Cloud Computing / Reviews

IT Central Station members weigh in on Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Dell Boomi AtomSphere, IBM App Connect, and SnapLogic

Acer's rugged Chromebook 11 N7 is a low-cost, touch-screen laptop that can handle being dropped, shaken and doused.

Midrange Chromebooks have never been so good. Here's a long-term, real-world comparison of this season's standouts: the Dell Chromebook 13 and the Toshiba Chromebook 2.

Where do you draw the line between a laptop and a tablet?

Chrome OS enthusiasts are always clamoring for high-quality hardware -- cloud-centric laptops with solid construction, snappy performance and stunning displays. But the vast majority of Chromebooks cater to the budget end of the market.

When you stop and think about it, it's kind of astonishing how far Chromebooks have come.

Cloud Foundry shines with broad application support and stellar ease of use, but OpenShift has the edge in management and automation

Cloud Foundry impresses with broad application support, streamlined deployment, and enterprise extras from Pivotal, though initial setup could be simpler

The scoop: Transporter Sync, by Connected Data, about $100 (plus cost of external storage drive)

Thin clients aren't very exciting, and for a reason: they're designed to allow remote access to servers, usually with a Citrix, Microsoft, or VMware client. The folks at Dell WYSE have spiced up the category by building a thin client on top of Android, and getting it down to a form factor only slightly larger than a USB memory stick.

Apple's online productivity suite is exceptionally polished and easy to use, but lacking in word processing and spreadsheet features

Word Online and Excel Online are surprisingly capable, but PowerPoint Online and Office document compatibility are still half-baked

Bigtable-inspired open source projects take different routes to the highly scalable, highly flexible, distributed, wide column data store

The latest release of Fedora, nicknamed "Heisenbug," is a step towards making Fedora a player in the mobile arena. Fedora 20 also includes more support for cloud, and this is also the first release that supports cheap, low-power ARM processors as a primary architecture, in addition to Intel and AMD chips.

A diverse set of real-world Java benchmarks shows that Google is fastest, Azure is slowest, and Amazon is priciest

Cloud-based back ends for mobile applications combine key services with varying degrees of complexity

Going beyond Office 365's native admin GUI, 365 Command provides powerful Exchange admin capabilities without the need to run PowerShell

Ubuntu is moving into the rarified class of operating systems that cover x86/x64 clients and servers, ARM-based tablets/smartphones, and commodity cloud instances. Meaning that it's taking on everybody from Microsoft to Red Hat to Apple and Google.

CloudVelocity and Ravello Systems march clones of in-house servers into the cloud for development, testing, and disaster recovery

Box trumps Dropbox, Egnyte, Citrix ShareFile, EMC Syncplicity, and OwnCloud with rich mix of file sync, file sharing, user management, deep reporting, and enterprise integration