Host Net India

Google, Verizon, Intel, McAfee, Microsoft and Savvis are joining a voluntary program set up by the Cloud Security Alliance that provides public information about whether contributors comply with CSA-recommended cloud-security practices. By reading reports submitted to CSA's Security Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR), potential customers of participating providers can more readily assess whether products and services meet their security needs. LEARN: 8 ways to become a cloud security expert To encourage other participants, CSA is encouraging businesses to require that any cloud vendors they deal with to submit reports to CSA STAR. For example, eBay is requiring the submissions fr... [More]

Cloud computing, which amounts to be the industrialization of enterprise technology infrastructure, will bring a lot of advantages coupled with a lot of lost jobs. Few disagree that cloud computing will be disruptive to industries, enterprise technology and the way we conduct businesses. The disruption will extend to the workforce. In other words, humans will be virtualized just like servers are. The upshot from cloud computing is that companies will need fewer data centers. People run data centers. Those jobs are likely to simply disappear. Johan Jacobs and Ken Brant, two Gartner analysts, made the cloud computing-jobs connection last week at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. The present... [More]

  hanks to Google’s “significant improvement” to its ranking algorithm, you have just better than a third of a chance that your Google searches today are different than they would have been yesterday. According to the Official Google Blog entry, this ranking update is designed to help the Caffeineweb indexing system at the heart of the search engine intelligently decide when to display “fresher,” more recent results over those that might be months or years old. For example, results that are a year old aren’t very helpful when searching for recent or ongoing events like “Occupy Oakland” or “NBA Lockout.”... [More]

Google continues to secure its spot as one of the top (if not the top) provider for email and online collaboration software to the enterprise world. The latest customer set to sign up for Google Apps appears to be General Motors. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is close to inking a deal to provide its cloud-based suite of productivity apps to more than 100,000 GM employees. However, the WSJ also reported that Google must meet certain requirements before GM will ultimately deploy its software. Those requirements haven’t been specified publicly yet, nor has Google or GM announced anything officially just yet. Nevertheless, if this goes i... [More]

HP’s mutli-phase Project Moonshot looks to increase the density of datacenter servers while decreasing space and power requirements, with claims of systems that will use 83% less energy and occupy 63% less space on your datacenter floor. HP’s perspective is that with every computing device seeming to develop a web presence (their prediction is 5 to 8 billion devices by 2014) it will become very difficult for traditional web provider architectures to meet the demand. The enabling technology for this first phase of Project Moonshot is the Redstone development platform. Based on the Calxeda EnergyCore ARM Server-on-a-chip technology announced shortly before the HP announc... [More]

A “data center issue” caused a brief outage of the New York Times website on Thursday afternoon (EDT).The company's spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said, “It was a very minor thing,” about the outage that lasted about 15 minutes. “It was fixed very quickly.” She declined to provide any further details on exact cause of the incident.The outage affected people who were in the New York Times building in New York and people elsewhere, who were on the news website at the time of the outage.The company's tech team resolved the outage by switching application services to a back-up data center in Seattle. According to Murphy, the issue occurred in the Times' p... [More]

Even though its data center 140 miles south of the epicenter of the powerful earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan's northeast in March continued serving applications without interruptions, Microsoft shifted data and services from that facility to a data center in North America, following reports of the possibility of aftershocks, PCWorldreported.Adrienne Hall, general manager of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative, told PCWorld that the company feared effects of the aftershocks on the facility.“We decided based on the seismic reports that were coming in that suggested there may be follow-on earthquakes that we should proactively move the services out,” she sai... [More]

The euro crisis is beginning to have an effect on the data center, according to the Q2 data center viewpoint CB Richard Ellis has conducted for the European market. The finding defies the message given by a number of large colocation players in the industry, including Telecity in a recent DatacenterDynamics interview, which have recently said they are experiencing some of their best years yet as companies look to outsource data center operations to overcome financial constraints. CB Richard Ellis Executive Director Andrew Jay, however, said Q2 for 2011 is looking much grimmer than 2010. “Recent volatility in the global economy, particularly in the eurozone, has now... [More]

Some time ago I wrote a white paper entitled 'PUE is not the Holy Grail of data-centre efficiency'.  I had quite a few comments, mostly disbelieving, about the underlying claim that server idle power was high whilst utilisation was low - clearly overshadowing any marginal improvements in PUE that we might be striving for. Now I will share with those doubters some of the headline facts that need little further explanation: In the spec_power web-site you will find the majority of commercial servers in terms of Average Watts (when running the spec_power software routine), Idle Watts (when doing 'nothing') and ssj_ops/Watt (a measure of how many of the spec_power operations can be cr... [More]

Apple could launch a new movie service before the end of the year or in early 2012, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper says representatives from Apple have been meeting with studios to finalize deals that would allow users to buy movies through iTunes and then access them on any iOS-based device. Although the Los Angeles Times didn't cite iCloud specifically, the report says Apple plans to "put movies in the cloud." That sounds similar to the music, iBooks and document storage features of the newly launched service, so it makes sense that iCloud serves as the backbone for a movie service. It's unclear if movies and TV shows would be downloaded to devices -- as it's curre... [More]