"Organizations that are adopting hybrid or multi-cloud should pay particular attention to how data is stored and accessed across different applications and infrastructures," writes GigaOm Analyst Enrico Signoretti in a just released GigaOm Market Landscape Report, "Multi-Cloud Object Storage and Data Mobility." The report looks at the challenges posed by multi-cloud storage and examines the tools needed to realize a winning multi-cloud storage strategy.

"Block, File and Object/Cloud. All of them have very peculiar characteristics which are important to understand all the challenges with data mobility and avoid potential lock-ins while providing the best options for users and applications," says Signoretti, naming the three best storage systems for a multi-cloud strategy. Signoretti also examines the maturity of categories, notes key considerations for using multi-cloud solutions and includes a vendor review.

"When it comes to multi-cloud, wherein a large number of applications and data are stored in different locations, there are several aspects that come into play, these include data security, data protection, data placement and compliance, performance and cost." – Enrico Signoretti

HYCU announced a new global reseller agreement with Lenovo. This agreement will provide Nutanix customers that purchase HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix with Lenovo offerings directly from Lenovo and its resellers in a single transaction. HYCU’s integration with Lenovo solutions provides a compelling and cost-attractive data protection solution that delivers IT simplicity and multi-cloud management for the Nutanix-led data center.

"For today’s modern data center, IT organizations look for easy to deploy and use data protection solutions that maintain a great user experience. Our agreement with HYCU reinforces our customer-first approach and helps us deliver high value solutions to our customers," said John Majeski, who leads the Software and Solutions business at Lenovo Data Center Group. "Our experience shows that our customers want IT simplicity while gaining maximum value from their infrastructure solutions. HYCU’s solutions deliver both IT simplicity and multi-cloud data protection and when combined with Lenovo solutions, and Nutanix, accelerate the move to the multi-cloud data center while maximizing cost."

With HYCU, Lenovo customers gain the industry’s first and only purpose-built data protection and back-up software solution for Nutanix IT environments by using HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix’s easy to deploy and manage software solution.

Are you forced to replace your hardware? Are you thinking about different deployment models for your IT infrastructure, e.g. hyperconvergence?

Well, any change to your IT infrastructure is a major challenge, and typically requires complex data migrations, resulting in service downtime, overtime and more money to spend – but are the results worth it?

Before you start your next project, think about an alternative approach to rip-and replace, like software-defined storage. You may ask yourself, why should that help me? And there are many good reasons, but an essential one are the unrivaled chained migration options.

If you’re wondering what these benefits can mean to you, just join this brief webinar with DataCore Software, which also includes a live demo and audience Q&A so you can see how simple it is to bring software-defined storage into your IT environment and leverage chained migration. Among others, you’ll be able to discover:

• How to integrate software-defined storage into your environment
• How to migrate data between totally different types of storage
• How to change towards hyperconverged during regular business operations

WHEN?  December 12, 2018 @ 1PM ET

Join Alfons Michels, Sr. Product Marketing Manager & Alex Best, Dir. Technical Business Development – DataCore Software 

VMware, Inc., a leading innovator in enterprise software, today announced it has been positioned as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Unified Endpoint Management, Q4 2018, which evaluated 12 unified endpoint management (UEM) vendors. VMware’s intelligence-driven digital workspace platform, VMware Workspace ONE, achieved the highest possible score in the market presence category, as well as the product vision, commitment to innovation, and partner ecosystem criteria.

According to the Forrester Wave report, "Over the past year, VMware has invested heavily in helping customers embrace modern management for Windows 10 with its Workspace ONE product. The solution’s differentiated AirLift feature automates migration of SCCM collections, devices, and app packages to Workspace ONE. It excels in IAM, with features like single sign-on (SSO) to the Workspace ONE app and support for dozens of conditional access policies."

DC BLOX, a multi-tenant data center company offering robust connectivity and storage solutions for distributed IT in the Southeastern U.S., today announces the immediate availability of the DC BLOX Cloud Storage service. The service enables customers to reduce the cost, complexity and risk of off-site data backups with simple, predictable pricing and scalable remote data storage.

Widespread industry digitization is creating unprecedented growth in data, bringing numerous advantages but also significant costs for businesses. Related challenges commonly faced by businesses include the complexity of adding to storage infrastructure, and managing multiple copies of data for processing, analysis, backup, long-term archive and more. Businesses experiencing this rapid growth can now leverage DC BLOX’s reliable and local cloud storage to avoid capital outlay and proactively protect their critical data at a lower cost than comparable public cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure storage options.

CloudJumper, a leading provider of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Workspace as a Service (WaaS) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solutions, today announced that its Cloud Workspace Management Suite (CWMS) software is now available to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS brings together VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software and elastic, bare-metal infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give organizations consistent operating model and application mobility for private and public clouds.

CloudJumper CWMS software is a complete cloud-based platform for Desktop as a Service (DaaS), Workspace as a Service (WaaS), and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) delivery, providing ease of management and access to the productivity tools needed to run businesses in the cloud. CWMS delivers an integrated online experience that unifies business applications and corporate file systems using a full-featured Microsoft Windows desktop from anywhere, across any device. IT administrators retain complete control, security and auditability of their IT infrastructure for compliance through an intuitive browser-based management system that reduces support costs, increases service quality and improves responsiveness.

Portworx, the cloud-native storage company modern enterprises trust to manage data in containers, today announced the availability of PX-Enterprise 2.0, the most significant new release to-date of its comprehensive cloud native storage and data management solution for running stateful containers in production. The two most significant updates are PX-Motion and PX-Central. PX-Motion allows Kubernetes users to migrate application data and Kubernetes pod configurations between clusters enabling cloud migration, backup & recovery, blue-green deployments and more. PX-Central enables enterprises to manage their Kubernetes application data with embedded monitoring and metrics directly from the Portworx dashboard. Together these updates empower enterprises to overcome the biggest barriers to hybrid- and multi-cloud adoption, as well as manage and protect containerized applications, including their mission critical data, from a single platform.

According to findings from Portworx’s 2018 Annual Container Adoption Survey, also published today, one-third of respondents report running containers in more than one cloud, with 23 percent running in two clouds and 13 percent running in three clouds. However, data management and multi-cloud operations are leading barriers to enterprise container adoption with 39 percent of respondents citing data management as one of their top 3 barriers to container adoption, and 34 percent citing multi-cloud and cross-data center management as a top barrier. As enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, they must be able to move their application data across clouds safely and securely without negatively affecting operations. Portworx integrates with more container platforms than any other solution, including Kubernetes services running on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Pivotal as well as Red Hat OpenShift, Mesosphere DC/OS, Heptio and Rancher. PX-Enterprise 2.0 fulfills the promise of containers and multi-cloud adoption by solving data portability across all major enterprise container platforms and arming enterprises with tools that allow them to visualize the state of their Kubernetes applications’ data.

Teradici, the creator of industry-leading PCoIP technology and Cloud Access Software, today announced expanded support for multicloud environments. Users of Teradici Cloud Access Software can now manage virtual machines deployed from public clouds, private data centers or any combination of the two via a newly updated Cloud Access Manager. With the introduction of multicloud entitlements, companies can now create and manage these virtual environments on AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure or via their on-premise infrastructure, benefiting from the flexibility and agility that a multicloud strategy enables.

"Teradici is committed to supporting our customers and their multicloud strategy. Expanding the capabilities of Cloud Access Software provides more flexibility and simplifies how businesses can securely deliver high-performance virtual workstations across their entire organization," said David Smith, CEO of Teradici. "Our technology enables enterprise organizations the flexibility to easily and quickly scale their cloud deployments up or down using a mix of private and public clouds."

"With the multicloud capabilities of Cloud Access Software, we can connect staff and freelance artists to virtual desktops in our in-studio private cloud or to high performance work environments hosted in the public cloud," said Jeremy Smith, CTO, Jellyfish Pictures. "We have the flexibility and agility to scale our IT infrastructure, via private or public clouds, based on project requirements."

ZeroStack, creators of a self-driving cloud that lets users focus on their businesses, today announced that administrators of its Self-Driving Cloud platform can provide single-click deployment of GPU resources and deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet, taking care of all the OS and CUDA library dependencies so users can focus on AI development. Furthermore, users can enable GPU acceleration with dedicated access to multiple GPU resources for an order-of-magnitude faster inference latency and user responsiveness. GPUs within hosts can be shared across users in a multi-tenant manner.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning products and solutions are quickly becoming commonplace and are shaping our experiences in computing like no other time in history, and AI applications and solutions are now more viable than ever with the availability of modern machine learning and deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe, etc., along with access to GPUs that are built specifically to perform parallel operations on large amounts of data. However, one significant challenge remains: deploying, configuring, and executing these complex tools and managing their interdependencies and versioning and compatibility with servers and GPUs.

Article Written by Avery Phillips
 

When it comes to moving IT management to the cloud, there is no one size-fits-all strategy. In fact, patience and research are essential to making sure that a company finds the solution that is right for them. It takes time to align resources, build capacity, and engage vendors to make sure everyone is on the same page. 

Cloud solutions range from hybrid solutions, in which some information is stored locally and the rest on the cloud, to the choices between private and public cloud services. No matter which way a company chooses to go, though, there are some clear benefits of moving IT management to the cloud. 

Using a trusted IT management software can eliminate some of the problems and concerns many businesses have and make the process of moving to the cloud a much simpler one. When it comes right down to it though, what are the advantages of moving your IT to the cloud?