SDSC Cloud, Academic And Research Data Storage Service

SDSC, San Diego SuperComputer Center is joining the thousands of Cloud services providers that seem to spring up every night.
The SDSC Cloud is a bit different in the sense it is geared towards Academic and and research institutions. It is also said to be the largest cloud (Academic) with 5.5 Petabyte delivered at, very impressive 8-10 GB per second Read speeds.
If you fit the bill, (service is offered via an application process at the moment), you can have 100GB for equally impressive price of $3.25 a month.
The SDSC Cloud with initial 5.5PB aw storage (Capable of scaling further) is 10Gb Arista connected providing up to 8GB/s aggregate I/O. The cloud is OpenStack based with Rackspace and S3 APIs providing multitudes of connectivity options which could be used for;

HPC Compute data staging and Storage,
Backups, including SDSC Commvault back services
Application integration using supported APIs
Web Application and site hosting
Streaming Data services, images/videos
Data collections and published data sets

Get the press release (with more info on the cloud, connectivity, pricing and application information) at Geemodo;
SDSC Cloud, World;s Largest Academic And Research Data Storage Service From San Diego Supercomputer Center.

All Connected With Chromebook!

Chromebook Connectivity http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Chromebook is something to be considered among all these tablets and such. To me it is truly the cloud computing.

Want more information? Connect to Chromebook Site

DimDim Video Collaboration Software Company Acquired By Salesforce.com For $31 million

#DimDim #Salesforcehttp://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
We have known and followed DimDim for a long while now. From it's start at sourceforge.net, where the open source DimDim was hosted to time it became a 60,000 customer strong real-time communication company. But now the open source company has provided a way for founders and late comers to make an attractive exit.
Press Release;

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash, net of cash acquired.

Founded in 2007, Dimdim has created critical real-time communication technologies such as presence, messaging and screen sharing. With the acquisition, salesforce.com gains Dimdim's real-time communication technologies, along with a team of world-class developers experienced in building cloud-based collaboration services. Salesforce.com will use the acquisition to bring new real-time communication capabilities to the Chatter collaboration platform, mirroring the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.

Comments on the News

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world's most popular Internet site."

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said DD Ganguly, CEO, Dimdim. "Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn't have been otherwise possible."

Bringing the Proven Facebook Model to the Enterprise

Salesforce.com recognizes that a massive shift is under way in the industry, the shift to Cloud 2. The first phase of cloud computing was about leveraging technologies that were low cost, fast and easy to use. Cloud 2 represents the new generation of cloud computing -- one that is inherently social, mobile and real-time.

Facebook initiated this transition by training more than half a billion users worldwide on real time collaboration, including feeds and status updates. Today, Facebook has proven the value of integrated collaboration and communication, with services like presence and messaging, which helped fuel user adoption, making it the world's most popular Internet site.

Salesforce.com followed a similar path when it introduced the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform. Today, more than 60,000 customers have deployed Chatter since its release in June -- making it the company's most-popular product. Now with Dimdim, salesforce.com is following Facebook's lead once again. By offering an integrated collaboration and communication platform, the company believes it will drive greater Chatter adoption, increase customer loyalty and differentiate its entire product portfolio.

Financial Impact of the Dimdim Acquisition

* Q4 FY11: The acquisition is expected to have no material impact to salesforce.com's fiscal fourth quarter revenue. However, the company expects the acquisition to reduce non-GAAP EPS by approximately $0.01 in the quarter ending Jan. 31, 2011.

* FY12: The company currently expects no material revenue contribution from the acquisition during its fiscal 2012. The company currently projects the acquisition to reduce non-GAAP EPS by approximately $0.04 to $0.05 in the year ending Jan. 31, 2012.

Non-GAAP EPS estimates exclude the impact of the following non-cash items: stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangibles, and the tax consequences associated with these items. The financial impact of the acquisition on a GAAP-basis cannot be estimated until the allocation of the purchase price is made following the closing of the acquisition. Salesforce.com currently expects that the reduction of EPS in the quarter ending Jan. 31, 2011 and the year ending Jan. 31, 2012 will be significantly greater on a GAAP basis than a non-GAAP basis.

About Dimdim:

Dimdim was founded in 2007 by DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot, with a focus on developing enterprise applications on a cloud-based communications platform. Its current offerings allow users to host or attend live online meetings, demos and webinars using just a web browser. Dimdim's investors include Draper Richards and Index Ventures. Dimdim has offices in Lowell, Mass., and Hyderabad, India.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the trusted enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's Force.com platform and apps have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate. Salesforce.com's cloud offerings include:

• The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
• The Service Cloud, for customer service and support
• The Jigsaw Data Cloud, for ensuring data integrity and quality
• Salesforce Chatter, for social collaboration
• The Force.com platform, for custom application development
• Database.com, the world's first enterprise cloud database
• The AppExchange, the world's leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing apps

Salesforce.com offers the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of October 31, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 87,200 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements may not be currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Take Your Messaging To The Cloud And Save Money With Google Apps

I am a Google apps user and very happy at about the decision. Just the spam control of my email is worth the every penny, pennies are what we are spending at Google, compared to what we did when we hosted our own servers.
While we are small fish, Forester Research found that even big companies has similar seat cost;

Forrester Research, found that for a 15,000-person firm requiring archiving, the fully loaded cost of on-premise email was $25.18 per user per month compared to a cost of $8.47 for Google Apps.

There is more to moving your messaging to the cloud than the cost savings. Google Apps and cloud could help any size of company streamline the IT infrastructure and reduce maintenance and management efforts.

So Google Apps is providing a Webinar to educate you further on the Google Apps together with financial model walk through by an expert, customer experiences and an opportunity to get your questions answered. So mark your calendar, (mine is on my Google calendar!)
But you got to Register first.

Save Money with Cloud Computing and Google Apps
Thursday, October 8, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT


Official Google Enterprise Blog: Get your money's worth with cloud-based messaging

Cloud Computing For Mobile Phones

cloudclone
With mobile phones providing more and more capabilities for us not to be tied to a desk, the shear amount of data that is processed by the Mobile devices tend to affect the battery life and send us back to the desk much earlier than we wanted to.
If we could use our mobile phones as a terminal to a much more powerful computer on the net will reduce the power requirements on the phone and at the same time provide much better processing power. Just like the old days with main frames and dumb terminals, transformed to today with cloud computing and intelligent terminals. But where and how do we do that? The answer comes from two Intel Research Berkeley scientists Byung-Gon Chun and Petros Maniatis. They have been working on a project called CloneCloud, which is a cloud computing service that provide external processing power to mobile phones.
With high speed connections available for mobile communication, handing over of a phones processing to a more powerful clone in the cloud might save a lot of processing power on the phone allowing the battery to last much longer.
At the same time the clone will be able to extend the processing power of the phone. For an example, the researcher Chun created a facial recognition application. The application required 100 seconds to run on the phone, while the same task took just one second once offloaded to the cloud.
But it is not all rosy with clonecloud and there are many hurdles to overcome. Network latency and bandwidth limitations will affect the operations and as I mentioned, it will be not much more than a dumb terminal once in an area where there is no connectivity. But then again in a dead zone you will be doing very little work.
Sending Cell Phones into the Cloud (MIT Technology Review)

Tags: cloudclone, cloud computing, UC Berkeley, Intel, mobile communication