it should be noted that it uses the sort of "open core" model adopted by the likes of private-cloud outfit Eucalyptus and Hadoop shop Cloudera. The heart of the platform is open source, but the company also offers an enterprise version that includes proprietary code.

For instance, a plug-in for connecting to a billing system is not open source. "The fundamental theory is that if you're going to make money off of this, we're going to make money off of this," Ulander says. He also says that other pieces are closed because they involve hooks into proprietary extensions and APIs from the likes of NetApp and Cisco.

With the addition of vSphere and vCenter support, the company aims to serve outfits that have already deployed VMware. "Within an existing VMware vSphere environment, companies can deploy a full-blown cloud platform using Cloud.com and deliver that experience to their end users," Ulander says. "We build on top of VMware."

In essence, Cloud.com puts an agent onto all physical machines running VMware and pools these resources into a service that allows end-users to provision machines on the fly – as they're needed.

Article By TheRegisterUK

Traditional, rigid IT infrastructures get in the way of innovation because they take months or years to deploy when a business decides to try something new, the report said, whereas on-demand computing services can be set up in days.

"Often the costs and time required to test a new product or service, or try a new way of engaging customers, are so prohibitive, they discourage companies from even trying them," according to the PwC report. "But cloud computing offers an inexpensive and flexible way to deploy the infrastructure as needed to test ideas."

For example, the report said that 3M Corp. is using Microsoft Corp.'s Azure cloud technology to quickly analyze new designs for consumer products, and McKesson Corp. is using SAS Institute Inc.'s "analytics cloud" to study marketing data.

However, the report acknowledged that cloud computing raises security issues, as well as regulatory compliance, tax and financial accounting considerations.

Read more about Cloud Computing in Computerworld's Cloud Computing Topic Center.

Article Source – CompuWorld

“The major telcos have a long heritage in providing managed data center services and hosting and have combined this with their networking and security expertise to meet the needs of customers for cloud computing services," says Peter Hall, Ovum (News – Alert)principal analyst. See http://about.datamonitor.com/media/archives/4674 for more details. 

Some observers have speculated that the telcos might not fare so well in some parts of the cloud computing ecosystem, particularly in parts of the ecosystem requiring more application expertise. That might well be true, but there seems little reason to believe telcos cannot be major players in those parts of the business that are more centrally related to managed hosting. 

Telcos are well accustomed to managing mission-critical data centers. That, in essence, is what modern switching and routing facilities are. 

“All of the players reviewed in the report see cloud computing as leveraging their core competencies and Orange (News – Alert)has coined the term ‘IT operator’ to reflect its new role in IT services by analogy with its traditional role as a network operator," says Hall.

"We believe that the global and major regional telcos will become strong players across the full spectrum of cloud computing services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service," says Hall. That makes sense. 

Consumer voice services always have been managed services, and their roles as Internet access providers likewise already has required telcos to become managed service providers in that area as well.

It might not yet, and might never be the case, that most telcos can compete directly with larger system integrators that manage enterprise apps down to the desktop. But there is credible reason to believe that managing large scale, mission critical server farms is an issue for the larger telcos. 

How well major telcos can compete with "computing as a service" offerings such as Amazon Web Services (News – Alert)likely is the more immediate issue, not the direct competition with large system integrators and outsourcing shops.

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This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.

Amazon S3 is a cheap and cost effective way to scale your site to easily handle large spikes in traffic (such as from Digg) without having to go through the expense of setting up the infrastructure for a content delivery network. Startup companies are embracing it for their online storage solution, and even bloggers are starting to use it to host their images and other static media (such as mp3 files for their podcasts).

Pricing is really cheap. There are no setup fees, no minimum costs, and you literally only pay for what you use, even if it’s just a couple cents a month. If you have a WordPress powered blog, and have a lot of media (such as images or mp3s), this plugin will help you easily utilize Amazon S3 for bandwidth and storage.

Once setup, this plugin transparently integrates with your WordPress blog. File uploads are automatically saved into your Amazon S3 bucket without any extra steps. Once saved, these files will be delivered by Amazon S3, instead of your web host. Any image thumbnails that get created are saved to Amazon S3 too. You’ll also find an “Amazon S3″ tab next to your regular “Upload” tab, which allows you to easily browse and manage files that were not upload via WordPress.

PlugIn location

Hosted FTP is a cool plug in that you can easily use in your wordpress blog. However, this simple plug in will simply let your users  share files with your hosted FTP account. On the other hand, this plug in is flexible and customizable and it comes with a lot of extraordinary features. You can simply put widget of this plug in by using your Hosted FTP username.

If you don’t have a Hosted FTP account, you may visit http://www.hostedftp.com for  a new FTP account which is 100% cloud based. So, let’s have a look on the extraordinary and aweosme features of this plug in:

Customizing Hosted FTP Plug In

1. This plug in is easy-to-use.
2. You can let your users share files wih your hosted FTP account in your WordPress blog.
3. The file sharing is as simple as dragging and dropping.
4. Hosted FTP plug in is customizable and you can add different looks or features by simply going to http://ftp.hostedftp.com
5. If you don’t have a Hosted FTP account, i recommend you to sign up for your account as it’s 100% cloud based.

Installation:

The installtion of this plug in very easy. Just follow the following steps:

Step No.1:

Go to your “Plug In” option of your wordpress dashboard. and click on “Add New”

Step No.2:

Now, search writing “Hosted FTP” and you will get a list of related plug in. However, the first plug in that you will see on the list is “File Sharing by Hosted~FTP~ ”

Now, install the plug in

Step NO.3:

Now, you are done with the installation procedures. Go to your widgets section and drag the Hosted FTP plug in to your blog’s widget area. Add your user name of Hosted FTP, add Greetings, name or so. It should look like this:

Hosted FTP Widget

On the other hand, if you would like to install this plug in manually by uploading from your pc then go there to download this plug in:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hostedftp/

The annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start-up Challenge is back with an expanded world footprint – start-ups in 22 countries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas can enter to win. This year, we will recognize 5 finalists from each region and select a global grand prize winner.

Stay tuned for full contest details. Sign up to get notified when we launch the Challenge! We will only contact you with pertinent information on the AWS Start-Up Challenge.

You may contact us regarding.