For years, VMblog has covered numerous technologies coming out of the SolarWinds think tank.  Perhaps the best known or most covered technology thus far (for obvious reasons) has been SolarWinds Virtualization Manager or VMAN — the company’s popular VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V monitoring and management solution.

[ Watch the SolarWinds VMAN video interview from VMworld 2016 ] 

Beyond Virtualization Manager, SolarWinds has been working hard to up-level and incorporate each of the company’s individual product lines into a unified view and centralized management platform by leveraging its modular, extensible and unified Orion Platform.  Bringing numerous monitoring and management applications under a single umbrella was probably hard enough, but SolarWinds is about to launch something that takes the Orion Platform to a whole… other… level.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where things get REALLY interesting.  This upcoming technology is known as "PerfStack."

SolarWinds PerfStack and Orion

Vapor IO, the next generation platform for hybrid and edge clouds, today announced Vapor Edge for Telecom, an end-to-end platform for edge computing, now 5G-ready and designed to operate as a self-contained microdatacenter at the base of cell-enabled radio towers.

"Mobile operators and landowners are in an ideal position to capitalize on the emerging need for low-latency edge-computing," said Cole Crawford, CEO and founder of Vapor IO. "They own the key infrastructure, including tens of thousands of remote tower and base station locations with power and high bandwidth backhaul. These locations are ideal for Vapor Edge technology, and Vapor Edge can help carriers upgrade their infrastructure and business models as they move to a fully virtualized infrastructure with edge computing and 5G capabilities."

Vapor Edge is an end-to-end platform for edge computing that provides wireless telecom companies with a simple way to deploy and manage cloud servers that are co-located with their base station equipment. This makes it easy for carriers and wireless base-station landowners to offer cloud compute capabilities in close proximity to the Radio Access Network (RAN), enabling new low-latency applications and creating new business models for these players as they forge partnerships with public cloud providers, web-scale companies and other OTT providers to deliver edge capabilities.

NetJapan, Inc., publisher of backup, system recovery, and virtualization software solutions, using its sector-based disk imaging backup and virtualization technologies, releases vStandby 6 with added support for Hyper-V.

vStandby 6, a Virtual Standby Availability Switchover solution, creates and maintains dormant Virtual Standby Replica (VSR) of physical or virtual source machines on Hyper-V or VMware hosts. The VSRs of physical and virtual source machines are made ready for immediate use in Hyper-V or VMware virtual environments. vStandby 6 is an easy-to-use affordable solution that ensures continued data protection and system operations.

vStandby 6 is also an ideal solution to counter potential ransomware attacks as the VSR can be resumed to an earlier unaffected state.

Grazed from OpenStack

The OpenStack community today released Ocata, the 15th version of the most widely deployed open source infrastructure software. The Ocata release cycle was a one-time, shorter cycle focused on stabilization, including scalability and performance of the core compute and networking services. Ocata also brought greater support for container-based application frameworks at the networking layer, as well as containerization of OpenStack services for easier deployment and upgrade management, treating OpenStack as a microservice application.

During this release cycle, the OpenStack community has witnessed the growing multi-cloud trend, where enterprises are employing a more sophisticated workload allocation strategy across public and private clouds. In particular, OpenStack users are seeing significant cost savings and compliance benefits with OpenStack private clouds. A new model of remotely managed private clouds has also emerged that makes it easier for users to experience the benefits of public cloud in an environment dedicated to them.

OpenStack continues to grow its support for container-based application frameworks and deployment tools, with Kolla (containerized OpenStack services), Kuryr (bridging container networking and storage with OpenStack) and Zun (container management) projects seeing the most contributor growth in the release cycle. Other container-related enhancements include:

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that Amazon GameLift now supports games built with any C++ or C# game engine, including Amazon Lumberyard, Unreal Engine, Unity, and custom developed engines. With Amazon GameLift, developers can quickly scale their dedicated multiplayer game servers to support millions of players using AWS’s highly available cloud infrastructure, without investing thousands of hours in upfront engineering. AWS also announced that Amazon GameLift includes new matchmaking functionality that intelligently selects the closest available game server based on each player’s location, giving players the lowest possible latency by leveraging AWS’s broad global footprint. Game developers only pay for the compute, storage, and bandwidth resources their games use, with no upfront commitments or monthly contracts. To get started with Amazon GameLift, visit aws.amazon.com/gamelift.

Expectations for multiplayer games have never been higher. Gamers demand short wait times to connect to games, imperceptible server latency, and bulletproof stability. To meet these expectations, game developers have needed to invest thousands of hours of engineering to build systems that manage server infrastructure and scale capacity. Amazon GameLift is a managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games. With Amazon GameLift, developers simply add the Amazon GameLift SDK to their games, upload their game servers, and launch the service in the AWS Management Console. The service then automatically deploys game servers across the AWS Cloud and starts connecting players to games. Amazon GameLift’s new matchmaking functionality continually scans available game servers around the world and matches them against player requests to join games. If low-latency game servers are not available, the service’s autoscaling feature can automatically start one, hundreds, or even thousands of game servers across AWS’s global regions. Autoscaling also eliminates wasted capacity by stopping unused game servers in minutes, lowering Amazon GameLift costs by an average of 50 percent. With Amazon GameLift, developers can be confident that on day one that their multiplayer games can scale to support millions of players, while maintaining the high performance gamers expect.

This represents a major commitment by Kontron to radically simplify the evaluating, buying and deploying of production-grade OpenStack platforms. For communication service providers, cloud and hosting providers, and enterprises who build private clouds, this fulfills many market expectations of an integrated OpenStack platform that is – deployable in hours not days, priced at a reasonable entry point, and is maintained as a truly open source platform without vendor lock-in.

The hardware-software integration story

EMA and Cirba recently came together to discuss how to optimize a migration to hybrid cloud.  If you missed the live session, don’t worry.  This Webcast is now available on-demand and can be watched at anytime.

Watch Torsten Volk, Research Director of Hybrid Cloud at EMA, and Andrew Hillier, CTO at Cirba show you how to avoid major risks and cut costs associated with cloud migration using industry-leading intelligent analytics.

Watch and learn:

1. How to address the biggest challenges in public cloud today:
   • Cost Control
   • Moving legacy apps
   • Pressure to move off prem
   • Which providers are right for your apps
2. What to look for in an analytics solution: Are you using the right one?
3. How some companies save 20%, 48%, 82% in hosting costs.

OpSus Backup supports healthcare enterprises’ efforts to implement holistic data management strategies that allow them to protect, control and derive more value from all their data. OpSus Backup uses Commvault’s holistic data management platform to backup data on Tier 4 data centers, and encrypt data both in transit and at rest. Both healthcare enterprise IT staff and CloudWave’s team of healthcare IT experts can use the service to initiate, monitor and maintain backup operations, as well as perform on-demand data restoration on secure landing zones.

Grazed from Linux Journal.  Author: Petros Koutoupis

At the time I got into the data storage industry, I was working with and developing RAID and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) controllers for 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN). This was a time before "The Cloud". Things were different—so were our users. There was comfort in buying from a single source or single vendor. In an ideal world, it should all work together, harmoniously, right? And when things go awry, that single vendor should be able to solve every problem within that entire deployment.

That is why, enterprise companies typically bought from a single storage vendor and invested deeply in them. You either bought HP, Dell, EMC, Sun Microsystems or NetApp, which also was successfully carving a new market in Network Attached Storage (NAS). For example, once an EMC shop, always an EMC shop. Hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars were spent to ensure that you were enabled for high availability, fault tolerance, training, support and more. Again, through that single vendor.

Cohesity, the pioneer of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced a new integration with Pure Storage, the market’s leading independent solid-state array vendor, to deliver faster, more efficient data protection and recovery. The native integration with Pure Storage FlashArray//M also empowers customers to leverage public cloud storage for long-term data retention and accelerate DevOps with instantaneous copies of any production application.

By combining Cohesity’s hyperconverged secondary storage platform with Pure’s all-flash arrays for mission-critical applications, customers now have access to highly efficient and scalable infrastructure that extends across the data center. The integration allows companies to automatically consolidate a wide array of secondary storage tasks on Cohesity DataPlatform within the Pure operating environment, rather than wrangle a handful of fragmented and expensive point solutions for data protection, backup, file services, DevOps and analytics.