Disaster recovery solutions provider Zerto announced today that is has made some significant changes and updates to its Zerto Alliance Partner (ZAP) Program. The updates have been put in place to better meet the needs of Zerto’s partner network since experiencing extreme growth; from 33 partners in 2012 to more than 1,500 reseller, cloud service provider (CSP) and system integrator partners today. Looking at more recent figures, Zerto has seen 50 percent year-over-year (YoY) growth in its partner network and 112 percent YoY growth in partner certifications. The program refresh, according to Zerto, is based directly on feedback they have received from partners as they’ve experienced this growth, and focuses on providing extra simplicity, an equal rewards approach regardless of partner type and a unique rewards-based training method Zerto calls "gamification." 

"The Zerto partner program is simple, far more simple than any other program we’ve been a part of -it just works," said Stephen Johnson, President, Corus360. "It’s easy to get to the Zerto team and resources that we need, which allows us to focus on designing and deploying DR solutions and services in the field. The new Zerto partner program changes the way we do business and enables us to be more successful in growing our data recovery and business continuity opportunities." 

PCI (short for Payment Card Industry) compliance is a list of practices that administer data security across credit/debit card payments. Businesses need to comply with the requirements outlined by the PCI Security Standards Council in order for their merchant account to stay in good standing. 

Every business that accepts credit/debit cards must obey with these Payment Card Industry standards, no matter what processing method they use. BluePay has compiled a slideshow answering some frequently asked questions as well as debunking a few myths regarding PCI compliance.

Today at OpenStack Day UK, OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce offered a sneak preview of speakers committed to the next OpenStack Summit, the must-attend cloud computing event, taking place October 25-28 at the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB) in Barcelona, Spain. Approximately 6,000 attendees from 50+ countries are expected to attend the Summit to discuss how the OpenStack open source cloud platform is helping companies increase agility and save money as software becomes more strategic to their business.

Featured speakers include OpenStack users and community members at Banco Santander, CERN, China Mobile, Comcast, Constant Contact, Crowdstar, Deutsche Telekom, Folksam, Google, Mesosphere, Sky UK, Snapdeal, Swisscom, Telefonica, United States Army, Verizon, Walmart and many more. View the full schedule, follow updates and register to attend at https://www.openstack.org/summit/barcelona-2016/.

Blue Medora, a leading innovator in enterprise cloud and data centre management, today announced SelectStar, a new IT operational analytics (ITOA) platform that combines comprehensive database and cloud infrastructure monitoring to help organisations track and optimise critical database performance and availability metrics.

The solution is available as a comprehensive Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that deploys in less than 15 minutes. SelectStar delivers a normalised view of more than 90 percent of production cloud-native or on-premises databases and their underlying cloud or virtualised infrastructure, ideal for multiple database architectures.

Nimbix, a leading HPC cloud platform provider, today announced a new capability, PushToCompute is a method for rapid cloud deployment and monetization of containerized compute intensive applications.  This capability is built into the JARVICE platform which powers the Nimbix Cloud.

Through the added feature on the JARVICE platform, developers are able to import the latest version of their application into an existing workflow in the Nimbix Cloud and make it available for consumption at scale immediately.  The application, along with its dependencies, executes in JARVICE’s container runtime environment, which provides superior performance and scale.  This includes sub-second launch times, faster execution, seamless access to advanced computational accelerators (such as GPUs and FPGAs), automated heterogeneous data management, and rapid workflow deployment across multiple compute nodes either in a parallel or distributed paradigm.

5nine Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner and the leading provider of Hyper-V security and management solutions, today released 5nine V2V Easy Converter 7.0, a VMware to Hyper-V conversion solution that enables enterprises to quickly and efficiently migrate VMware virtual machines to cloud-based Microsoft Azure and on premises Hyper-V infrastructures.

5nine V2V Easy Converter 7.0 simplifies and accelerates VMware to Microsoft migration projects, enabling enterprises to more quickly realize the economic value of virtualizing their IT infrastructure on Azure and Hyper-V. The solution performs fast, non-intrusive conversions with the highest ratio of success in the market.

Avere Systems, a leading provider of hybrid cloud enablement solutions, today unveiled the Avere Cloud-Core NAS (C2N) system, the only storage solution to combine the simplicity of NAS and the efficiency of object storage to deliver cloud-enabled infrastructure to the enterprise. The Avere C2N system transforms traditional storage environments into cloud infrastructure that scales from 120 terabytes to more than five petabytes to provide an easy and economical path to the cloud. Unlike other object storage solutions that start at a petabyte or more, Avere offers an entry-point solution built for starting small and scaling to large capacities for demanding applications in media and entertainment, life sciences, financial services, technology and other high data-growth industries.

Most enterprises looking to adopt the cloud are faced with challenges such as unfamiliar object-based application program interfaces (APIs) for data access, vendor solutions that start at over a petabyte, do-it-yourself solutions that are complex to implement, and public cloud data migrations that are difficult to execute and raise security concerns. The Avere C2N system addresses these complications by providing organizations with a cost-effective and manageable first step to cloud migration. By integrating private and public object storage with an organization’s existing NAS infrastructure, C2N allows enterprises to create a simple and flexible hybrid cloud, managing an entire heterogeneous infrastructure as a single, logical pool of storage.

Grazed from VirtualizationReview. Author: Trevor Pott.

A common rationale for using public cloud computing is that security done by professionals will invariably be better than that which is adhered to on-premises. So oft repeated is this mantra that questioning it is akin to blasphemy. Despite this, it is not objectively true that cloud security is better than on-premises security. True believers will react with anything from derision to active attempts at career sabotage for even attempting to discuss this topic. For many, the primacy of the public cloud is unchallengeable, and the argument of superior IT security is one of the pillars of argumentation.

The Arguments

Once you cut through the rhetoric, the security argument really boils down to two factors. The first is that public cloud providers know how to use and configure load balancers and their firewalls. In other words, public cloud providers have decent to good network edge security, whereas a lot of on-premises systems administrators, quite frankly, don’t even know how half the basic elements of the public cloud-provided solutions work…

Read more from the source @ https://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2016/09/19/public-cloud-doesnt-automatically-mean-better-security.aspx

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Larry Ellison has a message for Amazon Web Services: Oracle is going to give Amazon a run for its money in the cloud market. "Amazon’s lead is over," he said during his keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. "Amazon’s going to have serious competition going forward."

To that end, the company he co-founded is launching a set of new cloud data centers that are aimed at providing more powerful compute instances to help it compete against the likes of AWS, Azure and other cloud players. The generation 2 data centers will help bring a variety of performance improvements to customers who want to run high-performance workloads in the cloud…

AIS Network, a secure and compliant cloud hosting expert serving large enterprises in the health care, pharmaceutical, government, financial industries, international corporations and The Commonwealth of Virginia, today announced its entry into the VMware vCloud® Air™ Network with VMware IaaS Powered status. This designation illustrates to customers that the company’s public cloud service is validated using and compatible for use with VMware vSphere®, a leading virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures.

A member of the VMware vCloud Air Network, AISN provides its VMware IaaS Powered service using proven VMware technology that organizations already use in their existing datacenters. VMware vCloud Air Network Service Providers offer global cloud services in more than 100 countries.