Zenith grows, Techdata trains, Cumulogic beta, HTC acquire, Microsoft show off!

Hello all, It's that time of the week again so here are my pick from the Cloud-based news:

1. Zenith Infotech are seeing continued and significant growth in adoption of their cloud services. SmartStyle is a IaaS solution offering desktop and server virtualization and MirrorCloud is about business continuity and data restoration using the SmartCloud platform. Of interest is Zenith's choice of virtualization solution in that they have chosen to use Virtualbox a type 2, or hosted hypervisor instead of something like Hyper-V which sites directly on the hardware – know as a type-1 hypervisor. The benefits of using a type-2 solution are that pretty much any hardware can be used as there is no requirement for virtualization support (Intel VT-x or AMD-V). Personally I'm sceptical of the long term use of hosted hypervisors like VirtualBox, but the ability to export the VMs in OVT format means that migrating to a type 1 solution would be relatively painless. http://www.zenithinfotech.com/
2. Training VARs – Techdata have announced a TDCloud Academy solution for Microsoft, the "Microsoft Cloud Academy", to support resellers in gaining more Cloud business. Interestingly you have to align yourself with TechData as the distributor of choice with Microsoft to be eligible for this offering (I'm sure there is a reward back there for TD). This is the first designated and structured VAR training I've seen – info at http://techdata.com/content/tdcloud/support.aspx
3. Private PaaS – Cumulogic – built by former Sun folks – have released as beta their scalable cloud platform for running Java applications. The PaaS solution runs on top on cloud infrastructures including Cloud.com, Eucalyptus and VMWare and they team are working on compatibility with OpenStack too (no news on Hyper-V). Platform-as-a-Service gets less press than SaaS or IaaS at the moment, but it's future is strong I believe. This offering from Cumulogic demonstrates that others do to. http://cumulogic.com/
4. HTC – not a name I thought I'd be including but the mobile hardware manufacturer is extending it's reach with he purchase of Seattle-based Dashwire who build software for cross-platform content synchronization. This is a strategic move for HTC as it provides them with a set of patents independent from this held by the other phone system vendors, including Microsoft. It also adds to the value-add of the HTC platform for it's customers as the Dashwire services will be added to the HTSense.com portfolio. http://bit.ly/pDLFAa
5. Inside Microsoft's "Cloud" DCs – As we are all banging on about Office 365 at the moment I found it interesting to get – a little – background information on the Microsoft DCs and how they've evolved over the years. The Microsoft GFS team have some cool videos to see and they've got some nice reference points for us to use too! http://www.youtube.com/user/MSGFSTeam

Have a good one!