Container technology represents an opportunity for developer and operations teams to increase efficiency and flexibility in the delivery of software applications. Containers enclose pieces of code in a layer of software that can be transported easily between computers. While not new, container technology is gaining steam as companies look for ways to speed software delivery and leverage emerging technologies such as public cloud infrastructure.

Asigra, Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986, released the results of an Asigra-driven global survey of more than 125 Managed Service Providers of all sizes, revealing that cloud backup services lead to increased business revenue opportunities and customer retention. Respondents also cited compliance-driven verticals, such as healthcare and financial services, as offering significant market opportunities for MSPs to grow their services. The patent-pending Asigra Recovery License Model supports the MSP profitability opportunity to maximize revenue, serve as trusted advisors and retain existing customers.

Survey Response Highlights

• 89 percent of MSPs offering cloud backup services are profitable, and 87 percent expect growth to continue
• Healthcare and financial services are top growth markets for cloud backup services
• 67 percent of profitable MSPs are offering cloud backup as a bundled service
• 50 percent of MSPs are recovering less than five percent of customer data in a typical year, and 75 percent are recovering less than 10 percent

CloudPhysics, provider of data-driven insights for smarter IT, today announced that it has added Cloud Planning Rightsizer analytics to its Public Cloud Cost Calculators for enterprises who want to move to the public cloud and their channel partners. CloudPhysics’ Cloud Cost Calculators discover the configuration of every virtual machine (VM) in the data center and determine the cloud instance that best fits those discovered configurations. The Cloud Planning Rightsizer then examines the resource consumption patterns of those VMs and automatically identifies the on-premises VMs that are over-provisioned and have more resources than they need. The customer can then "rightsize" the VM and see what the costs would be to run the smaller, more appropriate VM in the public cloud.

"Today’s IT administrators are constantly asked if the enterprise can save money by moving applications to the cloud. The answer can only emerge after rightsizing each and every on-premises VM to its appropriate public cloud instance," said Chris Schin, VP, Products at CloudPhysics. "Now IT teams can quickly and easily make data-supported decisions about the costs of running applications in the cloud — based on the actual resource needs of their VMs. The savings are real. We’ve seen customers save more than 50 percent  of costs by rightsizing with CloudPhysics."

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jo Best.

Someone grabbed my wrist and pointed sharply below us: ‘Quick, look down!’ I swam to face the seabed and gasped through my snorkel. A shark stretching some 8m long, as long as a bus, had moved silently underneath us — and I hadn’t noticed it at all. The whale shark, a beautiful creature, a filter-feeder whose giant mouth gives it a benign look, is good at escaping detection.

It’s still not known how large the global population of whale sharks is, how they migrate across the oceans, and where they give birth, despite being the largest fish species alive today. For a few minutes off the coast of Ningaloo in Western Australia, I was able to swim with one such shark, before it disappeared off into the Indian Ocean, too deep and too fast for humans to follow…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Shirley Siluk.

Shareholders of EMC Corp. today overwhelmingly voted in favor of the company’s planned merger with Dell Inc. — a more than $60 billion transaction that’s been described as the biggest tech deal in history. According to a preliminary tally, 98 percent of EMC shareholders who voted were in favor of the merger.

Final results are set to be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later this week. The shareholders casting votes represented about 74 percent of EMC’s outstanding common stock. As part of the transaction, Dell, which ceased being a publicly traded company in 2013, must compensate EMC shareholders for taking the firm private…

Grazed from Huawei. Author: Editorial Staff.

The first OpenStack Days China Conference was held on July 14th and 15th at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. In this event, Huawei participated and shared the practices of public cloud and private cloud with the China Telecom’s Guangzhou Research Institute and Dongfeng Motor Corp. Huawei also introduced container deployment technology, cascading technology and data protection technology based on OpenStack.

By working with open-source entities, partners and customers, Huawei’s goals are to jointly build a cloud ecosystem and to help enterprises achieve their digital transformation, moving them forward on the path to a fully cloudified IT enterprises. Jiang Xiaoli, OpenStack & Container Open Source Ecosystem General Manager of Huawei, introduced Huawei’s FusionCloud, an open, hybrid and integrated cloud architecture based on OpenStack…

Grazed from Omaha.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

In a world where there’s a smartphone app for everything, one company — Amazon.com — has long been the host for an outsized share of online software and computing services. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella wants to change that. Nadella has poured billions of dollars into building new data centers around the world, hoping to position Microsoft as the leading alternative to Amazon in selling online computing power — housed in remote centers, or “clouds” — to Internet startups, big corporations and consumers.

As evidence the investment is paying off, Microsoft Corp. reported Tuesday that its Azure cloud-computing business more than doubled in sales last quarter, compared with a year earlier. That growth, combined with increases in revenue from Windows software licenses and other key segments, helped offset a big decline in revenue from the Nokia smartphone business that Microsoft largely shut down last year…

Eight VFX, known in the industry for delivering high-end visual effects on tight timelines, was experiencing challenges when delivering on-demand render power to customer projects for BMW, Chevrolet, HP, Mars, Nike, Puma and Samsung. The studio initially turned to rental nodes to manage its fast-changing production pipeline and dynamic digital assets, however this process proved to be time and equipment intensive. Due to these issues, the studio explored a number of cloud-based rendering solutions with burst-compute capability, and found that Avere Systems was the only solution that did not require complex scripting or data management.

INFINIDAT, a leading provider of enterprise data storage solutions, today announced that Brightsolid, a leading UK cloud provider, has implemented the InfiniBox enterprise-proven storage array to improve storage performance and reliability in its VMware cloud environment. Using InfiniBox, Brightsolid reduced the time to deploy storage from hours to minutes, and lowered write latencies from 2-10 ms to below 1 ms, thereby gaining a competitive edge in its market. 

“Our mission is to deliver technical innovation with personal service. By this, we mean finding the best way to apply the most effective technology so that we always surpass the expectations of our customers in the performance, reliability and price of our service,” said Richard Higgs, CEO at Brightsolid. “InfiniBox has delivered the outstanding performance we require as we serve some of the most data-intensive industries, such as energy. Flexibility is one of our key priorities and the scalability of the InfiniBox platform meets this requirement, particularly where customers need to quickly spin resources up and down depending on business demand and budget.”