Author: David

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

NextCloud, a state of the art cloud computing service provider, today announced the availability of its NextStore(SM) service which provides high speed, high performance cloud backup for small, medium and large organizations facing the operational and financial challenges of offsite back-up, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity.

"This high performance platform provides a compelling alternative to tape backup and existing low speed, internet-based cloud backup systems which fail to meet the requirements of the enterprise," said Jonathan Reeves, Chairman of NextCloud. "NextStore services allow our customers on east and west coasts to protect their operations and reduce risk by storing critical data offsite and replicate data across multiple locations."…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Racemi, which specializes in moving business computing workloads onto and between clouds, snagged $7 million in B Round funding led by Paladin Capital Group and Harbert Venture Partners. The money will fund the expansion of sales, service and engineering efforts for Racemi’s cloud broker service. That brings total funding for the company to $19.3 million.

As more companies evaluate cloud deployments — especially multi-cloud deployments — the need for easy and safe ways to put workloads to the cloud to begin with, and then move them between clouds as needed, will grow. That’s the problem services like Racemi’s DynaCenter and competitors like CloudSwitch, now owned by Verizon and run out of its Terremark unit, are taking on. Other offerings in this space include Scalent, acquired by Dell in 2010, Altirus, now part of Symantec and Platespin, bought by Novell in 2008…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Rob Vanderburg.

Just a few years ago, cloud computing was a nearly unheard-of development in IT. Today, many enterprises are interacting with the cloud on a daily basis. A recent North Bridge Venture Partners survey of 785 IT decisionmakers reported that 50 percent of users say they are completely confident in the cloud. IDC predicted that by the end of 2012, 80 percent of new commercial enterprise applications will have been deployed on cloud platforms.

Cloud adoption has nowhere to go but up. However, companies still do have hesitations about adoption. The top ones uncovered by North Bridge were security (55 percent) and regulatory compliance (38 percent).

If the CIOs of private enterprises listed security and compliance as their main hesitations about the cloud, imagine how government agencies feel. In fact, until 2011, federal government agencies, which operate under sophisticated IT governance structures, regulations and security requirements, had no official impetus to migrate to the cloud at all. The cost-savings and scalability advantages of the cloud may have been clear, but adoption was hampered by concern that cloud providers couldn’t navigate the government’s unique requirements…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Liz McMillan.

Virtustream and SafeNet on Tuesday announced that they have entered into an agreement that will incorporate SafeNet’s market-leading authentication solutions into Virtustream’s enterprise cloud platform, xStream.

"Enterprises looking to deploy the cloud want both enterprise-grade performance and security, while still benefiting from the scalability and economics of multi-tenant virtualization technology," said Dr. Shaw Chuang, Executive Vice President of Engineering, Virtustream. "Incorporating SafeNet’s authentication platform brings another best-of-breed offering to our platform and lays the foundation for further extensive security capabilities."…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Storage requirements are growing exponentially and, as a result, companies are looking for alternatives to traditional tape-based solutions. The cloud can provide a cost-effective storage alternative, but it may not be the right solution for every case. Today, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, released a list of the top pros and cons to a cloud-based storage solution to help CIOs and other IT professionals determine if this cost-effective alternative to tape will work for their specific requirements.

“Most organizations can take advantage of cloud storage,” says Victor Dermott, solution architect, cloud computing, for Logicalis. Large organizations, Dermott notes, frequently have very large volumes of online storage and may have legal requirements to retain data for years, including unstructured data like pictures, films and radiology studies, resulting in petabytes of storage which can run into prohibitive costs for media and physical storage. Small and medium-sized organizations may benefit from the cloud’s affordable monthly terms and the ability to easily increase their storage service levels. “Any organization that has large volumes of archive data, or unstructured data, and a requirement to control and access that data on a policy basis can benefit from cloud-based storage systems,” Dermott says, noting that, frequently, the best data to store in the cloud are those types that have traditionally been stored on tape. To help IT pros determine if their companies can benefit from cloud storage, Dermott suggests a careful examination of the pros and cons…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Migrating applications is not a trivial process. Whether you want to move apps from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud or distribute them across multiple cloud providers, you’ll face obstacles. Moving virtual machines, migrating data and configuring networks can all create friction in the app migration process.

Migrating data from one cloud platform to another can be a substantial challenge.

Moving virtual machines. You have several options when migrating virtual machines (VMs) between an on-premises infrastructure and the cloud: using a shared machine image format, importing or rebuilding…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Egnyte netted $16 million in Series C funding to help raise its profile globally and to position itself as a leading hybrid cloud storage provider. The new cash brings its total funding to $32 million. Google Ventures, a new backer, led the round which also included funding from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris Ventures. Google Ventures partner Karim Faris will join Egnyte’s board.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is one of many cloud storage players, including Box, LogMeIn, OwnCloud, trying to crack the enterprise market for cloud storage.

CEO Vineet Jain said he will use the money to make Egnyte more of a household — er boardroom — name. “There’s been a huge amount of marketing dollars spent by our friends at Box. The number one problem I need to address is that our awareness is still low compared to Box,” Jain told me in an interview…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Aryaka, a startup offering cloud-based wide area network optimization has raised $25 million in Series C funding. The round was led by InterWest Partners, with participation from Presidio Ventures, a Sumitomo Corporation Company and included existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures. It brings Aryaka’s total funding to $54 million.

Making wide area networks — the connections between multiple corporate offices or data centers — faster isn’t sexy, but it’s an important element of corporate computing, especially as we move to the cloud and more remote work forces. By taking the traditional WAN optimization game and moving it from boxes located inside corporate offices and data centers into a service comprised of a mesh network of connections, Aryaka has fundamentally changed the business…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Violin Memory, Inc., provider of one of the world’s fastest and most scalable flash Memory Arrays, served as the storage platform required by Cisco to set the 2-socket server world record in cloud computing performance as measured by the VMware VMmark 2.1 benchmark. A record of this magnitude validates the sustained performance achieved by Violin Memory Arrays and their ability to provide the infrastructure necessary to support virtualized and cloud environments.

VMmark 2.1: The Industry’s Virtualization Platform Benchmark VMmark 2.1 is the industry’s first multi-server datacenter virtualization benchmark, which assesses the performance of a group of virtualized real world applications. It includes a variety of common platform-level workloads such as live migration of virtual machines, cloning and deploying of virtual machines, and automatic virtual machine load balancing across the datacenter. To achieve the best results, end-to-end performance from server to storage is needed…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

Coraid on Tuesday unveiled the new Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers. Designed for cloud, video and Big Data customers, this high-performance unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable unmatched scalability, performance and operational simplicity.

Carl Wright, executive vice president at Coraid noted that "organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth. By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN."…