October 26, 2017 Off

FileCloud Joins Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program

By David
Grazed from FileCloud

FileCloud, the leading file sharing software ensuring enterprise control in the cloud, today announced that it has officially joined the Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program. As part of Microsoft’s Cloud Storage Partner Program, FileCloud will enable Office 365 business users to open, edit and save changes to remote Office files stored in FileCloud using a web browser. Importantly, users can co-author and collaborate on documents in real time on Office documents stored in FileCloud from anywhere.

Since its inception, FileCloud continues to break barriers and offers unique customer choices. FileCloud gives Office customers a seamless experience when working with Office documents regardless of how they are accessed or where they are stored.

 
October 26, 2017 Off

Aerohive Extends SD-LAN to Remote Locations with NFV Appliance for Cloud-Managed VPN Services

By David
Grazed from Aerohive Networks

Aerohive Networks, a Cloud Networking Leader, today announced an expansion to its SD-LAN capabilities with the ability to extend the corporate user experience to small branch and remote locations using the radically simplified HiveManager NG cloud networking platform and the addition of a network-function-virtualized (NFV) appliance.

Aerohive’s virtual private network solution provides connectivity for remote workers and offices by securely extending the corporate network to remote locations with the ease of unified cloud management and plug-and-play configuration. The solution also assures business continuity in the event of an unplanned outage or natural disaster, allowing organizations to provide a consistent mobility experience even in temporary locations.

October 26, 2017 Off

AWS Announces Availability of P3 Instances for Amazon EC2

By David
Grazed from Amazon Web Services

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced P3 instances, the next generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances designed for compute-intensive applications that require massive parallel floating point performance, including machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and autonomous vehicle systems. The first instances to include NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, P3 instances are the most powerful GPU instances available in the cloud. To get started with P3 instances, visit https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p3/.

P3 instances allow customers to build and deploy advanced applications with up to 14 times better performance than previous-generation Amazon EC2 GPU compute instances, and reduce training of machine learning applications from days to hours. With up to eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, P3 instances provide up to one petaflop of mixed-precision, 125 teraflops of single-precision, and 62 teraflops of double-precision floating point performance, as well as a 300 GB/s second-generation NVIDIA NVLink interconnect that enables high-speed, low-latency GPU-to-GPU communication. P3 instances also feature up to 64 vCPUs based on custom Intel Xeon E5 (Broadwell) processors, 488 GB of DRAM, and 25 Gbps of dedicated aggregate network bandwidth using the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

October 25, 2017 Off

AWS Announces General Availability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL

By David
Grazed from Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced general availability for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. Amazon Aurora is a cloud-optimized relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Now, customers who use PostgreSQL databases can get up to several times better performance with scalability, durability, availability, and security as good as or better than commercial databases—all at one-tenth the cost. With no upfront costs or commitments required, customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use, and can automatically scale storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation. AWS also announced that customers migrating to Amazon Aurora from another database can use the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) free of charge for the next six months. To get started with Amazon Aurora, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora

Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. Open source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL require less capital expense, but customers often find they cannot achieve the performance or availability of commercial databases. Amazon Aurora offers the best of both worlds—the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source. And, with more and more enterprises embracing PostgreSQL for its user-defined functions and data types, complex SQL support, NoSQL and JSON support, broad application language support, and closer semantics to some of the old guard databases, Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL launch comes at a great time for customers looking to break free of the cost and complexity of traditional commercial databases.

 
October 25, 2017 Off

Veritas Study: Alarming Majority of Organizations (69%) Export Full Responsibility for Data Protection, Privacy and Compliance

By David
Grazed from Veritas

Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, today announced the results of a global survey spanning thirteen countries indicating that the majority of global organizations (56 percent) operate with a cloud-first mentality when it comes to deploying new applications and managing workloads. Only one percent of organizations reported that they will not be adopting cloud over the next two years. However, the study reveals that significant misconceptions exist on the responsibility for data management, with 69 percent of organizations wrongfully believing data protection, data privacy and compliance are the responsibility of the cloud service provider.

The Truth in Cloud study, commissioned by Veritas and conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 1,200 global business and IT decision makers revealed that customers are embracing the multi-cloud as a key component of their business strategies. Within the survey, customers indicated they use a variety of cloud service providers, including public clouds and hosted private clouds. With respect to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) specifically, over two-thirds (67 percent) of organizations state they use, or plan to use, two or more cloud providers. Forty-two percent say they are using, or plan to use, three or more cloud providers, with common goals of improving resiliency and data security as well as reducing capital expenditures (Capex) and operating expenses (Opex).

As customers embrace the cloud, the research explores three key areas of focus: misconceptions of data management in the public cloud, rise in multi-cloud adoption and future cloud trends.

October 25, 2017 Off

MyVitalz Strengthens Cloud Posture with Armor Managed Security Solution

By David
Grazed from MyVitalz and Armor

Armor has announced that it has further strengthened cloud security for MyVitalz™, a cloud-based in-home medical monitoring solution provider that improves care and reduces costs. A customer since 2013, MyVitalz is now transitioning to the latest version of Armor’s dynamic security solution to improve PHI data management and protection.

“The healthcare industry is responsible for vital data that is highly coveted by criminals,” said Chris Drake, founder and CEO, Armor. “With these security threats and new regulatory demands consistently being implemented, the cloud has become an ideal platform to manage massive amounts of information. To fully leverage its benefits and efficiencies, however, security cannot be an afterthought. Armor’s solutions lift security responsibilities from our customers to provide peace-of-mind that critical patient data is protected.”

 
October 25, 2017 Off

Containers will oust VMs and storage arrays, says Red Hat

By David
Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Antony Adshead

Red Hat launches storage delivered via containers and predicts a future in which costly and inflexible storage hardware and pricey hypervisors will be a thing of the past

The traditional storage array will become a thing of the past – and so will the virtual machine and hypervisor. Costly and cumbersome and lacking the flexibility to support the unpredictable and “bursty” requirement of applications in the cloud era, they will be replaced by containers.

 
October 24, 2017 Off

Swyx announces its own cloud service and plans to offer its products as a service

By David
Grazed from Swyx

Unified Communications (UC) specialist Swyx has announced its own cloud-based communications offering at its annual Partner and Technology Conference: As part of the cloud solution SwyxON, the UC provider will in future offer its products as a service throughout Europe. Swyx is committed to the channel so customers will be able to purchase the manufacturer’s own cloud service exclusively from Swyx partners.

With the cloud service SwyxON, the UC specialist creates the ideal framework for tomorrow’s communication: customers benefit from the proven Swyx Unified Communications functionality as well as the high elasticity, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud-based communication. Companies can if necessary alter the services they use within a short period of time and thus react flexibly to new requirements. Multiple locations and mobile users can also be easily integrated. 

In addition, SwyxON customers can significantly reduce maintenance and administration costs: They always use the latest version of the Swyx communication solution and innovative new features are immediately available. The connectivity can be individually customised depending on user requirements. Swyx is working closely with experienced partners who have their own network infrastructures and data centres to provide their own cloud services, ensuring the quality and safety of the solution. SwyxON will be available next year, first in Germany and later on throughout Europe.

 
October 24, 2017 Off

Three UK Selects MYCOM OSI to Assure World’s First Telco Cloud

By David
Grazed from MYCOM OSI and Three UK

MYCOM OSI, the leading independent provider of Assurance, Automation and Analytics solutions to the world’s largest Communications Service Providers (CSPs), today announced that Three UK has selected MYCOM OSI to assure its next generation core network which deploys NFV (Network Functions Virtualization), SDN (Software Defined Networks) and will be part of the world’s first Telco Cloud. 

Three UK is deploying the world’s first fully integrated cloud native core network that will enable massive scalability, elasticity, and better reliability, so as to provide the highest quality and service experience possible for Three’s customers, as demand for VoLTE, high definition video and other digital services continue to grow. In addition, it will provide improved agility to rapidly respond to customers’ dynamic service demands while preparing for IoT and 5G. 

MYCOM OSI’s Experience Assurance and Analytics (EAA) product suite will be deployed to monitor Three UK’s all-new Telco Cloud which is based on the ETSI NFV MANO framework, incorporates open-source technologies, such as Red Hat® OpenStack Platform, and spans several new state-of-the-art datacentres architected for full geo-redundant high-availability. EAA will assure both new virtualized and existing physical networks, and provide closed-loop assurance-driven orchestration based on end-to-end network and service quality. 

October 24, 2017 Off

Microsoft is now trying to use Google’s secret cloud weapon against it

By David
Grazed from Business Insider.  Author: Matt Weinberger

On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the Azure Container Service, a new service for the Azure cloud computing platform that’s built on Kubernetes — a mega-popular open source cloud technology built by Google.

Kubernetes is a software project that started out as a way for Google to manage its massive server infrastructure and has since become a  go-to tool for modern software developers .

While the market-leading Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure both offer some kind of support for Kubernetes, Google Cloud prides itself on being the first and best place to use the software, given that it was invented there.