Turbonomic announced a strategic extension of its Partner Program, designed from the ground-up for the top, global partners of Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The new Cloud Specialization offers partners a differentiated technology and approach to managing today’s workload diversity across multiple customer environments in a single platform, enabling partners to deliver the industry’s fastest and most accurate, AI-powered cloud assessment plans and optimization.

The new Specialty builds upon Turbonomic’s rapidly accelerating partnerships with Microsoft Azure and AWS (awarding Turbonomic with both AWS Cloud Migration and AWS Cloud Management Tools Competencies within a month of each other).

Partners who complete specialization gain access to dedicated technical resources to assist with first engagements, co-brandable customer campaigns and service delivery templates. Additionally, the enablement and training provide partners with the technical acumen to deliver new services at any phase of customers’ cloud journey. More than 30 partners have been onboarded and enabled through the new Specialization.

ControlUp today announced ControlUp Console is 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 cloud. ControlUp delivers total visibility, Machine Learning assisted analytics and fast troubleshooting to customers of VMware Cloud on AWS.

With ControlUp, vSphere administrators can quickly spot application performance issues across multiple layers – from the hypervisors and datastores to connection servers and VMs, all the way to specific processes. Using real-time performance data, ITOps teams can quickly detect AND remediate the root cause of an issue, using the ControlUp console. ControlUp gives VMware administrators access to a rich set of contextual management actions that enable proactive troubleshooting of data-center related issues. Moreover, ControlUp seamlessly aggregates data for historical analysis and offers a plethora of out-of-the-box reports including HW virtual and physical resource consumption, topology flow, application activity, user action, user experience, system health and licensing.

Companies that have invested in multi-cloud deployments can now comprehensively view the health, performance, usage and spend of all public cloud investments, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), in a single view using LogicMonitor’s enhanced LM Cloud solution.

LogicMonitor, the leading SaaS-based performance monitoring platform for enterprise IT and Managed Service Providers, just launched expanded capabilities to LM Cloud to support Google Cloud Platform. GCP joins Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as cloud platform technologies supported by LogicMonitor’s hybrid monitoring platform.

"Enterprise workloads are moving to the cloud, and more than half now use more than one type of public cloud service. Using multiple cloud providers can significantly decrease risk and costs while increasing security and autonomy," said Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Evangelist at LogicMonitor. "Evolving our multi-cloud monitoring to include GCP gives companies the single-pane-of-glass view that enables them to optimize technical performance and financial management of their cloud resources."

While us who follow cloud computing news know the truth, passersby often look past the technology and miss its future potential. But the way it’s changing the world of business is incredible. All different kinds of industries are taking part in this digital interconnected revolution, from marketing and retail firms to medical professionals using it in their work. Even artists collaborate with each other across state or country lines using it. 

Let’s examine the future uses of the cloud for small businesses everywhere. If you can get ahead of the curve, then you may be able to operate your business on a better level competitively before the rest of the world catches on.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced that it is introducing an inside out view into cloud environments to help DevOps professionals gain unmatched visibility across the internal aspects of cloud environments-metrics, traces, and logs, plus an external view of the user experience. The enhanced functionality within SolarWinds’ products Pingdom, AppOptics, Papertrail, and Loggly can be used individually to provide visibility into cloud-based infrastructure and application performance or used together as a DevOps toolkit to maintain 360-degree visibility into cloud monitoring.

"Today’s recognized ‘pillars of observability’ combine metrics, traces, and logs to enable DevOps teams to monitor system and application performance. But, these capabilities provide only limited insights into application performance because they ignore the user’s experience-a critical measure of application performance," said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds. "Understanding if a system is slow or unavailable from an end user’s perspective is crucial in today’s digital world even if the metrics are good and there are no alerts. Bringing user experience, metrics, traces, and logs together with an easy-to-use, complementary toolkit provides DevOps teams with unmatched visibility into their environment, so they can seamlessly follow an alert or issue from one product into another to resolve issues quickly and get back to focusing on the more proactive elements of their job."

For example, if support gets a call that a web application is not letting users log in, a DevOps team can open the Pingdom (user experience) dashboard to see the login page has turned red and when the outage began. Jumping over to the metrics views in AppOptics (metrics), the DevOps team sees it’s not a problem with the website response time, therefore not a performance issue, but in the detail view they notice the HTTP status codes are red. Next, the DevOps team uses AppOptics (traces) to trace one of the failed requests and discovers the web application was trying to make a connection to a backend service, but there was an issue with the DNS entry. The DevOps team then jumps over to Papertrail (logs) or Loggly (logs) to see the log data. Here they can filter down to the application host and view when the outage started, discovering the service was stopped. With this insight, the DevOps team can quickly restart the service and get the web application up and running.

WhatMatrix, the independent technology comparison and analysis site, today announced the publication of its second SDS/HCI Landscape analysis report. Over and above providing a snapshot of the current landscape of the burgeoning SDS/HCI market, the latest report includes new use case analysis highlighting the top performers dependent upon specific areas of expertise, such as Data Services, Storage and Server support and Management. The WhatMatrix landscape report provides a valuable alternative view of this technology segments with its unmatched technical focus and free participation for any vendor. 

The report, authored by category consultant Herman Rutten, highlights the SDS/HCI market has gained in maturity, with customer numbers rising across the board. The ‘best’ solution is also very subjective. Although many SDS/HCI solutions appear similar at first glance, they have their own set of pros and cons that differ depending upon an organization’s unique situation and requirements. The Landscape Report is designed to assist organizations in that process and to eliminate the unknowns.

"SDS and HCI solutions have now reached a maturity level that makes them a viable alternative to traditional 3-tier enterprise storage systems. Nutanix and VMware continue to lead the pack in terms of market share. However, on the technology side they are challenged by new entrants in the report – such as Datrium and Pivot3 – to keep their solutions simple and feature rich at the same time," explained Herman Rutten, category consultant at WhatMatrix. "Having thoroughly analyzed the 12 vendor solutions included in this report, it is abundantly clear that the consideration of use cases is critical to the selection process."

The report also identifies the latest key trends: 

• Meshed architectures
• NVMe in hybrid and all-flash compositions
• Erasure Coding without compromise
• Native end-to-end encryption

As with all information and analysis from WhatMatrix, the full report can be downloaded free of charge – with no registration required.

Scalability

Software and upgrades can be relatively expensive, especially when they need to be purchased on a regular basis. However, businesses who use cloud computing have the option of scaling up and down which, in return, could save them a significant amount of money. It means they only have to buy the software that they need and are going to use, which will eliminate waste and unnecessary expenses. It is more or less a pay-as-you-go system, so you only pick products and services that are beneficial to your business, and you can stop paying for them if at any point they’re no longer needed. Another benefit in this regard is that instead of having to pay for upgrades yourself, the service provider typically does it for you.

Vembu BDR Suite, you might remember, is a comprehensive solution, designed to protect critical data across hybrid IT environments.  The backup and replication suite can protect physical servers and workstations, supporting critical workloads for your organization.  In addition to physical, it also handles Virtual (VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads) and Cloud (SaaS applications). 

As we approach VMworld Europe next week, expect to see more backup vendors talking about new features and enhancements, and upcoming new releases.  But prior to the start of the show, we’ve got a sneak peek at some of the new features and enhancements that you can expect to see within Vembu BDR Suite v4.0. 

There are a few new features concerning the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, including:

IBM and Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source cloud software, announced that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.

"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "IBM will become the world’s #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.

"Most companies today are only 20 percent along their cloud journey, renting compute power to cut costs," she said. "The next 80 percent is about unlocking real business value and driving growth. This is the next chapter of the cloud. It requires shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimizing every part of the business, from supply chains to sales."

"Open source is the default choice for modern IT solutions, and I’m incredibly proud of the role Red Hat has played in making that a reality in the enterprise," said Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO, Red Hat. "Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience –  all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation."

StarlingX – the open source edge computing and IoT cloud platform optimized for low latency and high performance applications – is available in its first release today. The project was established in May as a pilot project supported by the OpenStack Foundation (OSF) and builds on code contributed by Wind River and Intel Corporation.

StarlingX delivers new services to help fill the gaps in the open source edge cloud ecosystem to meet strict requirements of edge use cases and scenarios in both carrier and industrial applications. Additionally, StarlingX leverages components of projects including Ceph, OpenStack and Kubernetes and complements them with new services such as configuration and fault management with a focus on key requirements like high availability (HA), quality of service (QoS), performance and low latency.