Standards set for open cloud

The Distributed Management Task Force has introduced the 'Open Cloud Standards Incubator' to develop specifications that define how companies transfer applications and data between cloud environments - whether the clouds are located at one of the company's data centres or not, reports The H online.

In cloud computing, the main focus for system performance, for the provision of applications and for data storage is not on clients, but on servers, which are organised in grids and large, distributed server farms.

A central aspect of the cloud resource management approach, which is to be developed by the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, is the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF). OVF describes an open, secure, portable and extensible format for packaging and distributing software to be run in virtual machines.

Fujitsu has said it will build a new information technology platform to broaden the range of its virtual server farm and other cloud-computing-related services, according to Trading Markets.

As a part of the plan, the company will construct a new building at its data centre in Tatebayashi, Gunma Prefecture, and introduce 1 000 more servers there by October.

The new building and additional servers will form a key part of the company's cloud computing platform, which will serve a number of client businesses. The trusted service platform will be used to offer a virtual server farm service that will lease out hundreds of thousands of virtual servers to businesses for a monthly fee.

Genome sequencing instruments have gotten so much faster and cheaper over the years that they have created a new problem for scientists-digging through mountains of data on DNA, and maintaining these stores of data, states Xconomy.

So Carlsbad, California-based Life Technologies and its Applied Biosystems division have formed a partnership with Seattle-based Geospiza to help researchers store that information on someone else's servers and get access to it anywhere via the Internet.

Financial terms of the deal aren't being disclosed. But this is the first time a leading gene sequencing company has agreed to offer the whole package of the sequencing instrument, the consumable chemicals needed to run experiments, and the software needed to sort through and make sense of the data, says Geospiza president Rob Arnold. It's also the first time a major sequencing company has taken the leap into cloud computing.