Cloud brings hope to elderly

For aging societies, including South Korea's, cloud computing may play a pivotal role as the latest trend to change the daily lives of senior citizens and to secure more business opportunities, says the Korea Times.

Michael Thatcher, a regional technology officer at Microsoft Asia made this point in an interview with the Korea Times, adding that the nation will emerge as a leader in the promising cloud computing business thanks to its high broadband connectivity and unrivalled Internet literacy.

Cloud computing refers to Internet-enabled processing where shared resources, software and information are offered to computers on demand over the Web, instead of dedicated ones.

Riverbed Technology went live with its cloud computing strategy, including the debut of a cloud-ready version of its popular Steelhead WAN optimisation appliance, and a first-time entry into the cloud storage market with a product called Whitewater, reveals CRN.

With technology analysts all putting the cloud computing opportunity at between $40 billion and $70 billion by 2010, Riverbed said it makes sense to adapt WAN optimisation and acceleration tools to meet the demands of cloud infrastructure, particularly the hybrid on-premise and off-premises most enterprises are looking to adopt.

Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly called Cloud Steelhead and Whitewater the "Nirvana of data processing": speed and reliability across enterprise WANs as if they were LANs.

Microsoft has unveiled Hyper-V Cloud, a cloud computing solution for those interested in having their own private cloud, reports InfoQ.

Private clouds are cloud computing implementations with on-premises or off-premises dedicated computing, storage and networking resources. Microsoft has recently revealed the availability of such private clouds at TechEd Europe 2010.

Called Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud, the solution is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering combining Microsoft's software with hardware provided by six major vendors, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC, covering more than 80% of the world's server market, according to Microsoft.