Grazed from ComputerDealerNews. Author: David Yin.

It’s not everyday that a single announcement can bring three household names together in one room, but that is just what happened Tuesday. At a small gathering in downtown, the Telus announced that it is partnering with the software and networking giants to provide cloud aimed at the mid-market and large enterprise.

The managed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering will include public, private and hybrid clouds, and is enabled both by its own, as well as Microsoft’s new data centres that are coming to Toronto and Quebec city in the new year, and Cisco’s Cloud Architecture. “What we’ve essentially done here… is the Telus Hybrid Cloud,” said Tom Jolly, vice president of IT and cloud services at Telus. “We are interworking Microsoft’s and Cisco’s technologies into the Microsoft Azure platform, as well as providing the ability to integrate customer on-premise data centres.”…

Grazed from JournalOf Commerce. Author: Richard Gilbert.

A locally developed cloud-based technology is helping construction labour unions across North America with office administration and membership management. "When we started many years ago, the internet and e-mail were pretty weak in terms of being a common fixture," said Reg Cawston, who is responsible for business development with Delta, B.C.-based QTrades.

"So, the software has progressed to provide internet access, which allows contractors and business agents on the road to gain access and use the information they need. They don’t have to be at a desk. All they need is a mobile device." QTrades is launching a membership database system for the Construction Maintenance and Allied Workers (CMAW) Canada, which enables local offices, business representatives, contractors and members to have up-to-date information on jobsites…

Servosity, Disaster Recovery for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), today announces their newest version of Servosity DR Server featuring Hyper-V Instant Recovery.

Servosity DR Server is the easiest way for MSPs to protect clients’ Windows or Linux servers from potential business interruptions. DR Server allows you protect data On-Premise, in Microsoft Azure, or any other major Cloud Provider. DR Server includes Servosity’s unique technology as well as StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect SPX software. With the new release, we now support Instant Recovery directly into Hyper-V.

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) today announced that Lawter has replaced their IBM storage with the Zadara Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) architecture to support their SAP applications worldwide. By working with Zadara’s partner Dimension Data, Lawter has been able to upgrade their aging IT infrastructure to address immediate performance, security and cost challenges, and also position themselves for future growth.

Zadara’s partner Dimension Data, a global provider of IT solutions and services, has successfully completed the first phase of the modernization of the ICT infrastructure of resin producer Lawter. Lawter, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Harima Chemicals Group, was looking to replace their older infrastructure with a more scalable, higher performing, and easier to manage environment.

xMatters, inc., a leader in communication-enabled business processes, has received accreditation from the Crown Commercial Service to trade on G-Cloud 7 in the UK’s Digital Marketplace. It can be found under the ‘Software As A Service’ Lot in the procurement framework, which went live on 23 November.

Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced it has acquired Thomas Duryea Consulting, a leader in designing, building and deploying data centre, data management, enterprise information systems, systems management and cloud environments for mid-sized and large enterprises.

With an annual turnover of approximately US$50 million Thomas Duryea employs 125 staff in its data centre and mature cloud services business, with capabilities across EMC, Dell, NetApp, VMware and Microsoft.

StrongBox provides protected nearline and archive storage for unstructured data. By combining flash, disk, and LTFS tape, StrongBox helps businesses protect data on-site, off-site, or in the cloud. StrongBox VM provides all the same features as the original StrongBox and can be deployed in less than an hour using a company’s existing VMWare ESXi servers. This allows customers to quickly create file and object-based shared storage for local and distributed architectures without the requirement of dedicated hardware.

Array Networks Inc., a global leader in application delivery networking, announces today the immediate availability of its vAPV virtual application delivery controller on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

As virtualization and public, private and hybrid clouds continue to expand their footprints within the business landscape, businesses are finding an increased need for solutions that allow applications to scale in the face of a rapidly increasing, and demanding, user base. By proxying and intelligently load balancing traffic across multiple virtual servers, Array’s vAPV virtual ADCs give customers deploying on Microsoft Azure the ability to significantly enhance the availability, performance and security of cloud-based services.

DataCore Software, a leader in Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Virtual SAN solutions, today announced that it has signed Velocity Tech Solutions as a new value-added reseller (VAR) serving the United States. Velocity Tech Solutions primarily resells server and storage hardware offerings from HP and Dell, including EqualLogic.