Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, recently announced Supermicro and QCT as the latest Certified Rack Partner to offer Mirantis Unlocked Appliances. These turnkey, rack-based appliances ship with Mirantis OpenStack pre-configured to run in production environments and are easy to install, deploy and operate at scale.

I asked Jim Sangster, senior direct of Solutions Marketing at Mirantis, about why customers now seem to be embracing dedicated OpenStack appliances for building clouds instead of running off-the-shelf commodity servers.

VMblog:  OpenStack appliances have been the downfall of a number of startups – why are they working now?

Canonical announced today it will release Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on 21st April, featuring the new ‘snap’ package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. This is the latest version of the world’s most widely used Linux platform across desktop, IoT and cloud computing.

“The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical. “We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free software platform.”

Midokura, the global innovator in software network virtualization, today announced that Dell is offering the open-source Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) as an optional performance accelerator for the Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution, the on-premise cloud offering based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

"The Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution helps organizations rapidly build their OpenStack clouds and transform their IT environment into a cost-effective, secure, highly-available, and dynamic service-delivery center," said Ranjith Purush, director of product management, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud. "This collaboration enables organizations to flexibly build Dell’s solution with optional network virtualization technology from Midokura."

Grazed from MSPowerUser. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to the latest report published by JP Morgan analysts Mark Murphy, Doug Anmuth, Sterling Auty, Rod Hall, and Philip Cusick, the cloud computing “wars” are “entering a new phase”, and it will cause bad implications for traditional IT vendors like SAP, Oracle and IBM. They surveyed more than 207 CIOs at companies with a budget of $600 million or more annually.

According to their survey results, Microsoft will remain the dominant IT vendor ahead of Amazon, IBM and others. In fact, Microsoft seems to be one of the very few traditional IT vendors that will not lose market share. CIOs report that 16.2% of workloads are currently running in the public cloud, and that in five years 41.3% of workloads will run in a public cloud…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon unveiled several new cloud computing services on Wednesday including a way for business customers to identify the applications they already run internally so that it’s easier to switch them to Amazon’s public cloud. The new AWS Application Discovery Service is intended to solve a big problem for companies: They don’t necessarily know about all the software they use. It also identifies “dependencies” between those applications and the computers they run on,.

Matt Wood, general manager of product strategy for Amazon Web Services, announced the product, slated to go to preview in a few weeks, at an event in Chicago. While the new services will point the way, Wood said Amazon’s partner—companies like Accenture, or 2nd Watch, or Cloud Technology Partners—can provide the support and handholding to do the whole migration…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2016/04/19/amazon-cloud-migration-options/

Trilio Data, the creators of the first Data Protection-as-a-Service specification for the OpenStack community, Raksha, and Talligent, providers of cost and capacity management solutions for production-ready OpenStack clouds, have entered into a partnership. Organizations who use both Trilio Data’s solutions and Talligent’s solutions will have both comprehensive data protection and capabilities to report and bill departments and divisions for their use of data protection services. 

"There’s a common misconception that OpenStack does not need comprehensive data protection," said Sanjay Mishra, founder and CEO, Talligent. "In truth, the inherent features in OpenStack warrant a completely new thinking around data protection services. TrilioVault from Trilio Data delivers full capabilities to backup, migrate and restore their OpenStack applications, data and files."

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack company, and Supermicro, the leading innovator in high-performance, high-efficiency server, storage, and green computing total solutions for advanced IT/hyper-converged infrastructure, are partnering to deliver the Supermicro Mirantis Unlocked Appliance for Cloud Native Applications — a turnkey, rack-based appliance featuring Mirantis OpenStack, giving Supermicro customers an immediate onramp to agile development of cloud-native applications and container-based services in production.

The Supermicro Unlocked Appliance integrates Mirantis OpenStack with TwinPro SuperServers, NVMe SuperStorage servers, and Arista 10GbE top-of-rack switches into Supermicro 42U SuperRack enclosures delivering a preconfigured, fully validated, ready-to-deploy total solution. Supermicro will install and certify the appliance onsite ensuring it is ready to operate at scale.

"The launch of Saviynt on AWS Marketplace accelerates the speed at which organizations can deploy Saviynt to gain visibility into risks in AWS configuration and protect critical workloads. This is in response to the massive uptake in the use of cloud based infrastructure, and the need for continuous monitoring and preventive controls to thwart cyber-attacks," says Sachin Nayyar, CEO of Saviynt. He added, "Managing security and access for cloud infrastructure is incredibly complex and it’s not only important to get compliant, but also to stay compliant." 

vArmour, the data center and cloud security company and leader in application-aware micro-segmentation with advanced security analytics, today announced "Project Ice Cream," the release of its twelve-months-in-the-making new security architecture built for the requirements of cloud for simplicity, massive scale and economics. Built from core functionality of its flagship product, vArmour Distributed Security System (DSS), vArmour is delivering a new architecture based on of the vision it outlined late last year with "Multi-Cloud Security Architecture" to transform data center and cloud security.