Citrix Virtualization Offers Big Savings in Academic Computing

Citrix Systems announced that Montgomery Independent School District (ISD), located north of Houston, Texas, has implemented a multi-phased program to modernize and virtualize their academic computing systems using Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenServer. The first phase of Montgomery ISD's implementation utilized XenServer to virtualize and consolidate their servers in a central datacenter; phase two, now under way, expands that deployment to standardize on desktop virtualization district-wide with XenDesktop. The school district has already realized significant savings in time, energy, money and personnel resources, and expects to expand these savings further in the future.

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Amazon invites bidding wars in the EC2 cloud

Amazon may have made a name for itself as an online retailer and pioneer in e-book sales, but the company has also attracted a following for the cloud computing services it offers. The company has to maintain a large server footprint to handle things like the holiday gift rush, and at least some of that undoubtedly goes idle during slower times, so the company uses its excess capacity to offer users access to virtual hardware and storage that's cheap and can be scaled rapidly. Now, the company is adding an additional degree of flexibility that should increase the appeal on the "cheap" side of that equation: spot pricing for compute capacity.

The idea behind the EC2 service is pretty simple: users can create a customized operating system image—the company supports Windows, Solaris, and various Linux distributions—and then pay to run virtually on hardware at one of three Amazon data centers. Users can pay more to get more memory, more cores, and the like. If demand increases suddenly, it's possible to simply throw more instances at the problem, which enables users to rapidly scale without maintaining idle hardware during the times it's not needed.

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OpSource + Mezeo = Secure Cloud Storage

https://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1222950

Mezeo Software today announced that OpSource Cloud will offer the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform, enabling OpSource Cloud users to enjoy online sign-up and immediate provisioning of cloud storage service, speeding enterprises' cloud deployment and offering flexible, secure storage options to help ISVs differentiate themselves. The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform will be available to OpSource Cloud users in the first quarter of 2010.
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What Lies Beneath – Technologies Critical to Successful Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing and its ability to process the needs of multiple users with shared resources in a dynamic and transparent fashion doesn't happen by chance. The underlying technologies and their ability to provide elasticity, scalability, and automation, while protecting data in motion, data at rest and data in process are critical to a successful Cloud Computing implementation.

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CloudShare Comes Out of Stealth

CloudShare, formerly IT Structures, has come out of stealth today with marquee customers and a proven cloud-based technology platform for sales engineers and trainers. CloudShare customers have already delivered over one million VM demo, PoC (proof of concept) and training hours to date, representing over six quarters of consecutive double-digit usage growth for CloudShare.

This early success demonstrates the practical, revenue-oriented, immediately useful nature of the CloudShare platform. CloudShare's platform gives solution providers and ISVs selling software or appliances a simple way to deploy multiple, independent copies of their existing fully built hands-on demo or training environment in the cloud, in minutes versus the days or weeks typically associated with on-site delivery of such enterprise-class systems.