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Amazon and Microsoft are battling it out over a $10 billion opportunity to build the U.S. military its first “war cloud” computing system. But Amazon’s early hopes of a shock-and-awe victory may be slipping away. Formally called the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure plan, or JEDI, the military’s computing project would store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the Pentagon to use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities. The Defense Department hopes to award the winner-take-all contract as soon as August. Oracle and IBM were eliminated at an earlier round of the contract competition.

For the first time, the Defense Department will begin moving classified data and applications to Amazon Web Services’ Secret Region—the same cloud environment developed for the CIA and intelligence community several years ago. The Defense Department’s sole-source decision—a contract awarded without a full and open competition—was protested by Microsoft, which itself offers a variety of cloud services to the federal government.

“The privacy of emails, photos stored in the cloud, even heart rate history from a smartwatch could be at stake, according to civil libertarians, as the Supreme Court takes up a potential blockbuster case after Thanksgiving. When they return to the bench after the holiday, the justices will weigh whether the history of cell phone locations stored by a phone service provider is searchable without a warrant. The case, Carpenter v. U.S., centers on Timothy Carpenter, who argues the government violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure when it obtained his cell phone location records from MetroPCS...

Another polar vortex may or may not be on its way, but winter means heat bills no matter what. Unless, of course, you get your heat for free from a cabinet full of servers that's sitting in your living room. If you live in Germany, it’s possible! Cloud&Heat is a cloud infrastructure company that has started distributing its servers to people who want to store them in exchange for free heat in their homes or offices. Since servers generate so much excess heat and cloud companies have to spend a lot to cool them, the idea to repurpose the waste...

Andrew Feldman, CEO of AMD’s SeaMicro, made a presentation that announced the company’s Data Center Computer Platform this afternoon in San Francisco. The SM15000 Server Platform is optimized for big data and the cloud. The company claims that they have been able to reduce power dissipation by half and have been able to supply Storage Area Network functionality at Direct Attach Storage pricing through coupling data storage through a "Freedom Fabric" switch. ********************************************************************************Now what is all of this about?Well listen to this Youtube of Mr. Feldman discussing the coming Gigantic load on Data Centers and the Major Changes in...

VMworld 2012 It is not as much fun to be in the server part of Advanced Micro Devices these days, with Intel surging in the server racket and expanding out to switching and storage with its Xeon processors and Intel more or less counting the substantial innovations that AMD's engineers crafted for the Opterons a decade ago. The good news if you like a good fight is that there is a whole new management and engineering team at AMD now, and they not only understand that AMD has to do some serious innovating, but they are itching for the fight....

Network specialist also highlights the potential of the cloudBARCELONA (MarketWatch) — Telecom-networks giant Ericsson AB on Monday presented its vision for a ‘networked society’ that will make much broader use of cloud services and said it expects sales of fourth-generation Long Term Evolution equipment to account for a significant part of business in 2012. Speaking at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday, Ericsson Chief Executive Hans Vestberg said that over the next 10 to 20 years many more devices that are part of our daily lives such as televisions, appliances and cars, would get on the network and be able...

If you own a T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick smartphone I don’t have to tell you this. But if you are among the millions who don’t: on October 1st literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – emails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. — they had stored on the system. Initially, it was believed that information was now lost forever. The official statement from Microsoft/Danger (the latter being the company that builds the Sidekick) and T-Mobile is that the data “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.”