eG Innovations, the leading IT performance management software provider, today announced results from its 2018 Citrix Migration Survey. The industry survey, jointly conducted by eG Innovations and virtualization and cloud news and support website, DABCC, Inc., explores the status of organizations’ migration to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x from previous versions, in order to better understand the associated plans, challenges and performance expectations from Citrix professionals. With 795 respondents representing all major industries and IT roles, the survey results offer unique insights, trend analysis and predictions that are useful for any IT professional undertaking this impactful technology transition.

Citrix’s desktop and application virtualization solutions are supporting IT service delivery to millions of enterprise users around the globe and a migration to the newest version of Citrix products is a significant technology upgrade that introduces major architectural changes and adds several new functionality improvements.

"Citrix offers a complete solution for securely and cost-effectively delivering application and desktops to the enterprise, but the migration to 7.x has presented some significant operational challenges to Citrix customers," said George Spiers, 2018 Citrix Technology Professional Awardee and EUC Architect. "The benefits of upgrading are substantial, but migration has been slow until last year, in part due to the major redeployment effort that the upgrade requires, and also due to some key feature gaps between XenApp 6.x and 7.x. Citrix has closed many of these gaps over the past two years, and this has enabled organizations to fully plan their upgrades for 2018."

Key Findings: Migration to Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x

Make sure to sign up for this upcoming live Webinar with Storage Switzerland and Tegile Systems to learn more about the three primary storage challenges that keep IT up at night:

1. How to keep up with application performance demand
2. How to affordably manage and store the vast amount of data that IT has to store
3. How to protect that data so that applications can quickly return to service if a server, storage system or entire data center fails

Netronome, a leader in high-performance intelligent networking solutions, today announced collaboration with Red Hat on its Agilio 10/25/40GbE SmartNIC hardware and open software platform to develop future enhancements within the Linux and OpenStack communities. The ongoing development emphasizes open hardware acceleration technologies, aiming to help data center operators better extract more services and enable more users per server rack, a critical requirement in 4G networks and 5G deployments. This includes server racks used for OpenStack, cloud-based NFV and mobile edge computing infrastructures to help deliver more data, video, IoT, augmented reality and vehicle-to-infrastructure services.

The Agilio SmartNIC platform utilizes standard device drivers and data plane acceleration software for Open vSwitch (OVS), which have been developed alongside the Linux kernel community. This brings together the benefits of hardware-based acceleration and the strength of community-developed open source innovations. As a result, network traffic can now be delivered at line rate to virtual machines (VMs) running cloud networking and telecommunication applications while retaining the benefits of software-defined networking (SDN), OpenStack orchestration and VM migration. Based on Netronome benchmark testing, the innovations can deliver more than 25Mpps (million packets per second) while consuming less than a single server CPU core, resulting in up to a 20X gain in efficiency.

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announces a collaboration to deliver a new fully-managed cloud container solution – Atos Managed OpenShift (AMOS) – built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise-grade container platform based on industry standards, including Linux container technologies and Kubernetes.

AMOS enables customers to create and run cloud-native applications and migrate legacy workloads on enterprise hybrid cloud environments, in a fully-managed service, leveraging the power of open source container technologies (Linux container technologies, Kubernetes). Because AMOS is built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a container-centric hybrid cloud solution, it can deliver the flexibility customers seek from cloud-native and container-based applications.

"Healthcare organizations have an insatiable need for advanced analytics yet getting efficient performance from large databases demands a storage infrastructure with high performance and ultra-low latency. Excelero’s NVMesh software delivered beyond our expectations," said Brian Dougherty, chief technical architect at CMA. "Because of its flexibility and scalability, we deployed NVMesh in just two days, versus several weeks for DSSD – 80% faster. The time we saved can help our customers get started sooner with important medical research and finding new ways to control healthcare costs."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable foundation for modernizing IT infrastructure, on which enterprises and developers can roll out new applications, virtualize environments and create a hybrid cloud to deploy Red Hat’s certified open source solutions. Users can also customize their versions with add-on functionality from Alibaba, including desktop options and developer tools.

Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat entered into a collaboration to leverage each other’s infrastructure and solutions in October 2017. Since then, Alibaba Cloud has completed the certification process to officially become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. Being certified means that Alibaba Cloud is recognized as a provider that can offer a safer, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments, as well as Red Hat-tested and validated open source solutions.

Customers of Alibaba Cloud and Red Hat, along with independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers across the globe, can benefit from this collaboration in the following ways:

HyperGrid today announced its Software-Defined Cloud (SDC) strategy for its HyperCloud software platform; the only platform that integrates application management, intelligent cloud management and software-defined infrastructure services for private and public clouds. HyperCloud empowers customers to achieve digital transformation by enabling their journey to a cloud model. It enables them to cloudify existing assets, simplify operations, transform traditional applications, build modern workloads, and automatically optimize workload deployments by picking the best cloud. HyperCloud can quickly deliver consistent management and control of their prevailing public cloud environments to achieve simplicity, automation and intelligence.

HyperCloud’s turnkey capabilities automate and simplify operations, make traditional applications cloud-friendly, and enable development of modern applications based on microservices that help users seamlessly and systematically get into a truly vendor-agnostic cloud model.  This announcement showcases HyperGrid’s mission to help customers embrace a multi-cloud architecture for their business needs by minimizing the traditional barriers to cloud adoption such as integration, learning, and complex management.

"Multi-cloud use cases are increasing every year, which is making the use of multiple clouds very complex to manage. There is a clear need for a platform that spans private and public clouds, to help organizations to modernize and transform to the Cloud Era,” said Henry Baltazar, Research VP Infrastructure at 451 Research. ‘’HyperGrid’s cloud management platform enables organizations to intelligently manage workloads across all IT infrastructure in a single pane of glass."

Mavenir, a leader in mobile network transformation, today announced its collaboration with Dell EMC OEM Solutions to deliver a broad range of solutions for service providers and enterprises covering 5G Cloud RAN, Packet Core, IoT, VoLTE, VoWiFi and RCS on Mavenir’s cloud-native Open Stack NFV and container CloudRange platform.

Communications service providers are under intense pressure to simultaneously drive new revenue streams and aggressively reduce costs as OTTs gain market share in voice and messaging services. This expanded collaboration directly addresses these challenges, bringing together Mavenir’s extensive software stack for mobile network providers and Dell EMC solutions for infrastructure, cloud and IOT to create new offerings and best practices that enable the cost effective and rapid evolution of service provider and enterprise networks. Mavenir and Dell EMC OEM will pursue advanced engineering engagements in Cloud RAN, IOT and Enterprise Private LTE Solutions, including CBRS initiatives.

Your customers are important to you and your business. Being of significance to you, it would be fitting for you to keep the customer data you obtain out of harm’s way. At the same time, you are considering cloud services to accommodate the large capacity of not only customer data but company data as well. So, how do you enjoy the benefits of off-site cloud computing, while keeping your data safe?

Below are some of the biggest threats to data loss, cyber attacks, and otherwise questionable methods of obtaining sensitive data, and what you should watch out for to keep your customer data safe on the cloud.   

Data Breaches

In 2017, we saw very large companies fall victim to massive data breaches, unwittingly releasing sensitive customer data. Equifax, a major credit reporting agency and the hardest hit, revealed information of 143 million US customers. Your business holds very sensitive customer data such as credit card information, social security numbers, and birthdates – all which can be used to turn your customer’s loss into a cyber attacker’s gain.

RADCOM Ltd., today announced it is collaborating with Red Hat to provide operators with a fully virtualized network visibility solution running on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. As operators transition to NFV, a critical first step is gaining end-to-end network visibility. This collaboration enables operators to attain cloud-native network visibility without the hassle of building their own private cloud infrastructure. Moreover, once the operators’ transition to NFV mature, integration efforts with the operators’ NFV and MANO infrastructure can be simplified.

"Our customers see deploying network visibility as their top priority in beginning their journey to NFV-based networks. Customers want to deploy cloud-native service assurance as their first virtual network function (VNF) to test all other VNFs during the early POC(s) stage as well as when as the operator deploys them on the network," said Rami Amit, RADCOM’s CTO and Head of Product. "However, not all operators have mature cloud environments. In collaborating with Red Hat, RADCOM is providing operators a solution that allows them to achieve network visibility more rapidly, whether they have cloud environments or not. This solution provides operators with an ideal cornerstone on which to build their next-generation NFV networks and ensures complete end-to-end network services visibility from day one."