March 15, 2016 Off

Altiscale Launches Altiscale Insight Cloud

By David
Grazed from Altiscale, Inc.

Altiscale, Inc., the leading provider of Big Data-as-a-Service, today introduced a new solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud, a self-service analytics solution for Big Data. The Altiscale Insight Cloud supplies the critical missing bridge between Big Data and the business user — a rapidly queried data lake that enables business analysts to get critical answers all by themselves, while using familiar business intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft Excel.

The Altiscale Insight Cloud powers interactive SQL queries, dynamic visualizations, real-time dashboards, and other reporting and analytics capabilities. As a high-performance, self-service analytics solution, the Altiscale Insight Cloud replaces more complex, expensive alternatives that require heavy IT involvement, allowing Big Data to be harnessed more broadly and quickly throughout the organization and improving the speed and size of business impact. 

March 15, 2016 Off

Lifesize Enhances All-in-One Collaboration Platform With Integrated Group Chat Across All Devices

By David
Grazed from Lifesize

Lifesize, a global provider of award-winning audio, web and video conferencing technology, today announced that it has expanded and enhanced the free chat functionality in its Lifesize Cloud service. By improving 1:1 chat and introducing group chat, Lifesize Cloud now aggregates the critical features for collaboration and meeting productivity into one easy-to-use application.

Lifesize group chat extends the conversation beyond the conference room, helping teams continue brainstorming, problem solving, and addressing questions more efficiently. And when the team wants to gather face-to-face, Lifesize chat instantly escalates to a video call with just one click. To keep projects moving forward, users can participate in chats in multiple meeting rooms, return to a previous chat session, or review their chat history.

March 15, 2016 Off

SoftLayer IaaS v2.1 Manager Now Available for the Ensim Automation Suite

By David
Grazed from Ensim Corporation

Ensim Corporation, a leading provider of an end-to-end platform for monetizing any offering with marketplace, subscription management, service catalog, provisioning, usage collection, and billing for service providers, MSPs, and enterprises, today announced the availability of a major update to their integrated solution with IBM Cloud / SoftLayer. The integration with the Ensim Automation Suite enables complete customer life-cycle management with full usage collection, rating, payment, and billing.

The Ensim Automation Suite enables the complete quote to cash process, from the initial order configuration, quote, approval process, notifications, deployment, and usage tracking, to billing and payment for the full array of SoftLayer offerings. Providers can bundle with 100s of other XaaS applications that are pre-integrated with the Ensim Automation Suite for monthly, yearly, or flexible subscription and payment plans. Single sign-on directly via the Ensim portal to the SoftLayer administrative console ensures ease of management, while automated usage collection ensures accounts are always in sync and accurate. Delegated administration portals enable simplified and automated user and administrator self-service at all levels (customer, agent, reseller, service provider).

March 11, 2016 Off

Managed Services Provider Sagiss Partners With nGenx to Address Customer Demand for Cloud Services

By David
Grazed from Sagiss and nGenx

nGenx, a cloud services pioneer in the delivery of hosted workspaces, including applications, data, and desktops, today announced that Sagiss, a managed services provider (MSP) based in Texas, has chosen nGenx nFinity nWorkspace to support customers who are looking to transition their on-premise workspace to the cloud. Driven by customer demand, the partnership opens up new market opportunities for Sagiss which had not previously embraced the virtual desktop due to price point considerations.

Founded in 1992, Sagiss is an MSP serving small to mid-sized businesses in north Texas. Through expert planning, management and support, Sagiss is a trusted IT partner for leading organizations in a variety of industries. With a range of customized solutions, Sagiss can serve as a fully outsourced IT staff, supplement in-house teams, or assist with special projects and strategic initiatives.

March 11, 2016 Off

Velostrata Announces General Availability for First Software That Moves Business Application Workloads to the Cloud in Minutes

By David
Grazed from Velostrata

Today Velostrata, the cloud workload mobility company, announced general availability (GA) for the industry’s first software that removes the barriers to public cloud for business application workloads. Velostrata’s unique technology decouples compute from storage — providing the first software that moves production workloads to the cloud in minutes, without changing the applications and without moving associated storage to the cloud. Prior to the GA announcement, the product was in beta with large and mid-size enterprises who purchased the product after providing exceptional feedback about the agility, cost-saving, risk mitigation, and efficiency benefits of the Velostrata solution.

Despite the promise of public cloud to provide capacity on demand and better business agility, enterprises continue to struggle with complexity, costs, and risk associated with moving stateful business applications like ERP, OLTP or other production workloads with large data sets to the cloud. With Velostrata, customers are able to take advantage of the agility, scalability and cost-efficiency of the cloud, without the baggage of moving terabytes of stored data, while maintaining application performance. Enterprises can now reduce their data center footprint and move business application workloads incrementally, on a temporary or long term basis, without application re-writes and complex conversions. 

March 11, 2016 Off

Rackspace Expands OpenStack Leadership With Next Generation Bare Metal Servers

By David
Grazed from Rackspace

Rackspace today announced the next generation of OnMetal Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack — bare metal, single-tenant servers that are API-provisioned in two minutes, providing near-instant scalability and elasticity. This latest version of OnMetal Cloud Servers delivers innovative connectivity between public cloud and dedicated hardware and enables unprecedented hybrid cloud performance. Both Microsoft and Linux workloads can now benefit from these next generation capabilities by capitalizing on the flexibility of public cloud with the performance and security of bare metal servers.

OnMetal Cloud Servers are an ideal solution for customers looking to run workloads such as Cassandra, Docker, Spark and Windows that require intensive data processing, raw compute power and the ability to quickly scale and deploy. This offering gives customers bare metal speed, with the control, security and consistent performance comparable to dedicated hardware. OnMetal Cloud Servers help increase efficiencies at scale, allowing customers to reduce the cost and complexity of their IT operations by consolidating workloads from many virtual environments to a few bare metal servers.

March 11, 2016 Off

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Accepts Kubernetes as First Hosted Project; Technical Oversight Committee Elected

By David
Grazed from Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the development of cloud native applications and services and driving alignment among container technologies, today announced that Kubernetes has been accepted by the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and its IP will be transferred to the Foundation. The elected TOC members are also being announced today.

Initially developed by Google as an open source container orchestration system, Kubernetes includes apps, services, network storage, cluster management and performance and stability features. It is licensed under the Apache License v2. Kubernetes v1.2 is expected later this month. The TOC is considering multiple technologies for the CNCF and will review proposals as they’re received.

 
March 11, 2016 Off

Mavenspire Partners with Pivot3 to Bring Hyperconverged Solutions to the Market

By David
Grazed from Mavenspire and Pivot3

Mavenspire, a leader in the data center solutions and services space, today announced that it has partnered with Pivot3, a leader in dynamic hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions and high performance storage with Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. Through this partnership, Mavenspire will be able to provide customers with software-defined data center solutions that substantially reduce cost and complexity, while also delivering better capacity utilization, higher compute efficiency and greater fault tolerance for running enterprise IT workloads.

Mavenspire’s process combines expert assessment, architecture, design and implementation to provide customers with a roadmap to their ideal IT environment. The strategic partnership with Pivot3 gives Mavenspire a distinct advantage in the high-growth markets of storage, virtualization and HCI.

March 11, 2016 Off

Blue Medora Announces vRealize Operations Management Pack for KVM

By David
Grazed from Blue Medora.

Organizations that need to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot their entire open-source virtualization environment can consolidate and automate operations with a new management pack from Blue Medora, the leading innovator in enterprise cloud and data center management.

The Blue Medora vRealize Operations Management Pack for Kernal-based Virtual Machines (KVM) collects performance data from critical Linux-based virtual machine resources within the end user’s KVM landscape and makes it available in a single VMware vRealize Operations console.

March 11, 2016 Off

Zerto Releases Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) Version 4.5

By David
Article Written by David Marshall

Zerto has recently announced the availability of a new feature rich update to its flagship product, Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR), bringing it to version 4.5.    

Zerto Virtual Replication is the first hypervisor-based replication solution to offer enterprise-class cross-hypervisor replication, disaster recovery, data protection and workload mobility.  With ZVR, IT departments can automatically convert Hyper-V VMs to VMware, convert VMware VMs to Hyper- V, & convert Hyper-V to AWS for increased flexibility and cost savings.

Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5 builds upon the company’s always-on replication, with no snapshots, replication and orchestration capabilities by adding granular recovery.  Now, a single file or folder can be recovered from the journal, improving the mean time to recovery for files, folders, VMs, applications and sites.  Many other improvements were made as well to simplify disaster recovery operations, to further reduce ongoing management and maintenance and to automate more DR operations to ensure consistency and repeatability.

And it is Zerto’s interoperability (cross-replication, multi-hypervisor support) that is one of the big advantages that sets this solution apart from others.