Grazed from The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the opening of enrollment for LFS165x – Introduction to Open Source Networking Technologies. Students may pre-register now for this free course, and full course content will be available beginning in early August. 

The 2017 Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and Dice found nearly half of hiring managers are looking to hire individuals with networking expertise, and 55 percent report that formal training or certification is a priority when choosing new hires. On top of that, the way networks are built and deployed is evolving, with open source networking projects being responsible for much of this transformation.

LFS165x explores open source networking projects, from The Linux Foundation and beyond, that are shaping the future of networking and telecoms. Designed for open source enthusiasts, university students, network architects and engineers, security architects and engineers, and system engineers, this course offers an introduction to open source networking.

IT service providers have had their world rocked by the rapid expansion of mobile platforms and VDI technology over the past decade. Suddenly, their customers’ employees expect to access virtual workspaces on any device, anywhere – MSPs are taking note.

To meet their customers’ expectations, MSPs are turning toward affordable, all-in-one VDI solutions. VDI solutions provide a secured and managed service to desktop and mobile users anywhere.   

These proven Supermicro cloud system configurations have already been deployed across the entire range of datacenter environments including cloud service providers (CSPs), media streaming, e-commerce, social, telecommunications, semiconductor, OpenStack, artificial intelligence (AI), content delivery networks (CDN), and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). These systems are cloud optimized for scale-out, high performance at maximum density and software defined storage. 

VMware, Inc. unveiled VMware Integrated OpenStack 5, which will be the newest release of VMware’s OpenStack distribution that is on the OpenStack Queens release. Available in both Carrier and Data Center Editions, VMware Integrated OpenStack 5 will introduce new features to help customers simplify, scale, and secure production OpenStack environments. Through open, vendor-neutral API access to VMware’s industry-leading virtualized infrastructure, communications service providers (CSPs) and enterprises have a proven, high-performance platform based on an open architecture to accelerate production network functions virtualization (NFV) workload deployment and service innovation.

VMware Integrated OpenStack 5 will be one of the first commercial OpenStack distributions to comply with the OpenStack Foundation’s 2018.02 interoperability guidelines. An active member of the OpenStack community, VMware packages, tests, and supports all major components of the distribution, including the full open source OpenStack code in a multi-cloud architecture. VMware Integrated OpenStack provides customers with the fastest and most efficient solution to deploy and operate OpenStack clouds optimized for VMware’s NFV and software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure, with advanced automation and onboarding. Eligible existing VMware Integrated OpenStack customers will be able to take advantage of the software’s built-in upgrade capability to upgrade seamlessly to VMware Integrated OpenStack 5.

According to a recent report from the Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF), 72 percent of U.S. finance executives were either using cloud-based solutions in 2017 or they planned to do so in the future. While many banking, insurance, investment firms and other financial services organizations are moving to the cloud at an increasing rate, most lack the resources and expertise needed to navigate this digital transformation on their own. 

The new portfolio offers customers diversity of choice for the oversight and management of compute, storage, networking, security, support, and engineering relative to a wide range of cloud-based IT solutions powered by Azure.

According to Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud infrastructure services in the last quarter of 2017 jumped 46 percent, comfortably beating the growth rates achieved in the previous three quarters. Microsoft led the pack in terms of cloud growth. For its quarter ending Dec. 31, 2017, Microsoft reported revenues from Azure increased 98 percent.

Hasn’t outsourcing got a poor reputation?

Grazed from Inspur

Inspur, an OpenStack Foundation Gold member, today released version 5.5 of its InCloud OpenStack cloud operating system at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. The software, widely used in the financial services, securities and enterprise sectors in China, offers new capabilities in large-scale services delivery across multiple availability zones and geographies, accessibility and ease of management, stability and scalability, and intelligent operation and maintenance.

The newest version of InCloud OpenStack adds:

While there are still those out there in cyberspace who are leery of storing anything in the Cloud, most users are now feeling more secure with the added layers of security now in play. Having said that, it is important to understand that the best storage for Microsoft machines may not be the best for Macs, if they even are compatible. Even though iOS is said to be the safer of the two operating systems, less prone to hacks as it were, you don’t want to leave yourself vulnerable so it’s important to understand how Cloud storage works before choosing the right storage for you.

Advice for Mac Newbies

If this is your first Mac computer, you might not know that there are some very significant differences between the Windows and iOS platforms. For those who aren’t familiar with the Apple operating system, check out sites like Mach Machines which offer comprehensive articles on Apple computers and devices. Once you familiarize yourself with Mac, it’s time to look for Cloud storage which gives you the amount of space you need and the levels of security you are most comfortable with.

It is easy to see why this is such an attractive solution for modern companies. With data being an extremely valuable commodity, businesses are looking for the most secure environment in which to store it. There are plenty of cloud storage providers out there which utilize military-grade software and hardware to provide these secure environments where data is safe from hackers. Read about this and more on HardwareSecrets.com.

Here are three of the best cloud computing software solutions on the market today in 2018 –