Cloud News: VCE, Joyent, Arista, QTS

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

VCE Vblock foundation of NASA initiative.  Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) announced  that NASA has implemented Vblock Infrastructure Platforms from VCE as the foundation of its new backup and recovery solution for its NASA Enterprise Application Competency Center (NEACC) of which SAP is the flagship application in this environment. NASA's legacy "tape and truck" method will be transformed into a VCE converged infrastructure technology and is designed to save NASA significant time and money while ensuring business critical information remains available whenever it is needed. Using EMC Recover Point and VMware Site Recovery Manager software NASA data is replicated and mirrored online.  A push-button failover allows them to switch from primary to the disaster recovery location with the entire environment never more than a few minutes out of sync. Also, because the virtualized solution can be managed remotely, NASA can reduce its recovery time of crucial data from days to hours.

Joyent, MiTAC and Arista announce Taiwan Cloud.  Joyent and MiTAC Information Technology Corp. (MiTAC), a worldwide systems integrator, today launched MiCloud, Taiwan’s first true public cloud service and a cloud solution bundle for enterprises and service providers.  The single rack solution bundles Joyent's SmartDataCenter software, MiTAC's system integration and TYAN servers, and the network operating system from Arista Networks EOS. The Arista Cloud Networking switches connect the TYAN servers and Joyent SmartDataCenter together enabling dynamic network provisioning, 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, ultra-low latency for the most demanding applications. “Since announcing our strategic alliance with Joyent this past April, we’ve seen a strong interest among Taiwanese service providers and end users in offering and using public cloud services,” said Simon Chiang, President of MiTAC. “This initiative meets the needs of enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses and service providers who want to save on infrastructure cost while enjoying high performance and power savings using the services MiCloud will provide.”

QTS achieves PCI certifications.   QTS (Quality Technology Services) announced that its cloud-based QVI environment has been approved and registered as PCI (Payment Card Industry) Data Security Standard 1.2 Level 1 certified compliant. The PCI compliance applies to all five QTS data centers where the QVI environment is hosted. The QVI (Quality Virtualized Infrastructure) environment is hosted in Atlanta; Suwanee, Ga.; Jersey City; Miami and Santa Clara 1 data centers.  "Our customers in the payment card and financial services sectors not only benefit from QTS' safe and secure payment processing environment, but can leverage our PCI compliance to save on assessment costs. Certainly, this certification augments QTS' unique portfolio of core data center services," said Kurt Stoever, vice president of service support at QTS.

Deutsche Telekom pushes for German Cloud.  Bloomberg reports that Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE)'s T-Systems unit is pushing regulators to introduce a certificate for German or European cloud operators to help companies guard data from the U.S. government. DTE asserts that they and other telecommunications companies are promoting safe cloud computing offerings and lure customers by shielding clients from government access such as that allowed by the Patriot Act.  In the European Union, Commissioner Neelie Kroes, responsible for the region’s Digital Agenda, has asked providers and users of cloud computing to participate in talks about data protection and privacy as well as technical and commercial standards. “The Americans say that no matter what happens I’ll release the data to the government if I’m forced to do so, from anywhere in the world,’” said DTE division CEO Reinhard Clemens. “Certain German companies don’t want others to access their systems. That’s why we’re well-positioned if we can say we’re a European provider in a European legal sphere and no American can get to them.”