Category: News

Grazed from Linux Journal.  Author: Petros Koutoupis

At the time I got into the data storage industry, I was working with and developing RAID and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) controllers for 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN). This was a time before "The Cloud". Things were different—so were our users. There was comfort in buying from a single source or single vendor. In an ideal world, it should all work together, harmoniously, right? And when things go awry, that single vendor should be able to solve every problem within that entire deployment.

That is why, enterprise companies typically bought from a single storage vendor and invested deeply in them. You either bought HP, Dell, EMC, Sun Microsystems or NetApp, which also was successfully carving a new market in Network Attached Storage (NAS). For example, once an EMC shop, always an EMC shop. Hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars were spent to ensure that you were enabled for high availability, fault tolerance, training, support and more. Again, through that single vendor.

Cohesity, the pioneer of hyperconverged secondary storage, today announced a new integration with Pure Storage, the market’s leading independent solid-state array vendor, to deliver faster, more efficient data protection and recovery. The native integration with Pure Storage FlashArray//M also empowers customers to leverage public cloud storage for long-term data retention and accelerate DevOps with instantaneous copies of any production application.

By combining Cohesity’s hyperconverged secondary storage platform with Pure’s all-flash arrays for mission-critical applications, customers now have access to highly efficient and scalable infrastructure that extends across the data center. The integration allows companies to automatically consolidate a wide array of secondary storage tasks on Cohesity DataPlatform within the Pure operating environment, rather than wrangle a handful of fragmented and expensive point solutions for data protection, backup, file services, DevOps and analytics.

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Peter Sayer.

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents. If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.

The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn’t accept service changes. The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: Dan Blacharski.

The dotcom boom of the 1990s was a glorious and wonderfully chaotic time. When it began, nobody really knew that there was such a thing going on as a “dotcom boom,” they just knew that there was something exciting and disruptive happening, and they wanted in. Only a very small handful of visionaries truly saw the full scope of what it was and how it would change the world.

There were a lot of things about that time that failed. A lot of companies burned out quickly, a lot of venture capital money went up in smoke and a lot of 20-year-olds found themselves on the unemployment line with nothing on their resume except “Dotcom CEO.” Yet, a lot of things went right too: The innovative spirit changed how we view and launch startups to this day…

Grazed from VoiceNData. Author: Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo.

Colt Technology Services said it is deploying Ciena’s packet-optical technology to future proof the bandwidth demands of its customers driven by the explosion of IT applications, data, content and cloud computing. The partnership with Ciena strengthens Colt’s high-bandwidth push across Europe and Asia, enabling flexible, ultra-high bandwidth services across its 100Gbps-enabled metro and multi-terabit backbone networks. This network upgrade supports growth across a number of key European markets including London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam as well as improving inter continental connections into Asia including Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.

“As the applications and infrastructure that power businesses increasingly move into the cloud and the data centre, the demand for reliable, scalable, and high-quality, business-grade connectivity continues to grow.By partnering with leading technology firms like Ciena, we are signaling our commitment to providing the intelligent, high-bandwidth networks enterprises require…

Rackspace today announced that the company has achieved seven gold and three silver Microsoft Partner Competencies for capabilities spanning application development, cloud platform support, data management, business applications, mobility and productivity. Microsoft Partner Competencies recognize companies in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) for their proven expertise in delivering quality solutions in a specialized area of business.

"Rackspace continues to grow its expertise in Microsoft cloud solutions as these 10 Microsoft Partner Competencies prove, making the company a reliable and long-standing member of the Microsoft Partner Network," said Aziz Benmalek, Vice President, Worldwide Hosting and Cloud Services at Microsoft Corp. "The company continuously strives to deliver positive customer outcomes with service-oriented solutions to meet our joint customer needs."