Grazed from FederalNewsRadio.  Author: Jared Serbu.

While the Defense Department has made some strides over the past year in simplifying the way it buys cloud computing services, individual DoD components are still, to a large extent, on their own when it comes to picking a provider and shepherding them through the military’s security approval process. The Navy hopes to change that beginning next month with a managed service it’s calling its “Cloud Store.”

Version 1.0 of the store will have a decidedly limited selection: its catalog will include just one provider, Amazon Web Services, leaning on an existing contract the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare System Command already holds with AWS…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Alluxio (formerly known as Tachyon), the world’s first memory-centric virtual distributed storage system, today announced its open source version 1.0 release. The vision for Alluxio is to become the de-facto storage unification layer for big data and other scale-out application environments in the same manner that Apache Spark became the standard computation layer.

Alluxio’s memory-centric architecture provides orders of magnitude performance gains over existing solutions and superior manageability by allowing developers to interact with a single storage layer API without worrying about the configurations and complexities of underlying storage and file systems. Co-created by Haoyuan Li, CEO of Alluxio, Inc. and a founding committer of Spark, Alluxio ushers in the next generation of storage virtualization for petabyte scale computing…

Big Blue announced a major partnership with VMware to bring its customers onto the IBM Cloud; and at the same time, also announced partnerships with the developer community GitHub, link shortener Bitly, the recently open-sourced Swift language from Apple, and more.

Despite the increase in organizations embracing and investing in the cloud, only five percent of respondents believe they have an "optimized" cloud strategy.

Boomerang is an easy-to-use and cost-effective virtual appliance for replicating VMware virtual machines (VMs) to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud for low-cost backup and disaster recovery. Boomerang also automatically remodels replicated VMs to native Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for fast execution, providing an ideal solution for migrating from on-premise systems to the cloud and for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

VeloCloud enables enterprise-grade performance, security and reliability to both enterprise and cloud applications as part of the MetTel managed SD-WAN and bonded Internet solution. VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN runs as an overlay over Internet and Hybrid links while simplifying deployments and reducing costs.

The solution is part of the Oracle Communications intelligent orchestration framework, which helps guide CSPs in their adoption of Network Function Virtualization technology and helps them maximize its benefits. The framework gathers and analyzes network performance information, evaluates the network’s operation against predefined policies and business rules, and can trigger the appropriate action to automatically modify the behavior of services, network functions, and virtualized infrastructure — in a closed loop manner.

Grazed from ChannelPartners.  Author: James Anderson.

Two cloud companies that do business in the channel have brought on new personnel.  CloudPassage, the cloud security provider, added a vice president of channel sales, Tim Colby, and a vice president of federal sales, Dan Brigati.  Colby most recently led worldwide channel sales at Infoblox. He said CloudPassage’s security platform address a major need in the IT space.

Grazed from InfoQ.  Author: Kent Weare.

Microsoft is approaching the cloud as a model and not something that is tied to a specific location.  For customers who are not ready for public cloud, Microsoft is trying to bring cloud based capabilities to local data centers that allow customers to develop and deploy IT services in a symmetric way to that of Azure.

In response to customer demand, Microsoft has been working on a private cloud solution called Azure Stack that shares much of the same computing fabric that exists in Azure. InfoQ previously covered the January 26th release of Azure Stack Technical Preview 1.  As a result, this article will focus on what has changed since then.  Following their Technical Preview 1 release of Azure Stack, Microsoft has launched Azure PaaS Services and DevOps tools, in preview, for Azure Stack…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

While the vast majority of organisations hope for 99.9% uptime throughout the year, 57% of companies polled by CloudEndure say they had at least one outage in the past three months. The survey, which quizzed 141 IT global IT professionals, found organisations are, in general, gaining confidence in cloud disaster recovery (DR) solutions. This is noticed in the key risks to system availability.

The number one risk remains human error, followed by network failures and application bugs. Downtime of cloud providers fell from the third highest risk last year to #6 in 2016. CloudEndure found the key challenges in meeting availability goals were insufficient IT resources, followed by budget limitations and a lack of in-house expertise…