In this article, we will update you with latest news and developments in the Cloud Computing world. Lets take a look at the major happenings in the Cloud Computing world in the past week.

IBM SmartCloud Adds Resilience Disaster Recovery, Archiving

The IBM SmartCloud managed services platform recently added IBM SmartCloud Resilience service, a disaster recovery and archiving offering which would boost data protection in a faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner. SmartCloud Resilience includes two separate services described as below :

• IBM SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery - increases the reliability and efficiency of recovery to help practically eliminate business downtime, and minimize data loss if any outage happens.
• IBM SmartCloud Archive - enables clients to deal with structured and unstructured data. The service will let the users to have control on their data storage and include search and indexing, and document/record management systems.

IBM SmartCloud Resilience will be available July 19, 2011. IBM is promoting SmartCloud Resilience as a complement to its existing two-year-old SmartCloud Managed Backup offering, which is available for private and public cloud deployments.

Cloud Storage : Box.net integrates with Google Docs

Box.net announced new integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets SaaS productivity tools which combines online, cross-platform storage of Box.net with the Web-based productivity applications of Google Docs. This move can be seen as a challenge to rival Microsoft Office 365.

In a box blog post, CEO Aaron Levie says that Box's 6 million users can easily create and collaborate on Google Docs and Spreadsheets from within Box, as well as edit the existing 50M+ Word and Excel files already stored on our platform. The blog also boasts the power and functionality of Google Docs over Microsoft's Office 365. Microsoft lags the Box.net and Google Docs alliance in cross-platform functionality.

SITA and Orange Business Services join to build Global Cloud

SITA, the air transport industry IT specialist, and Orange Business Services, the leading global integrated communications service provider for businesses of France Telecom-Orange, have agreed to jointly build a global, high performance, managed cloud computing infrastructure. The cloud service is intended to offer to clients with a greatly expanded international reach added with reliability and minimum latency.

The cloud computing infrastructure will include six seamlessly interconnected Tier III+ and Tier IV data centers in five continents, in Atlanta, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sydney. Each data center will be interconnected via Orange’s high-speed MPLS ( Multiprotocol Label Switching) network. Customers will be able to take advantage of IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) – sometimes better known as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The data centers of Atlanta, Frankfurt and Singapore will be fully operational in the first quarter of 2012 and all six data centers will be live by third quarter of 2012.

Microsoft BPOs hit with yet another Cloud-Email outage

In a few days Office 365 suite is going to be launched. On 23rd June, some of the companies in North America that pay for Microsoft BPOS got hit with extensive email outages. However, the outage lasted only for 3 hours but left the users frustrated. Customers reported problems logging into and connecting to the hosted service – Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Microsoft said that the problem was caused by some network hardware failure.

The BPO failure is not first of its kind issue, it happened for the fourth time in last two months. This has raised questions on the reliability of the service. The customers are very much waiting for release of Office 365 suite which assures the stability factor.

HP Releases Networking Solutions

HP announced release of new solutions and technology along with an expanded entrepreneur program to enable small and midsize businesses (SMBs) aimed at driving growth, bettering employee capabilities, and protecting business assets.

SMBs face many problems including employee productivity management, cost control, and gaining access to credit. HP's new solutions are intended to solve such recurring problems. The products provide following features -

• support of basic office applications such as web messaging, small databases control, file and print,and some other vertical applications.
  
• entry-level rack-optimized server which runs a wider range of dedicated applications, including IT infrastructure applications, web, messaging, file and print operations, small internet applications, and shared web access.
  
• include storage support, allows SMB clients to get enterprise-class performance.