Five-year-old Fusion-IO, the Utah solid-state storage start-up that hired Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak two years ago as its chief scientist, has filed to IPO on the New York Stock Exchange as FIO. The yet-to-turn-solvent outfit will be looking to raise at least $150 million for an unknown percentage. Partners and customers of the fast, energy-efficient data access widgetry include IBM, Dell, HP, Supermicro and Facebook. It's into the venture capitalists, including Michael Dell, Andreessen Horowitz and Samsung (the world's biggest flash memory chip supplier), for $111.5 million. It's using Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse. The start-up cleared $36 million in revenue last year and lost $31.5 million despite a 59% gross margin leaving about $42 million in the kitty. ... (more)

How to Make Public and Private Clouds Secure

With Gartner predicting $150 billion in cloud-related revenues by 2013, the march towards "the cloud" is not abating. As the market grows, "Is the cloud secure?" is a very familiar refrain frequently asked by corporate management. While those in IT will certainly tell you no environment will be completely secure, there are measures you can take when moving to the cloud to mitigate security risks to reasonable levels. Transitioning to the cloud can often be more secure than a traditional in-house solution. Cloud providers have collectively invested billions in implementing standar... (more)

IBM Moving $38m Cloud Computing Center into Singapore

IBM said Monday that it was going to put $38 million into a new Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Center in Singapore, adding to its centers in Germany, Canada and the United States and its 13 global cloud labs, seven of which are in Asia-Pac in China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. The new Singapore facility is scheduled to launch in April offering the company's infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud portfolio to start along with IBM and third-party software. IBM said the addition reflected demand for both public and private clouds. IDC figures the Asia... (more)

Standardized Cloud APIs? Yes

Mike Fratto over at InformationWeek has a blog that declares the need for standards in Cloud Management APIs is non-existent or at least premature. Now Mike is a smart guy and has enough experience to have a clue what he’s writing about, unlike many cloud pundits out there, but like all smart people I like to read information from, I reserve the right to completely disagree. And in this case I am going to have to. He’s right that Cloud Management is immature, and he’s right that it is not a simple topic. Neither was the conquering of standardized APIs for graphical monitors back... (more)

Minutes from the Boston Chapter of the CSA's First Board Meeting

After many scheduling challenges, we had our first CSA Boston Chapter Board Meeting. The "Board" consists of me (Vordel), Prateek Mishra (Oracle),Matthew Gardiner (CA), and Kevin Fox (Cisco). A really good session for planning out the year. Here's the basic thinking: - Divide the CSA guidance into 4 units and have 1 meeting focused around each unit - The events will be about 2 hours - 1 hour on high-level information contained in the CSA guidance and 1 hour on a lower level details of someone who is actually living/implementing the scenario - We'll rotate the location among CA, Or... (more)