Janet, the UK not-for-profit education and research IT network provider, has signed up to pilot Dell’s vCloud infrastructure.

It is connecting its primary internal data center to the Dell Cloud, creating a hybrid environment.

Janet’s data center contains mostly Dell equipment, which means vCloud can seamlessly interoperate with the Janet private environment, according to Dell.

“The hybrid cloud means that internal IT staff can now transition virtualized workloads from the primary data center into the cloud and deliver new hosted services to staff,” Dell said.

“This supports collaborative working and enables greater flexibility in the delivery of new services.”

Google upgrades Cloud SQL and adds European access

Google is upgrading its Cloud SQL database – part of the Google cloud – allowing it to scale up alongside App Engine to help meet demand for faster access to more data.

Part of the upgrade includes access to its European data centers for premium users whereas previously users could only access Cloud SQL through data centers in the US.

It is increasing storage on Cloud SQL by ten times to 100GB, increasing the speed for read instances to 16GB RAM (a n increase of four times) and adding optional asynchronous replication for the write performance of a non-replicated database  and integration with Google Apps Script for faster and easier use of Cloud SQL.

Google is also offering a free six-month trial offer for testing Cloud SQL from June 1, 2013 with 0.5GB of storage.

Etisalat and Pacific controls team up for GCC cloud

Telecommunications provider Etisalat has partnered with Pacific Controls owned Pacific Controls Cloud Services to deliver an Infrastructure-as-a-Service Cloud platform for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region.

Pacific Controls Executive Chairman Dilip Rahulan said the offering represents the first such partnership between a managed service and engineering solutions provider and a telecommunications player.

“The core objective of our partnership is to provide high-quality, innovative cloud-based IT infrastructure services to enterprises in the region,” Rahulan said.

“Our cloud offerings will allow businesses to access a diverse array of applications and extend customers' IT capabilities with no capital cost, with significant enhancements to their flexibility, scalability and speed."

Hosted in a Tier III data center in the Dubai TechnoPark, the scalable services include on-demand IaaS, offer subscription-based payments, pooled computing resources and are offered in public, private or hybrid cloud set ups.

It will be provided over a high-speed backbone network provided by Etisalat at a reduced cost for cloud users.

Network disrupts cloud take-up in UK

UK-based Exponential-e said research it conducted shows poor network infrastructure is disrupting critical cloud services and slowing adoption in the market.

Responses showed that 23% of those questioned had experienced unplanned connectivity outages in the last year that lasted around 12 hours in total, and 27% of these respondents suffered even longer than one 12-hour service outage.

“A mere 16% had seen no unplanned outages in the last year,” Exponential-e said.

“The impact of downtime was also extremely severe: 58% of unplanned connectivity outages affected business workflow, with internal operations (72%), employee productivity (68%) and client services (47%) most badly affected, suggesting that repercussions from the failures were felt across multiple business areas.”

It said that more than half of the businesses using cloud in the UK are reliant on a public link to the Cloud, but 86% of users agree that high-speed, optimized network links can improve reliability.

Exponential-e is a network provider for the Cloud and surveyed 250 IT directors and managers across eight vertical sectors, 141 of which were small and medium-sized enterprises and 109 of which were companies with more than 1,000 employees.