Grazed from InfoVista

InfoVista, the leading provider of network performance orchestration solutions for a better connected and collaborative world, today announced the launch of a cloud-based managed service assurance platform, VistaGO. Communications service providers (CSPs) and mobile network operators (MNOs) facing service assurance challenges with limited capital and time can increase agility by leveraging VistaGO. The turnkey and affordable managed service can be rapidly deployed to enable Tier-1 class service assurance.

Both CSPs and MNOs face constant pressure to reduce TCO while requiring increased agility. Whether Tier-2 or Tier-3 sized providers, they demand the same power, scale and flexibility in their service assurance platform as Tier-1 providers, but don’t always have the resources needed to achieve this. VistaGO provides a low-cost, agile solution to their service assurance needs.

VistaGO for business services delivers end-to-end performance visibility for SLA reporting of IP-VPN or Carrier Ethernet, enabling CSPs to differentiate their services, drive customer acquisition and enable revenue uplift with a predictable, monthly cost.

Grazed from VMware.  Author: David Rosenberg

Are you ready for cloud transformation?

As the CIO, you know cloud is good for you. Capacity on demand! Independence from hardware… IT as a service, even as self-service… In other words, you know why you are doing it. You fought for, and got the budget allocated, you acquired the best technology, and your trusted consultant has proven to you in a nicely-done POC that the technology works. But you know, it’s not just the technology. Will your cloud fly high and deliver the expected benefits, or fall rock-hard on the shoulders of your IT team? Will your consumers use it, or see it as an additional burden? Will everyone be happy, including those whose job description changes, or worse? So, let’s talk about cloud transformation.

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Sam Varghese.

Information management vendor Veritas Technologies and Microsoft have signed a multi-year deal to promote the use of the Azure cloud platform for hosting Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud management and governance service. The two companies will jointly sell hybrid cloud storage solutions.

Under the deal, the data protection software Veritas NetBackup 8.0 will support storage tiering to Azure. A statement said this would give businesses a chance to reduce costs and avoid deploying additional storage. It said Veritas Backup Exec 16 now supported movement of back-up data to Azure, reducing time and costs and improving resource savings…

Grazed from ChicagoInno. Author: Ustav Gandhi.

Supercomputing has changed the way we process big data in a wide range of industries. Unsurprisingly, these capabilities to perform multiple complex tasks in the least possible amount of time have traditionally come at a price — in fact, even the first one hundred supercomputers were sold at a price of $8 million each (hefty, especially by the standards of early 1960s standards when they first launched). While this price point has mostly restricted supercomputing to academia, federal research labs and large industry, Parallel Works, a startup incubated at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Exchange, is out to democratize this — by bringing the underlying technology to the cloud.

Parallel Works’ platform takes supercomputing to the software-as-a-service, pay-per-use model, thus removing talent and resource maintenance costs typically associated with big machines. The software is domain agnostic–employed in applications as diverse as climate change research to neuroscience to mass media analysis–and the technology’s custom interface can be packaged, stored, and deployed as per the needs of the client or industry…

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.