Minio today announced the general availability of its distributed object storage server built for cloud applications and DevOps. The solution enables applications to manage massive quantities of unstructured data, and enables cloud and SaaS application developers to adopt emerging cloud hosting providers such as Digital Ocean, Packet and Hyper.sh with Amazon S3 like capabilities. Minio’s object storage server is now production ready, with major features such as erasure code, bitrot detection and lambda notification, and has grown in popularity amongst the Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes communities due its cloud native architecture.

"Minio is a valued partner of Mesosphere and a leading voice on the topic of storage in the DC/OS community," said Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere. "With its future-proof and developer-friendly distributed object storage offering, Minio solves a real problem for our joint customers, and this latest release continues their history of innovation."

Completing the Storage Stack

Cato Networks, provider of network and security as a service solutions, today announced the launch of its cloud-based, secure SD-WAN service. The Cato Cloud converges networking with security to dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of existing networks. It extends the WAN with policy-based routing, an SLA-backed global backbone, enterprise-grade network security as well as cloud and mobile support. Enterprises can now reduce their reliance on expensive MPLS services and distributed network security appliances to securely connect branch offices, cloud and physical data centers, and the mobile workforce.

"The role of the wide area network (WAN) is now expanding to incorporate a new set of requirements including connectivity to a growing number of mobile workers and public cloud providers," said Jim Metzler, Ashton, Metzler and Associates. "These requirements expand the enterprise attack surface, which drives the need to better integrate the network security stack into the WAN infrastructure."

"Current enterprise networks are built upon 25 years old networking and security technologies. This aging architecture is incompatible with the cloud-centric and mobile-first modern enterprise," said Shlomo Kramer, Co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. "Over the next 10 years organizations of all sizes will need to re-architect their WANs to provide secure networking capabilities across the business, anytime and anywhere. This challenge requires a new architecture, not merely point solutions like existing SD-WAN products. Cato Cloud is the blueprint for transforming the enterprise WAN for the business of the future."

The Cato Cloud provides multiple benefits to maximize the business impact of WAN transformation.

ThinPrint Cloud Services, the specialist for cloud-based printing and print management, today announces the release of its free ThinPrint Cloud Extension for Chrome OS. For the first time, IT administrators in businesses and organizations of all sizes have the ability to manage network printing activities both securely and easily for all devices. Chromebook users also benefit from printing smoothly and without needing any instruction.

Chromebooks are in high demand, especially among educational institutions as well as companies seeking thin client replacements. Two-million notebooks running on Google’s operating system were sold between January and March 2016, which is more than the 1.76 million Apple Macs sold during the same period. Despite its popularity, the economical laptop lacks important printing features. While Chromebook users can send documents unmanaged to compatible printer models, IT departments had no way of embedding these devices into their corporate print environment and managing the volume of printing.

Cloudian, Inc., a leading provider of hybrid cloud object storage, has announced that Purity IT, a storage and cloud services provider in Norway, has deployed its HyperStore solution as a key component of its new S3-based public cloud offering.

Based in Oslo, Purity IT is a leading regional provider of backup, disaster recovery and cloud storage services. They have built a public multi-site S3 service based on Cloudian HyperStore. The new service, which also offers local SAN cache and tiering to tape, is intended for use cases including primary storage, archiving and backup.

Cloudian HyperStore was selected ahead of technology from Scality, Red Hat, and Quantum, following a five month proof of concept comparison project. The competing solutions were tested on the following criteria: ease of use, data tiering capabilities, storage policy support, S3 API interoperability, scalability, security, and cost.

Global Capacity,  the leading connectivity as a service company, today announces the availability of its innovative Ethernet Multi-Cloud Connect service. Recognized by MEF as Best Ethernet Service Innovation, this latest virtual network service from Global Capacity’s One Marketplace software-defined network platform offers enterprises the flexibility to build multiple cloud services from a single port in real time to access hybrid and multi-cloud solutions across multiple locations and gain the performance and security necessary to compete in today’s marketplace.

Global Capacity’s Ethernet Multi-Cloud Connect service leverages an interconnection architecture with software orchestration to simplify multi-Cloud connectivity and improve service performance. This approach delivers a better user experience by allowing businesses to connect to Cloud locations or select from a list of interconnected One Marketplace Cloud destinations including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and 20 other Cloud providers on Equinix Cloud Exchange. Combining the reliability and flexibility of multi-destination Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) and Global Capacity’s One Marketplace, Ethernet Multi-Cloud Connect streamlines commercial buying across the Cloud services ecosystem.

Police are increasingly relying on digital infrastructure. The problem is that if that if it fails, lives could be at stake. Here’s how the cloud can help.

In January, Canadian police were hit with a major network outage that prevented them from accessing critical resources required to do their jobs. The outage, it is reported, started around 11:30 PM ET on Wednesday, January 18, and continued until 3 PM ET on the 19. Evidently, the whole thing originated with a router failure which also impacted "mobile computer workstations in RCMP police cruisers and two other crucial internal RCMP databases," according to CBC news.

This is not the first such outage suffered by the organization – their networks have reportedly gone down "more than a dozen times since last spring," reports CBC.

This month, HP Enterprise (HPE) announced an agreement to acquire Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) vendor Simplivity for $650M.  The acquisition highlights the growing popularity of consolidated computing systems that CIOs are adopting as an alternative to public cloud services, and suggests that on-premises computing systems still remain a crucial option for many organizations.

SimpliVity is but one of many companies offering hyperconverged systems which bundle computing, storage and networking onto the same server.  The company’s flagship product is called the OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure appliance, and they’ve been working with hardware vendors such as Lenovo, Dell, Cisco and Huawei to bring the software portion of its solution to those vendors’ hardware platforms.

SimpliVity was founded in 2009, and over the last couple of years, they raised almost $276 million in four funding rounds led by Waypoint Capital, Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Meritech Capital Partners.  When the company raised its Series D round of $175 million in March of 2015, the company was estimated to be worth as much as $1 billion.

As technologies surrounding cloud computing and convergence continue to evolve, data center managers have to reshape their strategies to allow for greater capacity and to ensure they can provide the highest quality of uninterrupted service that is being demanded of them. Industry leader, Chatsworth Products (CPI), provides seven best practices for addressing these demands and achieving data center optimization.

Data center managers should work to identify where their resources are currently allocated and how they can best be optimized. The key to this is embracing the latest thermal efficiency, airflow and power and environmental monitoring strategies. The way data centers utilize their resources will undoubtedly continue to change as new technologies emerge. Furthermore, as more devices become integrated with the Internet of Things (IoT), downtime will not be an option.

With this in mind, here are seven best practices to consider:

Choosing to Get a Degree Online

Of course, you can go to just about any college in the country to earn your degree, but there is a more popular option that has been giving every student a chance to get a degree in a way that is a little easier.  Choosing to get your degree online is an option and master in communications degrees are included as an option.  Because you can get a degree online these days, there are now plenty of schools that offer this type of course.  Doing a simple online search can help you narrow down that search.