ReadWriteCloud

Citrix announced today that the latest beta of XenServer, v6 is now available for a free download. Citrix has made Xen simpler (please, we're resisting the jokes), trimming down the management infrastructure required to run advanced features such as StorageLink and Site Recovery. Xen's Workload Balancing feature is also available as a turnkey virtual appliance, making that easier to install and manage.

Last Friday, just before a holiday weekend in the U.S., Dropbox made a change to its Terms of Service. Part of the updated ToS gives Dropbox a license to use your data in ways critics believe can be interpreted too broadly. The line in question read: "You grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service."

Despite being a holiday weekend announcement, news of the ToS change spread rapidly and Dropbox quickly updated it yet again to read: "You grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent reasonably necessary for the Service. This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services."

But even this wording could still be cause for concern.

Today SnapLogic announced several new features for its hosted cloud integrations service. It's adding new "snaps" that will easily allow users to integrate a Apache CouchDB database or any JSON data source with other SnapLogic supporting applications such as Box, Netsuite or Salesforce.com.

SnapLogic is also adding in-memory optimization of data transformations and a new set of data quality tools, including:

Remember last week when we mentioned that Clojure may be the new hot programming language of the moment? That idea just got a bit more support today as Heroku announced support for Clojure. Clojure joins Ruby and more recently Node.js on Heroku's platform-as-a-service.

Clojure is a dialect of Lisp and runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It was created to give Lisp programmers a modern environment for development. It's a general purpose programming language but it's selling point is functional programming. According to the Heroku blog post, "Clojure covers a new use case on the Heroku platform: components which demand correctness, performance, composability; and optionally, access to the Java ecosystem."

Last week we asked you, prompted by RedMonk analyst Michael Coté's question, whether you were were adopting or wanted to adopt a platform-as-a-service. The majority of you are either already using one or more or are planning to start.

But according to the data Coté has assembled, PaaS isn't a home run success quite yet.

What are key considerations for protecting data as it moves between private and public clouds?

That's the question this month for our MacBook Air contest. Best comment on this post wins. You'll need a Disqus account to participate. The question raises all kinds of potential conversations, ranging from the type of server security to remote access and encryption considerations. So, let's hear it!

We'll review the comments and pick a winner at the end of the month. Independent analyst Dan Kusnetzky is our co-judge this month. Thanks to Tom Raftery for his help in the June contest.

Microsoft has admitted that it will hand over data to the U.S. government, if properly requested, even if that data is stored somewhere other than the U.S.

The issue, according to ZDNet's Zack Whittaker, is that because Microsoft is a U.S. company it has to comply with the Patriot Act, and that means handing over data that may be offshore. The same rules would apply to Amazon Web Services and any other U.S. based cloud provider that has servers overseas.

When I got my first smartphone, the original black and white Danger Sidekick, the data plan cost me something like $40 a month for unlimited data plus something like 200 anytime minutes. These days an unlimited data plan will cost you more like $30 a month, not including voice minutes. But the original Sidekick couldn't play music or movies. You couldn't download additional apps (the app catalog came along in later models). All you could do was browse the Web with its scaled down browser, use AOL Instant Messenger and e-mail. I suppose it was easy to offer an "unlimited" data plan, when it was hard to actually download much.

But the days of unlimited data are going away. AT&T; already dropped its unlimited plan for new users, and Verizon is about to do the same. We've written before about the mobile data bottleneck, which is only going to get worse as more smart phones and tablets get online.

In an article at Enterprise Efficiency Andrew Froehlich, makes the case that cloud providers should also become Internet providers. Specifically, he suggests Apple and Google get into the ISP business.

Amazon announced that effective this Friday, they will no longer charge for data transfers into your cloud environments at Amazon's Web Services. (It was ten cents per GB.) Previously and still effective, the first gigabyte of data transferred out are also free. It is indicative of AWS that their price chart now goes to petabytes. Prices have been reduced about ten percent of what they were previously. Pricing for data transfer between Amazon hosting regions remains unchanged.

Just last Tuesday Oracle acquired CMS company FatWire and data quality software vendor Datanomic.

Today Oracle bought Pillar Data, a SAN storage company majority owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.