Grazed from VoiceNData. Author: Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo.

Colt Technology Services said it is deploying Ciena’s packet-optical technology to future proof the bandwidth demands of its customers driven by the explosion of IT applications, data, content and cloud computing. The partnership with Ciena strengthens Colt’s high-bandwidth push across Europe and Asia, enabling flexible, ultra-high bandwidth services across its 100Gbps-enabled metro and multi-terabit backbone networks. This network upgrade supports growth across a number of key European markets including London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam as well as improving inter continental connections into Asia including Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.

“As the applications and infrastructure that power businesses increasingly move into the cloud and the data centre, the demand for reliable, scalable, and high-quality, business-grade connectivity continues to grow.By partnering with leading technology firms like Ciena, we are signaling our commitment to providing the intelligent, high-bandwidth networks enterprises require…

Rackspace today announced that the company has achieved seven gold and three silver Microsoft Partner Competencies for capabilities spanning application development, cloud platform support, data management, business applications, mobility and productivity. Microsoft Partner Competencies recognize companies in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) for their proven expertise in delivering quality solutions in a specialized area of business.

"Rackspace continues to grow its expertise in Microsoft cloud solutions as these 10 Microsoft Partner Competencies prove, making the company a reliable and long-standing member of the Microsoft Partner Network," said Aziz Benmalek, Vice President, Worldwide Hosting and Cloud Services at Microsoft Corp. "The company continuously strives to deliver positive customer outcomes with service-oriented solutions to meet our joint customer needs."

The OpenStack Summit-the must-attend open infrastructure event-will feature a new program called "Open Source Days," happening May 8-11 in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. Open Source Days bring together adjacent open source communities with the goals to improve collaboration and technical integration throughout the diverse ecosystem of open source projects that OpenStack users rely upon.

Community members from Ceph, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, OpenSwitch, Ansible, OpenContrail and more will each host their own Open Source Day during the OpenStack Summit. The Open Source Days will essentially be a dedicated content track to present software roadmaps, user stories and important cross-community roundtables.

Article Written by David Marshall

Today, Nexsan announced the release of Unity Active Archive and Desktop on Unity. Unity Active Archive integration allows Unity to automatically archive unstructured data with policy-based guidelines into this secure archive. Organizations can further protect their data, but make it easily accessible to their users with the current features including file sync and share, multi-site sync and secure remote access via mobile devices and the web – all without the hassles of VPN.

"Since launching Unity in April 2016 we have continued to expand our product range. This latest integration along with desktop synchronization delivers an industry revolutionary unified storage platform that meets many diverse data center needs all in one product," said Dr. Geoff Barrall, COO, Nexsan. "With Unity Active Archive, there is a fully comprehensive set of data protection features ensuring organizations can not only safeguard the long-term retention of highly critical information, but protect against data loss from ransomware attacks. We are continuously working to deliver ground-breaking and innovative solutions that are designed to complement today’s modern workforce."

For businesses using and creating applications for the Internet, it is becoming more difficult to ignore Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is the massively scalable, cost-effective cloud storage solution developed specifically to house the huge influx of data created by organizations around the world. Amazon S3 commands twice the market share of all its closest competitors combined and is likely to be the storage platform of choice for on-premises hybrid or private cloud deployments for years to come. 

S3 has become the standard for cloud storage. Almost every application connects to S3 and most storage vendors have already announced that they connect to S3 or are working to do so. In addition to Amazon, there are a number of competing storage implementations that are S3-compliant, including Google Cloud Storage, Openstack Swift, Rackspace’s Cloud Files and Ceph. These services use the standard programming interface but have different underlying technologies and business models. 

The rise of S3, which Amazon describes as "cost-effective object storage," has also helped to drive the adoption of object storage. In addition to Amazon, household brands such as Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox and Twitter all use object storage. It’s also deployed by enterprises for applications that require massive amounts of unstructured data, including content media storage, bioinformatics, data analytics, private cloud, file distribution and sharing, and backup and archiving. 

CloudCheckr, the leading cloud management platform today announced a partnership with Spotinst, the leading workload management platform, which provides lifecycle management for AWS EC2 Spot Instances. The partnership enables AWS customers utilizing the CloudCheckr platform to reduce their EC2 costs by up to 80% through highly available, automated Spot Instance management.

"Cloud cost management and optimization are top of mind for all organizations as cloud adoption increases in the enterprise," said Amiram Shachar, CEO & Founder at Spotinst. "The combination of CloudCheckr’s cloud management platform with Spotinst’s EC2 workload management will enable businesses to seamlessly leverage excess capacity for computing resources at a low cost with high availability."

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise universal cloud management, today announced the results of the RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Survey. In its sixth year, the RightScale State of the Cloud Survey is the largest survey of corporate cloud users, including 1,002 technology professionals at large and small enterprises across a broad cross-section of industries.

"The RightScale 2017 survey showed that enterprise multi-cloud and hybrid cloud adoption  continues to grow, and even with that growth, challenges are decreasing," said Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale. "Companies report using 8 different clouds on average; optimizing cloud costs is the top cloud initiative; cloud challenges, including security concerns, continue to abate; and Docker continues its phenomenal growth. We also saw AWS adoption remain flat, while #2 Azure continued to gain ground on leader AWS."  

Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company, today announced it is delivering analytics-based insights for specific industries with the Data Discovery Platform, its newest big data analytics-as-a-service solution. Built with IBM BigInsights and IBM dashDB and developed on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, the solution accelerates insight-driven decision making through pre-built applications for specific industries, such as banking and financial services, retail, energy, education and manufacturing.

In many organizations, internal and external data exist in silos across the company, making it difficult and expensive to collect and analyze. The Data Discovery Platform helps businesses unlock the true value of their structured and unstructured data to deliver insights customized to the customer’s industry sector.

Wipro and IBM developers collaborated on the solution which is available in an outcome-based ‘pay-per-insight’ cloud delivery model. It has been customized for a number of specific industries and their associated overall processes, including: