Lifeboat Distribution, an international value-added distributor for virtualization, security, business continuity and emerging technologies, announced today a distribution agreement with Cloudistics, a leading cloud software appliance company.

Lifeboat will sell Cloudistics’ cloud solutions to its network of value-added resellers. Cloudistics goes beyond traditional HCI by delivering a turnkey enterprise cloud on-prem. Cloudistics interlocks and virtualizes network, storage, and compute, and then hides infrastructure from the user with application-focused control software. Through a software defined approach, Cloudistics provides customers the ability to focus on deploying, securing and managing their applications and services.

Federal Government agencies can soon hire Xerox knowing its Managed Print Services (MPS) solutions have been carefully pre-vetted and approved. Xerox has achieved in-process status for the U.S. government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). This process signals that Xerox is FedRAMP ready and has been prioritized by the Joint Advisory Board – the last step before full FedRAMP authorization. The move by the government reinforces Xerox’s leadership in cloud-based MPS security and workflow automation.

The FedRAMP program standardizes security assessment, authorization and monitoring for cloud products and services government-wide. Cloud service providers authorized through FedRAMP are included on a centralized list accessible by all federal agencies. By using a cloud service provider from the list, federal agencies can eliminate the time-consuming, research-intensive process of vetting MPS products for purchase such as automatic supplies replenishment, print awareness and productivity and fleet management of multi-vendor printers and multifunction printers.

Aviatrix, a pioneer in cloud networking and an inaugural AWS Network Competency partner, today announced that its EC2 FlightPath tool is now available as a free download on AWS Marketplace. EC2 FlightPath allows cloud and DevOps teams as well as network engineers to troubleshoot Amazon Web Services (AWS) network connectivity issues faster to minimize business disruption.

By automating the collection of AWS network troubleshooting data and displaying it in a single view, EC2 FlightPath eliminates the time, frustration and human errors required to find the source of connectivity issues that are reported as problems. It also makes it easy to communicate the source of the problem, and the required fix, to other internal groups so they can take appropriate actions.

"Instead of tedious ‘whack-a-mole’ efforts to track down the source of connectivity problems across many screens, the Aviatrix EC2 FlightPath tool generates the needed network data quickly and automatically," said Steven Mih, CEO of Aviatrix. "EC2 FlightPath maps the path between two EC2 instances and shows relevant routing rules, network access control lists (NACLs) and security groups. Cloud engineers and DevOps teams can now spend less time dealing with daily networking trouble tickets and more time getting real work done in the public cloud."

The program and hiring plans will support increased demand for customers moving their business to the cloud, driven by pressure to digitally transform and create operational efficiencies with agile, blockchain, IoT, data and disaster recovery technology. Quisitive will be building teams consisting of Microsoft Azure infrastructure architects, application architects, data architects and data engineers in the coming months to support cloud migrations for customers. Quisitive works with financial services, oil and gas, manufacturing and retail enterprises to modernize their business with cloud migration, cloud platform development and data services.

Kublr is disrupting the cloud native market by delivering an open, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade Kubernetes platform that’s not tied to a single cloud, PaaS, OS, or limiting technology stack. With the launch of Kublr 1.8, Kublr is introducing its self-service control plane that enables simplified Kubernetes deployment and management. The Kublr control plane empowers enterprises to run Kubernetes in production at scale out-of-the-box-from security to monitoring and logging to backup and disaster recovery-without the need of extensive in-house Kubernetes expertise. Even complex scenarios, such as hybrid or multi-cloud deployments can easily be executed.

Kublr 1.8 with the Kublr control plane:

Fundamentals of marketing

You need a plan that is well-constructed and appropriate for your business. Marketing is critical to the success of any business because without your potential customers knowing about your offer they will never have the opportunity to become customers. Marketing is the way you reach them, by communicating with them and showing people you have what they need. To construct your plan, you need to address three key areas:

Grazed from CloudCheckr

CloudCheckr, the cloud management company, today announced the first city in its Cloud Leaders Tour 2018 event series. Portland, OR, known for its thriving tech community, will play host on February 23, 2018. The Cloud Leaders event will feature talks by prominent local and national IT executives who have successfully leveraged cloud computing technology in their organization.

Attendees of Cloud Leaders Portland will learn how to shift their organizations toward a cloud-first approach, learn new skills that are unique to the cloud, network with peers, and dig into the latest industry issues and trends. They will also gain insights from the latest Cloud Management Report, which surveys experts on the development of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) in their organizations.

Blue Medora is an innovator in monitoring integration software for the most common application performance, cloud and database management platforms.

BindPlane is a first-of-its-kind monitoring integration service that connects the health and performance data on the top enterprise technologies with the world’s best IT performance monitoring and analytics platforms. The new integration service is a departure from the traditional platform-to-plugin approach and instead provides a single monitoring integration service that connects any analytics platform to the health and performance data on the top enterprise technologies instantly.

I recently saw an announcement from VMware reminding people that vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 are nearing what the virtualization giant is calling "End of General Support" or EOGS.  I guess that’s the more polite way of saying End of Life (EOL) what with no support being offered and all.  Mark your calendars, these two VMware products each reach EOGS on September 19, 2018. 

EOL, or EOGS for those playing the acronym game at home, dates tend to sneak up on people as this isn’t necessarily something everyone pays close attention to.  How many people actually disregarded the numerous attempts by Microsoft to migrate off of Windows XP?  Plenty.

For these two virtualization products nearing the end of support, VMware warns:

ZeroStack, Inc. today introduced new management and control features that improve IT governance of cloud resources while further reducing cloud operations and management overhead. The services are:

• Network sharing, which allows IT administrators to take gold images of networks and share them selectively with users or customers, and
• Quota-based monthly billing and cost management, which help MSPs and enterprises alike ensure proper billing for resources.