In a bid to beef up its cloud computing chops IBM acquires SoftLayer Technologies, one of the biggest privately owned cloud infrastructure providers around. 

Financial details are not available, but hearsay suggests IBM shelled out around $2 billion for the privilege. 

Founded in 2005, SoftLayer operates 13 data centres housing 100000 machines in the US, Europe and Asia, and has a customer base of around 21000. It also develops and owns cloud provisioning technology, even if IBM already plans to extend the SoftLayer cloud portfolio with OpenStack capabilities.

The acquisition is a big deal for IBM, since it means Big Blue wants to soar outside its private cloud comfort zone towards the public cloud, a sphere dominated by the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure.  Read more...

Devon IT proposes a new means of turning monitors and displays into zero clients-- the Ceptor, a compact device the size of a USB memory stick customers connect to displays via HDMI.

The Ceptor features a configurable, persistent and fully manageable enterprise client desktop, making it ideal for a variety of applications. Handling virtual desktop access is ZeTOS, the Devon IT zero client OS. 

The device carries a dual-core ARM processor, integrated Bluetooth and wifi capability, and a pre-installed ZetOS client. Thin client management comes through Read more...

The French Ministry of Health hands the highest level of certification to the Arrow Electronics hosting subsidiary, Asplenium, for the hosting of health data. 

The certification allows Asplenium to offer a heightened service and comprehension for the business needs of hospitals and retirement centres. It will also provide round-the-clock support and disaster recovery plans boosted through cloud-based offers from Arrow (Arrowsphere). 

Asplenium will take care of implementation and management of critical application, patient data management and administrative management of health facilities for major clinical groups, including Ramsay Santé (Ramsay Health Care), and a number of hospitals.  Read more...

Google makes a couple of announcements regarding the Google App Engine (GAE) service at the I/O developer fest-- the Platform-as-a-Service is now available for all (not just customers paying for support) and features PHP support. 

What does this mean? In a few words, GEA now supports the three more widely used web languages (Python, Java and PHP) together with the Google-sponsored Go.

"This isn't like your existing PHP stack," Google technical infrastructure senior VP Urs Hölzle says. "We patch it and manage it for you. Because it's GAE, if your site gets no traffic it costs you nothing but if your site gets a lot of traffic we can scale it up fast."

PHP allows GAE to host web applications such as WordPress, Drupal and Magneto, with auto-scaling responding to spikes in traffic-- making it similar to the likes of Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk, AWS-based Heroku and Engine Yard, and App Fog. Read more...