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:

The OpenStack community today released Newton, the 14th version of the most widely deployed open source software for building clouds. New features in the Ironic bare metal provisioning service, Magnum container orchestration cluster manager, and Kuryr container networking project more seamlessly integrate containers, virtual and physical infrastructure under one control plane.

"We believe these analyst recognitions, combined with our 96 percent customer retention rate, underscore our commitment to our customers’ security and success," said Tom Kemp, CEO and co-founder of Centrify. "This report comes on the heels of Centrify being named a leader in the Gartner June 2016 Magic Quadrant for Identity and Access Management as a Service, Worldwide."

Canadian Web Hosting (www.canadianwebhosting.com), the leading cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider in Canada announced the general release of their new Private Cloud Hosting plans that greatly expand the availability of their industry best virtualization choices. Their cloud portfolio now includes on-demand Proxmox Private Clouds.  These new plans are available in certified Canadian data centers in Vancouver, BC or Toronto, ON and give customers access to complete server virtualization management, support for both Windows and Linux images, low-cost managed support and advanced features at a fraction of the cost of typical enterprise systems.  

With Proxmox Private Clouds, many businesses now have access to an enterprise-ready system that allows them to quickly reduce their infrastructure spend. This is done by the ability to increase the efficiency of their infrastructure resources and significantly reduce typical hardware costs and administrative time required to run their own servers and hardware.  Canadian Web Hosting’s launch of Proxmox Private Clouds in Canada gives customers access to a completely open source server virtualization system that utilizes KVM (Kernal-based Virtual Machines) running on lightweight container-based virtualization, Linux Containers (LXC) storage, virtualized networks and high availability. 

Cloud native communications software leader Metaswitch today announced the integration of its virtualized IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS) solution with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Helion OpenStack Carrier Grade and NFV Director orchestration platform. The combined solution accelerates fixed and mobile network operators’ deployments of advanced services including VoLTE on private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructures. With this integration, Metaswitch becomes the first Independent Software Vendor (ISV) to complete all levels of validation in the HPE OpenNFV Partner Program.

"The integration of Metaswitch IMS and HPE Helion enables CSPs to take full advantage of breakthrough cloud economics when bringing advanced voice services to market," said Brandon Harper, SVP of business development at Metaswitch. "The combined solution builds on our commitment to cloud native software development and furthers our close collaboration with HPE, which stands at the forefront of NFV platform and infrastructure virtualization."

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Ed Jones.

Every business has that one legacy system they can’t seem to let go of. You know you’ve got one – a relic hidden away in some dusty server room. But are you aware of the damage these outdated systems can, will and may already be having on your organisation? The damage inflicted by legacy technology can range from minor systems issues through to major events that could put your organisation out of business – and it’s important to know the hidden dangers.

Increased downtime

Outdated software runs on outdated hardware, all of which eventually leads to ever increasing downtime and continued system failures. Running systems past their operational lifespan is a recipe for disaster. These systems will increasingly overheat, crash and eventually cease to operate…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2016/oct/10/hidden-dangers-legacy-technology-and-how-resolve-them/

Grazed from Thrillist. Author: Joe McGauley.

"Just save it to the cloud!" You’ve heard this, probably in the same sentence with some other obnoxious tech buzzwords. Run out of space on your iPhone? Buy some more space in the cloud! Your mom can’t figure out how to email you photos from her dog’s birthday party? Upload them to the cloud! But, do you actually understand what exactly the cloud is, or how it works? There’s no shame — it’s confusing as hell. To clear things up, here’s what you should know.

The cloud is not a physical object

First things first: you cannot reach out and touch "the cloud." That’s because it’s not a physical object in space, not some gigantic hard drive in the sky, but rather an enormous network of remote servers all around the world that we are all constantly saving and retrieving data to and from via our high-speed internet connections…