Cisco moves to open cloud

The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011, writes IT Management.

One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco, which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments. At this stage of cloud development and deployment, standards are still emerging, which is where open source software may be able to help, the report states.

"We are interested in working a lot more with different open source communities as that's where a lot of the cloud activity is happening," Lew Tucker, Cisco CTO for Cloud Computing told InternetNews.com. "Open source is contributing a lot of technology to the cloud computing arena today."

An open source project by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has gained the support of the Apache Software Foundation as a top-level project, says Government Computer News.

Object-orientated data technology is a data-sharing architecture Nasa developed to use metadata to seek out disparate and geographically dispersed data sources for access by any user. It was developed for that purpose in 1998 and has evolved in the past 12 years to accommodate data sharing among several Nasa Earth science projects, including the Npoess Preparatory Project, a joint effort by Nasa, the US Defence Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Soil Moisture Active and Passive test bed.

"Each database is broken into a different data type," says Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab. "The system collects data with different technology and turns it into an online entry point that allows people to search across datasets."

The open source NES emulator, called SharpNES, has been ported to Windows Phone 7 by Matt Bettcher, who says it only took a couple of hours and still needs work to optimise it for the platform, states Geek.com.

However, it may never make it on to the shiny new Windows phone as Microsoft has already said it will never get on Marketplace, the report says. Even though Bettcherwill makes it available for free, Microsoft has told him to forget it.

Bettcher's only hope is to drum up support for the emulator and get Microsoft to change its mind. He is urging prospective users to support the project by visiting the YouTube channel and up-voting the video.