The complexity of a piece-part approach and the absence of a utility consumption model in most private cloud initiatives has prevented many organizations from delivering mission-critical applications to their customers quickly. Many IT organizations find themselves stuck with manual processes that result in long waits experienced by end users, rising operational expenses, inconsistent infrastructure, and overall dissatisfaction by business users.

HyperCloud Block Storage Service meets the diverse needs of enterprises by providing reliable block storage to run mission-critical applications such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. Leveraging storage volumes that provide consistent and low-latency performance, HyperCloud delivers database as a service for Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Mongo, and many others. The database services in HyperCloud deliver scalable and highly available databases supporting multi-host clustering, backup, replication, and automatic database recovery.

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Thomas Borrel.

The IT services industry is undergoing tremendous change driven by the increased use in technology. Businesses rely and depend on IT to meet customer demands, grow their businesses and deliver value. This dependency presents challenges for companies who need to keep up with IT to stay competitive or differentiate.

According to a recent survey, 68 percent of IT and business professionals are using an outside IT firm to either manage one or more of their IT functions or provide implementation, integration or other IT project work. Additionally, 50 percent of respondents indicated that they would consider using an outside IT firm in the next two years…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

The ubiquitous cloud computing craze may not be long for this world if venture capitalist Peter Levine is right. The Andreessen Horowitz general partner said that as more computing capabilities move to so-called "edge" devices, including anything from driverless cars and drones to the boundless devices that make up the internet of things (IoT), the cloud will slowly evaporate.

"A large portion of computation that gets done in the cloud today will return to the edge," said Levine at the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network event here Tuesday. Levine said the driverless car, whose 200-plus CPUs effectively make it a "data center on wheels," is a prime example of an edge device whose computing capabilities must be self-contained…

VeloCloud Networks, Inc., the Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN company, today announced that it has closed a $35 million Series D round of funding, led by Hermes Growth Partners. Round participants included new investors Telstra Ventures and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the strategic investment fund of the Government of Malaysia ("Khazanah"), in addition to existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Venrock, March Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, and other undisclosed strategic investors.

The funding will be used to expand business, capacity and operations as the company accelerates new SD-WAN product development, supports larger customer rollouts, and dramatically increases sales and marketing in theaters worldwide. Today’s funding brings the company’s total funding to $84 million.

"We have been following the exploding SD-WAN space very closely and recognize its potential to transform enterprise WAN," said Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, founder and partner at Hermes Growth Partners. "We decided to invest in VeloCloud because of the company’s highly differentiated solution, superb track record with customers, and exceptional management team."

Docker today announced Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), a new commercial platform for enterprise development and IT ops teams that build, run, and operate business-critical applications in production at scale across the software supply chain. Comprised of a container runtime, with integrated and multi-tenant orchestration, security and management in addition to an ecosystem of certified technologies, Docker EE gives enterprises an open container platform that ensures a simplified yet rich user experience. This new modular platform makes it easy to install, configure and upgrade Docker on certified infrastructure (operating systems and cloud providers). Docker EE is available in three tiers: Basic comes with the Docker platform, support and certification and Standard and Advanced tiers add advanced container management (Docker Datacenter) and Docker Security Scanning.

Docker is also launching its Docker Certification Program, a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to Docker EE and make their solutions available on Docker Store. The Docker Certification Program is designed for both technology partners and enterprise customers to recognize Containers and Plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification is aligned to the available Docker EE infrastructure, which provides enterprises with a trusted way to run more technology in containers with support from both Docker and the publisher. With certified containers and certified infrastructure, organizations now have the reassurance that the entire portable stack is supported and compatible with technologies from other ecosystem partners. 

CSC, a global leader in next-generation IT services and innovative cloud solutions, and Virtual Clarity, a leading provider of IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) transformation strategy and leadership, today announced an agreement to jointly help enterprises accelerate their transformation to leading cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Under the terms of the agreement, CSC will make an undisclosed investment in Virtual Clarity to accelerate the company’s leading transformation consulting services targeting the Financial Services, Insurance, Telecom, and Manufacturing industries. Virtual Clarity will become a Strategic Affiliate of CSC and will collaborate on joint go-to-market pursuits with CSC.

Virtual Clarity has significant knowledge and experience in helping global clients solve large, complex business problems and building lasting value for customers and partners. Its ClearTransformation service enables companies to accelerate business innovation, overcoming the inertia of legacy IT by transforming the traditional IT operating model to nimble IT-as-a-Service.

Visit CloudMinds at Mobile World Congress, Hall 2, Stand 2E6MR.

VMware, Inc. today announced VMware vCloud NFV 2.0, designed to modernize and transform network architectures and operations for global communications service providers (CSPs). Built from production-proven software-defined infrastructure and management solutions, the vCloud NFV platform can improve economics through accelerated service delivery, operational excellence and lower infrastructure costs. With vCloud NFV 2.0, CSPs will be able to deliver new and differentiated services on an agile, open and secure software-defined architecture today as they evolve their networks to support 5G and the Internet of Things.

VMware vCloud NFV is an ETSI-compliant fully integrated, modular and multi-tenancy NFV platform. The vCloud NFV platform combines a highly available, carrier-grade network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) with Day 2 operations management and service assurance capabilities to drive successful NFV deployments and operations. With vCloud NFV, VMware is delivering openness and choice across the NFV technology stack-NFV infrastructure (NFVI), Virtual Infrastructure Managers (VIM), Virtual Network Functions (VNF) and NFV Orchestration (NFVO) — and continues to advance vCloud NFV interoperability across mobile, wireline, Internet of Things, Software-Defined WAN, and security use cases. As virtualization is a prerequisite to 5G network buildout, VMware vCloud NFV delivers a platform for new service development today, with an architecture that will support CSP implementation of 5G implementation in the future.

"In today’s highly competitive environment, CSPs must deliver innovative services faster, with the best end-to-end customer experience and at the lowest cost. Current network architectures, including some virtualized deployments, remain rigid and expensive to build and manage," said Gabriele Di Piazza, vice president of solutions, Telco NFV Group, VMware. "With more than 80 NFV deployments by more than 45 CSPs serving 300 million subscribers worldwide, VMware vCloud NFV enables the transformation of network architectures, services delivery, operations and economics through a more dynamic, agile network built on software."

Datrium, the leading provider of Open Convergence for cloud builders, today announced Datrium Blanket Encryption, an industry-first software product that combines always-on efficient deduplication and compression technology with high-speed, end-to-end encryption: in use at the host, in flight across the network and at rest on persistent storage.

The number of breaches within the US have quadrupled from 2005 to 2015, and the year 2016 accounted for seven of the ten biggest data breaches ever. With threats rising, the requirement to encrypt data everywhere – from host-to-storage, between hosts, and between sites – is becoming standard. However, leading storage arrays and hyper-converged systems only protect data at rest and do not protect against host or network intrusions. Guest operating systems and hypervisors offer encryption at the source, but at the expense of data reduction required by the economics of modern flash storage.

Security and Economics Without Compromise
Datrium offers a fundamentally new and comprehensive approach.  By deduplicating and compressing data, then encrypting while it is still in the application host’s memory (RAM), Datrium Blanket Encryption can then move data across hosts, networks and storage that is always encrypted and efficient.