Author: David

Today, at HostingCon 2012, OnApp announced version 3.0 of its OnApp Cloud software, which includes support for VMware and means that OnApp’s cloud management platform now supports approximately 85 percent of the hypervisor market. With OnApp Cloud v3.0, service providers can run their VMware ESXi hypervisors alongside Xen and KVM hypervisors on the same cloud platform, via the same intuitive OnApp Control Panel. By enabling multiple virtualization environments to be consolidated and managed in a single cloud platform, OnApp Cloud v3.0 further reduces the total cost of ownership for cloud service providers.

The new VMware hypervisor support in OnApp Cloud v3.0 also enables service providers to offer cloud services to the large installed base of VMware users, and grow their customer base, while VMware users can host their applications with hundreds of providers around the world and take advantage of OnApp’s cost-effective, feature-rich cloud platform. VMware is used extensively by telcos, systems integrators and large hosting providers, and is the primary hypervisor for 67 percent of enterprises according to the latest V-Index report from Vanson Bourne.

Apica, a leading load testing and performance monitoring provider for cloud and mobile applications, today announced its performance monitoring resources are now available for data centers utilizing on-premise IaaS from Eucalyptus Systems. Customers can test their web and mobile applications launched in Eucalyptus cloud environments for maximum capacity, daily performance, improved load times, and protection from peak loads. This announcement extends the capability of Apica’s performance monitoring and testing services to Eucalyptus customers, while allowing the company to offer a more comprehensive solution to the market.

“By enabling organizations to leverage pre-existing hardware to create their own on-premise Infrastructure as a Service clouds, Eucalyptus is an appealing partner for organizations looking for flexibility, compatibility and durability to build, test, and launch web and mobile applications,” said Sven Hammar, CEO of Apica. “Eucalyptus customers now have the advantage of Apica’s load testing and monitoring solutions to optimize the performance of their applications and avoid the load delays or other performance issues that could put a damper on their next big release. Our solutions will help customers fully realize the benefits that come with deploying their own on-premise cloud.”

CopperEgg, a cloud monitoring and analytics company, today introduced CopperEgg RevealUptime, a breakthrough free service providing next-generation website and web application monitoring. CopperEgg is the first to offer a free service that allows organizations to maximize website performance visibility with the fastest monitoring checks in the market.  With CopperEgg’s new cross-correlation analytics, business-critical websites can quickly isolate root cause issues in the cloud, correlating RevealUptime end user experience measurements with internal server health from CopperEgg RevealCloud server monitoring.

"I was dumbfounded by how easy the CopperEgg solutions are to implement and use. The visibility and detail the combined solutions provide are worth their weight in… copper," said Andrew Horton, Director of Operations at Aim2Game, which offers Minecraft server hosting for gamers. "Our customers are tech-savvy gamers. You can imagine how our phones would light up if service was disrupted for any amount of time. CopperEgg has allowed us to monitor not only from the inside out, but also from the outside in, so we always know exactly what our customers are experiencing."

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mark Settle.

Just returned from an anniversary party to commemorate ten years of public cloud computing.

I joined several other CIOs who were pioneers in using Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) when large enterprise instances initially became available in 2007. Who would have ever thought that things could have changed so much in ten years?

Even as little as five years ago, large enterprise CIOs thought that public clouds such as EC2 would only be used on a limited basis, primarily for the development of non-business critical applications…

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…