Whamcloud, the startup created in July 2010 to continue development of the open source Lustre supercomputer file system, has secured a $2.1m contract from OpenSFS to spruce it up with new features and functions.Lustre – used on about 60 per cent of the largest supercomputers in the world – is a parallel clustered file system designed for both supporting petabytes of files and giving high-speed access to the data stored on the file system. Lustre was created by Peter Braam when he was a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and was commercialized when he created Clus...

Nimbula – the build-your-own-cloud outfit founded by Amazon's former vice president of engineering – has announced a new release of its Director platform, saying it will allow businesses to run a unified "infrastructure cloud" across geographically separate data centers.In short, this means that those using such a cloud can log into a single console to tap computing resources served up from disparate physical locations. Nimbula says that Director is the first "cloud OS" to span geographies in this way.Reza Malekzadeh, Nimbula vice president of marketing, tells The Register that D...

Computerworld - At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they wi...