Cloud News: Joyent, Nirvanix, DreamWorks, HP

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing sector:

Joyent announces Cloud Network for mobile-first markets. Joyent announced the launch of the Global Cloud Network (GCN), an alliance of Mobile Carriers who run their Mobile Clouds and IaaS on Joyent’s data center fabric. GCN is in response to mobile-first carriers in emerging markets that are facing unprecedented scaling challenges with billions of real-time, data-intensive, and latency-sensitive mobile transactions hitting their networks. With GCN Joyent hopes to bring together top global service providers unified under a common set of APIs, delivering the only industrial grade cloud that meets the new requirements of today’s applications worldwide. “With the shift to a device-based economy, it is critical that there is a standard in place for high performance cloud infrastructure on a global scale to support this next wave of mobile computing,” said Jason Goecke, president of Voxeo Labs. “It is encouraging to see innovative companies, like Joyent, pushing this standard forward to support what is becoming a largely mobile first economy.”

Nirvanix and Luminex announce cloud tape vaulting for Mainframes.  Mainframe Virtual Tape solution provider Luminex and Nirvanix  announced a cloud-based tape vaulting solution designed specifically for mainframe environments. Using CloudSAFE and Channel Gateway mainframe virtual tape solution from Luminex, customers can vault mainframe tape volumes in the globally dispersed Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network to eliminate the cost of physical tape media, shipping and off-site storage. Additionally storage and access to the vaulted copies of tape data is not restricted to local or regional off-site physical tape vaults. "Mainframe customers now have a new option for secure offsite storage of mission-critical data," said Scott Genereux, President and CEO, Nirvanix. "With LUMINEX CloudSAFE, they can gain the same economic benefits, including consumption-based pricing, of storing, securing and accessing data via the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network as our open and distributed systems users and truly implement an enterprise-wide cloud storage strategy." The new solution will be available for all mainframe customers during the fourth quarter of 2012 and supports z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, and S/390 operating systems.

DreamWorks integrates HP Cloud Services:  HP (HPQ) announced that DreamWorks Animation SKG is integrating HP Cloud Services with Panzura’s Global Cloud Storage System to create a foundation for a global collaboration infrastructure. This approach offers a robust, globally integrated environment for file sharing and project collaboration, enabling the DreamWorks Animation production teams across three studios using cloud-based data storage and DreamWorks' on-premises HP IBRIX  storage deployment. Derek Chan, head of Technology Global Operations for DreamWorks Animation, said this approach will enable it "to undertake ‘follow-the-sun’ content production through a robust, global network that ties together our distributed teams. In addition, the massively scalable low-cost tier of storage provides a platform for archiving reusable content in a central repository, while offering inherent data protection that eliminates the need for tape backup and stringent disaster-recovery planning.”