What is Cloud Storage?

Cloud storage is a service where data is remotely maintained, managed and backed up. Users of the service are able to store files online. These files can then be accessed from anywhere in the world as long as there is an internet connection.  

Here are some ways you can take advantage of what cloud storage has to offer.

NVMe and all-flash systems can solve any performance, floor space and energy problems.  At least this is the marketing message many vendors and analysts spread today – but actually, sounds too good to be true, right?

Like always in real life, there is no clear black or white, but some circumstances you should be aware of – especially if you intend to leverage these technologies.  

You may ask yourself: Do I need to rip and replace my existing storage? What is the best way to integrate both? What benefits do I receive?

Well, join this brief webinar with Datacore, which will also include a live demo and audience Q&A so you can get the most out of these technologies, and make your storage great again!

WHEN?  October 24, 2018 @ 1PM ET

You will discover:

• How to integrate Flash over NVMe in real life
• How to benefit of some Flash/NVMe for your entire applications

Written by Avery Phillips

The urge to take your office, business, or household paperless holds countless advantages. No more file cabinets full of records, no countless bills in the mail, no more bank statements laying around, and a lot less shredding of sensitive documents as they age all sound pretty good, and they are. 

However, digital storage is not without cost. There is no such thing as the cloud. The cloud is simply someone else’s computer, and that computer takes power and resources to run. While most cloud server farms are going green and use renewable energy, there are still resources used to store your data. 

There is also the issue of privacy. The more of your data that is online and the more places you store it, the more vulnerable you are. While there is more cloud adoption with businesses than ever before, 54 percent of those businesses are vulnerable to cyberattacks. 

So how do you declutter your personal cloud and minimize your digital footprint?

Fortanix Inc., the leader in Runtime Encryption, today announced its partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to integrate its Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) with the Alibaba Cloud platform, introducing new levels of security and privacy with Runtime Encryption key management in the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud is among the world’s top three IaaS providers according to Gartner and the largest provider of public cloud services in China according to IDC. It launched commercial Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)-powered cloud servers as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal instances in April. Working with Fortanix, customers can now keep their most precious applications secure with new levels of security and privacy for encryption keys in the cloud. This new partnership enables secure cloud adoption for even the most sensitive workloads by allowing prospects to securely adopt the cloud with unmatched privacy for their encryption keys offered by Fortanix SDKMS.

"Fortanix is one of the leaders in Intel SGX technology and their Runtime Encryption can bring applications that were previously constrained due to security issues to the cloud," said Xiaoning Li, Chief Security Architect of Alibaba Cloud. "Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service allows customers to encrypt all their data in Alibaba Cloud, while keeping the keys protected from Fortanix and Alibaba Cloud. We are glad to partner with Fortanix to provide a cutting-edge cloud security options to our users."

Cloud Academy, the leading digital skills development platform for enterprises, today announced the launch of industry benchmarking tools designed to help organizations define the critical job roles and technical skills needed for cloud adoption and ongoing competitiveness.

Starting today, the general public is now able to access the following resources on the Cloud Academy website:

• Cloud Roster, the job roles matrix that defines the core roles necessary for organizations to establish and maintain a competitive edge in technical innovation. Cloud Roster analyzes tens of thousands of public job postings weekly to trend the top technology skills in demand for each role over time, as well as the demand for each role itself. The resource leverages interviews with industry experts and documents the key traits, responsibilities, non-technical skills, and related industry certifications for each position.
• Cloud Catalog, a global technology index that tracks the popularity of cloud technologies, frameworks, and vendor platforms. Based on data gathered over time from several well-known developer community platforms, Cloud Catalog offers a stack ranking of technologies by relative popularity and geography.

Elastifile, the pioneer of enterprise-grade, scalable file storage for the public cloud, today announced groundbreaking new enhancements to its cutting-edge data management platform. With the introduction of ClearTier, a key feature of the company’s latest product release, Elastifile is empowering customers to reap the performance benefits of software-defined, cloud-native primary storage, while reducing cloud infrastructure costs to unprecedented levels. 

Elastifile’s "born in cloud" elastic storage solution enables frictionless shifting and bursting of enterprise NAS workflows into public cloud environments, with no application refactoring and no reliance on proprietary underlying hardware. Version 3.0 of the company’s software includes ClearTier functionality, which efficiently integrates the best aspects of file storage and object storage to drive in-cloud NAS costs as low as $0.03/GB/month.

With ClearTier, file data can be placed in inexpensive object storage while remaining transparently visible for access through the Elastifile Cloud File System, thereby economically expanding the amount of data natively available for processing by applications. Data placement is automated via policy-based controls, with no manual user intervention required. Leveraging this new feature, organizations can enjoy the workflow acceleration benefits of a high-performance scale-out NAS, while also securing the dramatic cost savings delivered by object storage.

A10 Networks today announced availability of an advanced solution for Service Providers to deliver more profitable DDoS scrubbing services to their enterprise customers with the A10 Thunder Threat Protection System (Thunder TPS). The new solution reduces TCO via advanced intelligent automation capabilities, continuous machine learning, and greater scale than competing solutions. 

The solution empowers a wide range of service providers to better serve and protect their enterprise customers at scale and increase revenue by delivering highly profitable scrubbing services with differentiated faster mitigation times, lower operating costs, and service delivery options tailored to different business needs. The result is a solution ideal for mobile, internet, cloud, hosting and managed service providers.

A10 provides the advanced intelligent automation capabilities, powered by machine learning, to enable proactive and precise DDoS defenses throughout the entire protection lifecycle. Operators define the networks to be protected and A10 powered defenses do the rest. A10’s solution provides granularity at scale to accurately profile and monitor over 100,000 servers and services, distributed over thousands of networks, while enabling up to 3,000 simultaneous attack mitigations.

Datrium, the self-protecting enterprise cloud company, today announced that customers are using Datrium DVX performance at scale to increase application speed and accelerate their business processes. IT staff are becoming more efficient as they can now eliminate storage management and eliminate backup, dramatically reducing datacenter administration overhead while deploying new infrastructure faster. As a result, Datrium customers are achieving a 617% 3-year ROI and a fast payback of only 5 months.

By migrating to a hybrid cloud paradigm, leading enterprises are driving out the inefficiencies of legacy infrastructure products. The major decision-making factors in this strategy were not just performance, availability, flexibility, and security, but the critical sum of these parts along with lower costs that delivers optimized ROI.

This impactful financial outcome was validated by IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice.  IDC interviewed ten large Datrium DVX customers, with an average of 41,800 employees and average revenue of $12 billion. In addition to outstanding ROI and payback metrics, IDC discovered that gross end-user productivity increased 6% while 3-year cost of operations dropped 54%. The velocity of new deployments increased – 67% faster deployment for new storage – with an 85% shorter data recovery window, making businesses more agile in the growing real-time economy.

Scale Computing, a market leader in hyperconverged solutions, today announced that the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) has selected Scale Computing’s HC3 platform to underpin its IT infrastructure. The HC3 cluster provides a cost effective and simple-to-manage solution that has helped modernize the organization and cater to future capacity demands.

The DSO is a community-supported orchestra that is celebrated as one of the nation’s most forward-thinking. Based in historic Orchestra Hall within the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Music Center, the DSO presents a variety of musical genres and performance types: classical, pops, jazz, and even yoga set to live music. The orchestra looks to be on the leading edge and wanted to utilize the latest technology in order to upgrade its previous SAN system.

Looking to simplify IT management while remaining cost effective, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra decided to pursue a hyperconverged platform and opted for Scale Computing’s HC3 cluster. The appliance has no additional software to license and no training is needed. In addition, the HC3 solution is built in a scale-out architecture, where nodes can be added, allowing for future growth and capacity demands.

The projects, Eirini and CF Containerization, have been accepted by two of the Cloud Foundry Project Management Committees (PMCs), which oversee platform engineering of the open source projects. CF Containerization has been accepted to incubate within the BOSH PMC while Eirini is an incubating effort within the Application Runtime PMC. Announced at last year’s European Summit, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) is housed in the Extensions PMC and also takes advantage of Kubernetes.