Author Archives: George Leopold

George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

Microsoft Fattens Up Azure Compute To Compete

October 23rd, 2014 Comments Off

Microsoft's entry this week into the converged cloud infrastructure market was accompanied by the roll out of a new series of virtual machines for the Azure cloud. In laying out the latest refinement of its cloud strategy, the company ...

EMC Takes Over VCE Converged Systems Biz

October 22nd, 2014 Comments Off

EMC and Cisco Systems have decided that their VCE joint venture for converged infrastructure would become a business unit of the storage company by the end of the year. The partners said the EMC's "controlling interest" in VCE is ...

Private Azure Clouds Come To Dell Hardware

October 21st, 2014 Comments Off

Signaling its shift to a "converged infrastructure" model, Microsoft announced a series of moves this week designed to flesh out its Azure cloud offering, including a preconfigured cloud appliance that combines Windows Server and other Microsoft software with storage ...

OpenStack Investors Place Big Bet On Mirantis

October 20th, 2014 (1)

Investors continue to pour cash into the burgeoning open source ecosystem. Mirantis, which bills itself as one of the few pure-play OpenStack software vendors, announced a whopping $100 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. The ...

Lower Electric Bills, Higher Morale At Datacenters

October 17th, 2014 Comments Off

Everybody likes a good deal, but here's a marketing pitch we hadn't heard before: Increasing energy efficiency in datacenters also improves "company morale." That's one of the arguments made in a recent case study released by a company that ...

Windows Server To Get Docker App Containers

October 15th, 2014 Comments Off

Microsoft is jumping on the Docker container bandwagon. The company is expanding its partnership with Docker, the company, to give it access to emerging application container technologies that will be delivered in a future release of Windows Server. The ...

Debate Heats Up Over Datacenter As Energy Hog

October 15th, 2014 (2)

A healthy debate is gathering steam over how cloud providers will find new ways to power datacenters that are sure to demand more energy as computing and storage requirements soar with enterprise adoption of clouds and the emerging Internet ...

EMC Buys Spot On OpenStack Bandwagon With Cloudscaling Deal

October 14th, 2014 Comments Off

EMC has confirmed reports earlier this week that it is acquiring OpenStack distributor Cloudscaling as the storage leader tilts further toward the open source cloud controller as a way to expand support for it public cloud services. "To further ...

Breaking The Storage Bottleneck In The Datacenter

October 13th, 2014 (1)

As more applications are virtualized, storage is said to be emerging as a bottleneck in datacenter performance. These performance issues mean many applications cannot take full advantage of the benefits of virtual machines, according to an industry survey. The ...

The Myth Of The Green Datacenter

October 10th, 2014 (2)

Here's the reality when it comes to datacenter energy consumption: If the cloud industry were a country, according to a recent study, it would be the fifth largest energy consumer in the world. The survey of datacenter energy consumption ...