Cisco acquires virtual network overlay technology developer vCider, and will integrate vCider code into its current development of the OpenStack Quantum network service. 

The Quantum plug-in provides programmability for both virtual and physical networks within cloud environments.

The company says the vCider acquisition will play an important role in the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, particularly in open source OpenStack cloud orchestration API support.  

"With Quantum becoming a core OpenStack service, it's clear that programmable Read more...

IDC reports 2012 WW spending on public cloud services will total $40 billion before growing to $100bn in 2016 with a CAGR of 26.4%-- x5 the growth of the overall IT industry for the 2012-2016 period.

"The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next 2 to 3 decades," IDC says. The analyst expects cloud services and other 3rd platform technologies to drive 80% of industry growth by 2020. 

By 2016 public IT cloud services should account for Read more...

Like the Roman god Janus, Amazon has 2 faces. One face handles online goods retail, the other cloud-based services. But what if the two faces meet? Enter Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. 

The concept behind the EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace is simple-- it allows Amazon customers to sell unneeded virtual servers (or rather, "Reserved Instances" within the Elastic Compute Cloud) to other users... with Amazon taking a 12% service fee (similar to the cut Amazon takes on its physical goods marketplace). 

Reserved Instances are virtual server Read more...

As you might already know, Amazon is not a mere retailer any more-- not with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing segment making an estimated $1 billion with 7 major data centres in 3 continents. 

Now a profile on The New York Times gives some details on a few of the customers AWS serves with cloud-based computing power. These include climate analysis service Climate Corporation, data analysis start-up Cue, photo-sharing company Instagram and the MIT-Harvard global education program EdX

Apparently Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also wants to set Read more...