Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Dan Kusnetzsky.

Cosentry recently announced a new extension to its Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering. The goal is helping small to medium size enterprises have the same DR capabilities as their larger cousins.  Cosentry describes its DRaaS offering in the following way:

    Cosentry’s DRaaS has been enhanced to meet varying recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), with targets ranging from less than 15 minutes to several days based on application importance and budget…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline.  Author: Perry Vandell.

SingleHop, the private cloud hosting company, said on Tuesday that it is acquiring Server Intellect, which is best known for providing Microsoft-managed hosting solutions. SingleHop believes Server Intellect’s experience in Microsoft’s Hyper-V native hypervisor will give it an advantage over the competition.

More than half of the enterprise hypervisor market has found a home with VMware – which SingleHop also supports – but notes that Microsoft’s Hyper-V encompasses approximately 30 percent of the market…

Grazed from WhaTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

We’ve written plenty in this column about the beneficial attributes of cloud computing but there’s another side to these: if successfully exploited by your competitors, cloud computing can be toxic to your business.  And it is the main benefits of cloud computing that make it a particularly powerful tool in the hands of a disruptive startup competitor: low, or zero, upfront costs; usage-based charging, rapid and massive scalability.

These aspects of cloud computing have been brought to the fore in a new report form Frost & Sullivan: The Role of Cloud Computing in Industry Transformation. It says: "Cloud computing is … a significant enabler of new, disruptive competitors—allowing new entrants to quickly and cost-effectively roll out new products and services and enter new markets, at a speed which can often blindside established market participants."…

Grazed from BusinessSolutions. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ingram Micro Inc. recently announced channel partners in the U.S. and Canada can now provision, invoice, manage and support Microsoft Office 365 products and bundles via the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. A proprietary gateway developed by Ingram Micro and its valued partners, the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace enables channel partners to transform and grow their cloud business by offering instant, online access to a wide array of services and solutions from market-leading cloud vendors.

“Ingram Micro is the first master cloud service provider to offer a true, online consumption model for Office 365 that is backed by a suite of migration services and a dedicated service desk,” said Renee Bergeron, vice president, Cloud, Ingram Micro. “This allows our resellers to have a more direct relationship with their customers while maintaining the flexibility to bundle their offering with solutions from Ingram Micro or other leading cloud service providers.”…

Grazed from Mellanox.  Author: PR Announcement.

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd., a leading supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems, today announced Mellanox Multi-Host™, an innovative technology that provides high flexibility and major savings in building next generation, scalable Cloud, Web 2.0 and high-performance data centers.

The new technology enables designing and building new scale-out heterogeneous compute and storage racks with direct connectivity between compute elements, storage elements and the network, better power and performance management, while achieving maximum data processing and data transfer at minimum capital and operational expenses. Mellanox Multi-Host technology is available today in the company’s line of ConnectX®-4 10/25/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, and in OCP-based boards as part of Facebook’s recently announced Yosemite platform…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Hewlett-Packard has just unveiled new, low-cost servers — the Cloudline family of servers — to meet the needs of service providers that want to differentiate themselves in the market. HP said its new open standards-based solutions, partnerships and flexible business Relevant Products/Services models will help service providers drive growth, accelerate service delivery and reduce costs.

HP may be right on time with its solutions, given IDC research that shows most organizations will stop managing their own infrastructures over the next five years. The IDC data Relevant Products/Services suggests enterprises will more often turn to dedicated and shared cloud Relevant Products/Services offerings in service provider data centers in the years ahead…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Let’s start the conversation with the very real fact that cloud computing is growing quickly. Organizations are adopting the cloud as a new foundation for their business models. This kind of growth is only slated to continue as a recent Gartner report shows that cloud computing will become the bulk of new IT spend by 2016.

Furthermore, the idea and perception of cloud is changing as well. The Gartner report goes on to discuss how there is a flawed perception of cloud computing as being one large phenomenon. Rather, cloud computing is actually a spectrum of things complementing one another and building on a foundation of sharing…

Grazed from CloudComputing. Author: James Bourne.

90% of users polled in the LinkedIn Information Security group claim they are either very or moderately concerned about public cloud security. The survey, sponsored by CloudPassage, aimed to give a comprehensive examination of current security mindsets from a more than 250,000 respondent base with a broad section of company sizes, experience and cloud mindset. Here are the key stats:

• 71% of respondents are either in planning stages, actively implementing or in production with cloud environments. Hybrid cloud deployments are most common with 7 out of 10 respondents using both private and public clouds in their organisation – 71% hybrid, 17% private cloud, 12% public cloud
• Cloud adoption barriers are general security concerns (45%), data loss and leakage risks (41%), loss of control (31%), legal and regulatory compliance (29%), and integration with existing IT environment (29%)…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

National IT infrastructure and cloud services provider, Peak 10, Inc., announced today that it has teamed with Level 3 Communications, a global communications provider, to introduce Level 3 Cloud Connect Solutions – Ethernet to Peak 10 customers. This unique service provides performance and security of a private, scalable Ethernet connection into the Peak 10 cloud. It replaces distance-sensitive pricing with flat-rated pricing, and scales bandwidth on-demand to support changing business needs.

"Some applications and cloud-use models are best served by a private, secure connection to their cloud service provider. However, it can be cost prohibitive based on the physical distance between the customer and the cloud provider," said Monty Blight, vice president of sales operations and product strategy at Peak 10…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Editorial Staff.

Salesforce, today unveiled Salesforce Service Cloud Intelligence Engine (SSCIE) an added layer of intelligence in the Service Cloud that adds analytics to customer service. Studies show that businesses that adopt a smarter approach to customer service achieve a 91% greater year-over-year customer retention rate compared to those that don’t.

Yet, most companies are not equipped to address these new consumer demands and are in jeopardy of falling behind their competitors. Which is where Salesforce Service Cloud Intelligence Engine comes in to play. The new engine adds new features to the customer agent including:…