Category: News

Datrium, the leading provider of Open Convergence for cloud builders, today announced Datrium Blanket Encryption, an industry-first software product that combines always-on efficient deduplication and compression technology with high-speed, end-to-end encryption: in use at the host, in flight across the network and at rest on persistent storage.

The number of breaches within the US have quadrupled from 2005 to 2015, and the year 2016 accounted for seven of the ten biggest data breaches ever. With threats rising, the requirement to encrypt data everywhere – from host-to-storage, between hosts, and between sites – is becoming standard. However, leading storage arrays and hyper-converged systems only protect data at rest and do not protect against host or network intrusions. Guest operating systems and hypervisors offer encryption at the source, but at the expense of data reduction required by the economics of modern flash storage.

Security and Economics Without Compromise
Datrium offers a fundamentally new and comprehensive approach.  By deduplicating and compressing data, then encrypting while it is still in the application host’s memory (RAM), Datrium Blanket Encryption can then move data across hosts, networks and storage that is always encrypted and efficient. 

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J.Vaughn-Nichols.

After Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Northern Virginia datacenter went casters up, you might think about switching your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud provider. If that’s the case, Cloud Spectator has benchmarked 10 of the biggest public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers based on price and value.

Cloud Spectator tested 10 of the largest, most well-known public cloud providers with North American datacenters. These were: 1&1, AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, DigitalOcean, Dimension Data, Google Cloud Platform, OVH, Rackspace, and IBM/Softlayer, aka Bluemix. They examined the performance of vCPU, memory, and block storage along with cost. This gives users the clouds’ CloudSpecs Score…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/which-cloud-will-give-you-the-biggest-bang-for-the-buck/

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Mae Anderson.

Usually people don’t notice the "cloud" — unless, that is, it turns into a massive storm. Which was the case Tuesday when Amazon’s huge cloud-computing service suffered a major outage. Amazon Web Services, by far the world’s largest provider of internet-based computing services, suffered an unspecified breakdown in its eastern U.S. region starting about midday Tuesday.

The result: unprecedented and widespread performance problems for thousands of websites and apps. While few services went down completely, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of companies had trouble with features ranging from file sharing to webfeeds to loading any type of data from Amazon’s "simple storage service," known as S3…

Cyber-threats traditionally targeting on-premises resources – such as ransomware, identity theft, and data exfiltration – are a growing concern for cloud services. As organizations’ adoption of the cloud continues to accelerate, effectively addressing these additional security challenges is a top concern. Mid-market companies are especially challenged. Cloud adoption is more prevalent in the mid-market due to its ease of deployment and low upfront costs. However, mid-market firms typically lack the expertise and resources required to effectively secure their cloud deployments.

In today’s hybrid IT environment, troubleshooting issues related to application connectivity is complex and challenging, especially due to the difficulty in isolating the source of the problem in a network. As you manage your cloud applications, it is also important to have visibility into the virtual network connections between your datacenters, remote office sites, and critical workloads. An unified network monitoring experience that gives you network visibility across public and hybrid clouds, and helps in proactive identification and resolution of potential issues is essential for managing today’s networks.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Network Performance Monitor (NPM), a cloud-aware network monitoring solution in Operations Management Suite Insight & Analytics, that monitors networks for performance degradation and outages. The solution continuously tests for reachability between various points on the network across public clouds, datacenters and user locations, and enables application administrators to quickly identify the specific network segment or device that may be causing the problem.

Scality today announced its new Scality HALO Cloud Monitor, a turnkey 24/7 monitoring solution for the Scality RING object storage platform and S3-focused products. Scality HALO provides customers continuous uptime for their managed private cloud storage environments and delivers transformative analytics to help streamline business operations.

"Our Scality RING system is designed to be 100 percent available and now with Scality HALO we have the cloud monitoring assurance for customers to guarantee 100 percent uptime for their Scality RING and S3 environments," said Daniel Binsfeld, VP of DevOps and Global Support at Scality. "Our customers, both Service Providers and Enterprise companies, must deliver on strong Service Level Agreements to their users. With Scality HALO we provide peace of mind and confidence that downtime can become a thing of the past for everyone."

IndependenceIT, the company that unifies cloud application and data management for IT administrators, today announced Cloud Workspace Suite version 5.1. The integrated automation software platform has been enhanced with several new features to facilitate the management and delivery of software defined data centers (SDDCs), workspaces, applications, and data to users anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

As MSPs, CSPs, and ISVs support business efforts to digitally transform their operations, much of their success will follow the deployment of cloud-based workspaces. Rapid adoption of Cloud Workspaces has accelerated in recent years and is expected to skyrocket with recent research showing global sales set to reach US $18.37 billion by 2022. With a focus on cloud enablement for service providers, IndependenceIT has been at the forefront of innovation in this space. Today’s release of Cloud Workspace Suite version 5.1 furthers the functionality of its platform with several new capabilities.

Cloud Workspace Suite Software Enhancements

IDC’s research shows the majority of today’s enterprise class organizations expect to rely on multiple clouds. Organizations need to make this transition in a way that maintains control over their applications, constantly optimizes the capacity being purchased, and doesn’t inadvertently create operational silos.

Join Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of Cirba, and guest speaker, Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice President Enterprise Systems Management Software, to learn why workload aware multi-cloud capacity and migration analytics are becoming critical enablers to modern cloud strategies.

Learn about critical enablers to modern cloud strategies.
Major topics include:

With a shortened development cycle, you’d think we’d have trouble finding 53 new features of interest in OpenStack Ocata, but with so many projects (more than 60!) under the Big Tent, we actually had a little bit of trouble narrowing things down. We did a live webinar talking about 157 new features, but here’s our standard 53. (Thanks to the PTLs who helped us out with weeding it down from the full release notes!)

Nova (OpenStack Compute Service)

1. VM placement changes: The Nova filter scheduler will now use the Placement API to filter compute nodes based on CPU/RAM/Disk capacity.
2. High availability: Nova now uses Cells v2 for all deployments; currently implemented as single cells, the next release, Pike, will support multi-cell clouds.
3. Neutron is now the default networking option.
4. Upgrade capabilities: Use the new ‘nova-status upgrade check’ CLI command to see what’s required to upgrade to Ocata.