Rackspace acquires Exceptional Cloud Services, a San Francisco-based cloud-related development tools maker, for an undisclosed sum. 

Exceptional is the developer of Exceptional.io and Airbrake.io, a pair of software tools helping developers resolve issues by tracking errors in web applications. It also offers the Redis To Go Redis instance manager. 

Rackspace will leverage the acquisition towards expanding its developer solution offering. 

"[The Exceptional Cloud Services] team shares a common vision and culture," Rackspace says. "We are very committed Read more...

Amazon bolsters AWS customer security with Cloud Hardware Security Modules (CloudHSM)-- a service handling the creation and management of encryption keys on the cloud. 

The HSMs in question are physical devices (connected either externally or inside servers as PCI cards) equipped with tamper-proofing or tamper-alerting tools taking care of encryption duties outside of more vulnerable server memory and storage systems. 

Previously the use of HSMs (demanded by a number of government agences) with Amazon services demanded the installation of appliances Read more...

Federal Computer Week reports the CIA just decided on a choice of cloud-- reportedly the agency signed a 10-year, $600 million cloud computing deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

According to anonymous sources AWS will provide a cost-effective private cloud infrastructure, one allowing the CIA to keep pace with big data and other emerging technologies. FCW also speculates the CIA plans to run public cloud-style infrastructure within its firewalls, negating potential classified data leaks. 

The CIA's current cloud efforts involve a number of smaller, Read more...

Nvidia launches what it claims is the first "visual computing appliance"-- the GRID VCA, a GPU-based system providing customers with remote access to graphics acceleration in Windows, Linux or Mac-based clients. 

The VCA carries x2 Xeon processors, x16 Kepler-class GPUs (in x8 Quadro cards) and Nvidia GRID VGX software inside an easy-to-install 4U appliance, and provides up to x16 concurrent users with access to graphic applications from the likes of Adobe, Autodesk and Dassault. 

The company says the appliance is ideal for SMBs lacking in dedicated Read more...