The solution evolves the backup capabilities developed as part of the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, and extends its existing endpoint and remote office capabilities to provide a third pillar of in-cloud workloads, all of which are managed from a single pane of glass management console from the cloud infrastructure of an organization’s choice. CTERA Cloud Server Data Protection enables organizations to replace cumbersome and siloed traditional backup solutions that fail to meet the evolving requirements of software-defined cloud operations.
Benefits of the CTERA platform include:

Day moves into the role of Armor president after serving in the roles of Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Operating Officer over the last few years. In his new role, he will be responsible for setting company-wide priorities and implementing cross-functional processes to ensure consistent execution.

The latest version of Cloudify, the open source, multi-cloud orchestration software based on the TOSCA standard, is now available, bringing with it a multitude of upgrades and new features focused on production readiness, NFV, and Hybrid Cloud orchestration. These features include greater scalability, better security, access control, and offline installation.

The current state of production readiness for mission critical deployments is fragmented with heterogenous architectures and fractured tool sets. Cloud orchestration with Cloudify 3.3 enables application deployment and management on all major clouds with any tooling, providing a single pane of glass for these complex systems. “We’re really excited about this release that has improved production and operational stability significantly. Seeing how Cloudify is increasingly being used in enterprise and NFV environments, we have gained a lot of insights about what would make it easier to operate and maintain. On top of this, we’ve rolled out numerous new features and integrations around multi-cloud, containers and NFV orchestration, all while strengthening security to meet our clients’ demands.” says Uri Cohen, Head of Product at GigaSpaces.

The Argon Cloud Jumpstart is a complete Microsoft Private Cloud based on the Microsoft Cloud Platform and the SecureGUARD Unified Cloud Block technologies and include compute servers, storage, switches and supporting infrastructure in a very small rack enclosure. Cloud features include Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V clusters for server virtualization, tiered and RAID high-performance storage, multi-tenancy network virtualization, Microsoft System Center services and the Azure Pack management portal. The Argon Cloud Jumpstart can be administered with a similar look-and-feel as Azure but is located and managed on premises by the company’s IT department.

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Bruce Byfield.

When should you choose cloud services and when a local Linux installation? For years, cloud services have been spreading like an out-of-control bushfire. From mega-corporations to the individual owners of a Chromebook, users are outsourcing their infrastructures, passing their administration and their data to third party applications on the Internet.

Software companies are investing heavily in cloud services, and every indication is that they will continue to do so — at least, until the next development fad comes along. Yet is cloud computing really making local computing obsolete? Depending on your priorities, a strong case can still be made for local computing, especially local computing with Linux and free and open source software…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

John Purrier, chief technology officer for CenturyLink’s cloud effort, is now CTO at Automic, a business automation company. The news comes two weeks after two other high-profile CenturyLink CTL -0.83% cloud executives, Jonathan King and Jared Wray, left the company, as well as the departure of Lucas Carlson, chief innovation officer in July.

This indicates a broad changing of the guard for the telephone company, which launched an ambitious cloud computing effort four years ago with its $3.2 billion buyout of Savvis. CenturyLink subsequently bought AppFog, with its cloud development services, and Tier 3, a well-regarded cloud infrastructure provider founded by Wray. King landed at Ericsson; Wray appears to be taking time off…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/centurylink-cto-exit/

The Azure Starter Kit focuses on Azure use cases that address major business challenges among SMBs and enterprises and are easy for partners to sell. Opportunities include the end of life and end of support of SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 in April 2016. Tens of millions of SQL databases and millions of customers are affected. SMBs especially lack the resources and expertise to upgrade their databases, putting their critical data and business applications at risk. By migrating these outdated databases to Azure SQL Databases, IT service providers can save customers money and ensure their databases are always up-to-date going forward.

Total consideration in the transaction, which closed on December 8, 2015, was $30.0 million consisting of $28.5 million in cash and $1.5 million in Fusion common stock. The cash portion of the consideration was funded via Fusion’s existing bank credit facility and its cash balances. The transaction is immediately accretive to Fusion, with substantial opportunity for cost savings through elimination of redundancies.

Fidelity Acquisition Highlights

Databricks offers a cloud-based integrated workspace for big data powered by Apache Spark, the most active open source project in the big data ecosystem. Spark continues to gain industry-wide momentum, with the number of committed contributors surging from 255 in 2014 to more than 750 in 2015. The Databricks platform lets users go from data ingestion, to visual exploration and production jobs without the hassle of managing complex infrastructure, systems and tools, making it easy to turn data into value.