SolarWinds MSP offers IT automation, security, and network and service management — both on-premises and in the cloud. Further differentiating its solutions, SolarWinds MSP leverages data analytics and business intelligence to provide actionable insights that MSPs can use to compete more effectively and better serve their customers.

Serverless, Inc., creators of the Serverless Framework, which enables companies to build web, mobile and IoT applications comprised of cloud services that scale automatically, has secured $3 million in seed funding led by Trinity Ventures. The funds will further Serverless’ mission to help its users spend less time operating complex infrastructure and more time delivering results.

In addition, Serverless, Inc. has brought Serverless Framework V1.0 out of beta. The Framework’s beta has seen massive interest from the open-source community and has racked up more than 11,000 GitHub stars in one year. It leverages new, event-driven compute services, like Amazon Web Services’ Lambda, to deploy applications that scale continuously and bill their owner only when they run. After being tested by hundreds of startup and enterprise companies, the Serverless Framework is ready for production.

Blue Medora, a cloud and database management software startup based in Grand Rapids, Mich., recently closed on a Series B funding round of $8.6 million, led by St. Louis-based Lewis & Clark Ventures. In a statement the company said the fresh investment will be used to expand more sales, marketing and development in cloud environments. 

Blue Medora completed its Series A for $4.6 million in 2015, and current investors VMware, Inc., eLab Ventures, Start Garden and Grand Angels also supported the series B. The total capital raised since the company’s inception is up to $14.5 million. 

• Hitachi Enterprise Cloud (HEC) for organizations that choose private and hybrid cloud to automate data center operations and application delivery.
• Hitachi Management Automation Strategy, which helps organizations simplify the management of their infrastructure.
• Enhancements to Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) 2000 and UCP HC for organizations that want to transform and modernize their IT infrastructure with economical and open converged and hyperconverged systems.

Leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider Infinitely Virtual today unveiled InfiniteProtect 2.0, an enhanced and expanded version of its award-winning cloud-based backup/disaster recovery solution.

Aimed at existing and new customers alike, InfiniteProtect 2.0 enables users to back up files safely and easily — and retain them indefinitely — from anywhere in the world, based on any schedule they choose.  InfiniteProtect 2.0 can perform synthetic full backups of Windows Servers, Windows computers, NAS devices, mobile computers, Exchange Servers and SQL Servers, along with entire Hyper-V and VMware hosts — seamlessly, with one transaction.  First introduced in 2015, InfiniteProtect 1.0 earned earned the highest rating of “Enterprise-Ready” in Skyhigh Networks’ CloudTrust Program.

A survey recently conducted by Heavy Reading reveals that 85.8 percent of telecom respondents consider OpenStack to be essential or important to their success. The survey, commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation, explores current usage and adoption plans of communications service providers (CSPs) particularly with respect to NFV, 5G, IoT and enterprise cloud. Attend a webinar hosted by Heavy Reading senior analyst Roz Roseboro on November 9 for a deep dive into the survey results, and hear directly from telecoms at the OpenStack Summit Barcelona, October 25-28, 2016.

Facing unprecedented traffic and rapidly evolving customer expectations, telecom providers worldwide are accelerating their adoption of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to increase network agility and mitigate costs, and OpenStack has emerged as the NFV infrastructure platform of choice. Already, numerous telecom providers and enterprise leaders have chosen to implement NFV with OpenStack. AT&T, Bloomberg LP, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Group, SK Telecom and Verizon are among the organizations documented using OpenStack for NFV.

Dell EMC is unveiling new software and a new generation of Dell EMC Data Domain protection storage systems that are flash-enabled to deliver industry-leading speed and scalability as well as enhanced protection for virtual environments. These new systems also provide the ultimate in efficiency for tiering long-term retention data to the cloud.

The deployment of the new Data Domain Cloud Tier software within Data Domain increases the total volume of data that can be managed through a single appliance by 200 percent, with a maximum logical capacity of 150PB. Data Domain Cloud Tier establishes Data Domain as the only protection storage to natively tier de-duplicated data to public, private, or hybrid clouds for long-term retention, including Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream Storage Cloud.

Lenovo today announced Unified Workspace Cloud, a hosted workspace solution, that will be unveiled at the Lenovo Software booth at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, October 16 to 20. Unified Workspace Cloud enables businesses to drive productivity, innovation, and profitability by providing employees with simplified access to their complete portfolio of applications and content via single sign-on, on any device, anytime, anywhere.

Technology Drives Retention and Agility

Businesses and CIOs today are frequently turning to technology policies and tools that help achieve a more flexible, agile and secure working environment in response to challenges related to attracting, engaging and retaining top talent: