Zerto, setting the standard for protection, recovery and migration of data in cloud and virtualized data centers, today announced a new business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) solution in IBM Cloud. The new solution offers turnkey BC/DR capabilities that protect critical IT infrastructure, and supports multiple use cases including data center migrations. Running in IBM Cloud this solution automates all aspects of disaster recovery for the virtual workload to create an advanced, and flexible disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) using Zerto Virtual Replication.

Customers with production workloads running in a virtualized infrastructure can now achieve application recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes using the dedicated IBM Cloud infrastructure. Additionally, a recovery point objective (RPO) of seconds can be achieved to maintain complete control over DR, with full automation and orchestration and on-demand recovery and DR testing. Further, usage based pricing eliminates additional capital costs.

Scale Computing, the leader in hyperconverged technology across the mid-market today announced the integration of flash-enabled automated storage tiering into its award-winning HC3 platform.

This update to Scale’s converged HC3 system adds hybrid storage including SSD and spinning disk with HyperCore Enhanced Automated Tiering (HEAT). Scale’s HEAT technology uses a combination of built-in intelligence, data access patterns, and workload priority to automatically optimize data across disparate storage tiers within the cluster.

"Hyperconvergence is nothing if not about simplicity and cost. But it is also about performance, especially in the SMB to mid-size enterprises where most, if not all workloads will simultaneously run on a single cluster of nodes," said Arun Taneja, Founder and Consulting Analyst of the Taneja Group. "Introducing flash into a hard disk based system is easy; the question is how do you do it so that it maintains low cost and simplicity while boosting performance. This is what Scale has done in these new models. The only decision the IT admin and the business user need to make is to determine the importance of the application and its priority. After that flash is invisible to them. The only thing visible is better application performance. This is how it should be."

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Gulf Air, the national carrier of the Kingdom of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment with Red Hat solutions. As part of this project, Gulf Air has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data solution, Arabic Sentiment Analysis.

Established in 1950, Gulf Air is one of the Middle East’s first commercial airlines and today it is a major international carrier, with a fleet of 28 modern aircraft serving 39 cities in 22 countries across three continents. The company prides itself on offering traditional Arabian hospitality and is committed to being an industry leader in developing products and services that reflect the evolving needs and aspirations of its passengers. In the age of social media, that also entails monitoring and analysis of online conversations about Gulf Air.

Grazed from CSO. Author: Brian Dye.

With enterprises moving to hybrid cloud environments, IT architectures are increasingly spread among on-premises infrastructure and public and private cloud platforms. Hybrid models offer many well-documented benefits, but they also introduce more complexity for securing data and applications across the enterprise. And this added complexity requires an increasingly diverse skill set for security teams.

That’s a challenge, considering the growing cybersecurity skills shortage. In one recent study, 46% of organizations said they have a “problematic shortage” of cybersecurity skills – up from 28% just a year ago. One-third of those respondents said their biggest gap was with cloud security specialists. Modern security teams require a broad and deep mix of technology skills, ranging from twists on traditional network and OS technology all the way to security on data itself, to address a rapidly evolving threat landscape…

Grazed from BDLive. Author: Shira Ovide.

THE web’s biggest spenders have mostly started splurging again. I wrote six months ago that Google, Microsoft and Amazon — among the world’s biggest operators of internet technologies and cloud-computing services — had slowed or reversed their perky growth in spending on huge server farms and other capital projects. I did not expect the breather to last — and for the most part, it has not.

Collectively, capital spending by those three giants and Facebook has risen 23% this year after a collective decline of 0.9% last year. Only Google’s parent company Alphabet has bucked the capex-growth rebound. Buying and maintaining their gigantic computing networks represent a big chunk of the tech superpowers’ overall bill…

The cloud computing market is continuing to grow and expand at a huge rate, with more and more businesses each day making the transition over to the cloud. With no signs of it slowing down any time soon, the demand for IT professionals with cloud computing skills is steadily on the incline. The cloud computing market already offers around 18 million jobs worldwide according to statistics, with cloud IT professionals with security skills being the most sought-after thanks to security being the main concern for many businesses who migrate over to the cloud. If you are an IT professional who wants to take advantage of this growing market, here are just some of the most in-demand cloud computing skills.

Encryption and Security

Grazed from Albawaba. Author: Editorial Staff.

Huawei, a global ICT solutions provider, announced its latest channel developments in ‘Transforming Together 2.0’ for the Middle East during its Partner Summit 2016, taking place today at Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai, UAE. In addition, product updates will also be shared to embrace the digital era of the Internet of Things and Cloud Computing.

Huawei’s ‘Transforming Together 2.0’ channel strategy is based on developing strong, collaborative partnerships to help end-users gain maximum value out of its solutions. Huawei is committed to building an ecosystem of partners to complement and provide compelling value propositions to businesses…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Joshua Jamerson.

Oracle Corp. said it agreed to acquire utilities cloud-services provider Opower Inc., expanding the database giant’s portfolio of cloud software for the utilities industry. Oracle will pay $10.30 a share in cash, a roughly 30% premium over Friday’s closing price. The deal is valued at about $532 million, net of Opower’s cash.

Opower’s stock rose 31% to $10.31 in premarket trading as Oracle remained unchanged from Friday’s closing price of $39.86. Rodger Smith, general manager of Oracle’s utilities global business unit, said the tie-up would make Oracle the largest provider of cloud services to utilities…

Grazed from OpenSource. Author: Jason Baker.

The twice-annual OpenStack Summit wrapped up last week in Austin, Texas, bringing together 7,500 developers, users, and others open source cloud enthusiasts from around the globe. Let’s take a quick look back at some of the highlights and news from the past week in this special post-Summit edition of our weekly OpenStack news.

OpenStack around the web

There’s a lot of interesting stuff being written about OpenStack. Here’s a sampling:…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

Intel is going through a rough phase. Some weeks back it had lowered its revenue forecast for the year and decided to cut down about 11.5 percent of its workforce in order to realign the business. In the latest news from the world’s largest chipmaker, there are plans to keep the smartphone SoC divisions on hold for now – effectively putting Intel out of the race among the smartphone chipmakers.

In a report published by analyst Patrick Moorhead, Intel will most likely be cancelling its forthcoming Broxton and SoFIA products, thereby leaving the smartphones and tablets market for the time being. In its response to a report on AnandTech, Intel has stated that it is accelerating its transformation from a PC company to one that will be known for cloud computing as well as smart, connected devices…