Category: News

"Virtuozzo 7 is the most agnostic, agile, and cost effective virtualization platform on the market today," said Alexey Kobets, senior vice president of Research and Development, Virtuozzo. "It combines our own optimized KVM and the ability to create system containers in a single hyper-converged platform. Leveraging the entire Virtuozzo 7 product stack–or utilizing standalone products within it, such as Virtuozzo Storage–gives our partners the flexibility and efficiency required to run their business across multiple clouds with the lowest total cost of ownership." 

ZeroStack, a one-stop shop for infrastructure that combines the consumption model of public cloud with the security needs of businesses, today announced that it has partnered with T5 Data Centers and Colovore, representing managed service providers (MSPs) and colocation service providers that will host individual ZeroStack Z-Block Cloud Appliances for each customer who wants the benefits of private cloud but don’t want to host them on-premises.  

Enterprise users have been frustrated with a broken private cloud model that forces them to understand the complexities of on-premises cloud infrastructure, OpenStack, and other software. ZeroStack offers an alternative by abstracting complexity through a hyperconverged cloud appliance and integrated, web-based software that can be consumed like a public cloud. This platform opens up new revenue opportunities for regional service providers that want to offer the convenience and added security features of a hosted self-serve private cloud. With deployments by T5 in its Los Angeles data center and in Colovore’s high-density Santa Clara facility, ZeroStack customers can seamlessly and time-efficiently migrate public or on-premise workloads into state-of-the-art, robust colocation environments.  

Nimble Storage, the leader in predictive flash storage, today announced an expansion of its commitment to the cloud by achieving the Mirantis Unlocked validation for its Nimble Cinder Driver, providing easy-to-deploy, scalable and highly available storage options for customers using OpenStack infrastructure with the Nimble Predictive Flash platform.

Integration of the Nimble Cinder Driver with Mirantis OpenStack allows customers to deploy OpenStack clouds with fast and reliable access to data. The combination of Mirantis OpenStack and the Nimble Predictive Flash platform delivers the foundation for enterprise customers to radically simplify cloud infrastructure deployments while meeting the demands of a dynamic and expanding user base. The Nimble Predictive Flash platform combines the power of InfoSight Predictive Analytics with a Unified Flash Fabric consolidation architecture to deliver flash performance and unparalleled availability by predicting and preventing issues.

Violin Memory, Inc., a global pioneer of award-winning all flash storage platform solutions for primary storage and active workloads, today announced the company has obtained Mirantis Certification for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) that will give businesses and service providers the ability to leverage Violin’s Flash Storage Platform (FSP) in both private and hybrid cloud computing environments. The company’s commitment to use of cloud by the enterprise is evidenced by this latest certification, which will impact and benefit the businesses that are part of one of the largest distributions of OpenStack in the market: the Mirantis user base.

Container technology represents an opportunity for developer and operations teams to increase efficiency and flexibility in the delivery of software applications. Containers enclose pieces of code in a layer of software that can be transported easily between computers. While not new, container technology is gaining steam as companies look for ways to speed software delivery and leverage emerging technologies such as public cloud infrastructure.

Asigra, Inc., a leading cloud backup, recovery and restore software provider since 1986, released the results of an Asigra-driven global survey of more than 125 Managed Service Providers of all sizes, revealing that cloud backup services lead to increased business revenue opportunities and customer retention. Respondents also cited compliance-driven verticals, such as healthcare and financial services, as offering significant market opportunities for MSPs to grow their services. The patent-pending Asigra Recovery License Model supports the MSP profitability opportunity to maximize revenue, serve as trusted advisors and retain existing customers.

Survey Response Highlights

• 89 percent of MSPs offering cloud backup services are profitable, and 87 percent expect growth to continue
• Healthcare and financial services are top growth markets for cloud backup services
• 67 percent of profitable MSPs are offering cloud backup as a bundled service
• 50 percent of MSPs are recovering less than five percent of customer data in a typical year, and 75 percent are recovering less than 10 percent

CloudPhysics, provider of data-driven insights for smarter IT, today announced that it has added Cloud Planning Rightsizer analytics to its Public Cloud Cost Calculators for enterprises who want to move to the public cloud and their channel partners. CloudPhysics’ Cloud Cost Calculators discover the configuration of every virtual machine (VM) in the data center and determine the cloud instance that best fits those discovered configurations. The Cloud Planning Rightsizer then examines the resource consumption patterns of those VMs and automatically identifies the on-premises VMs that are over-provisioned and have more resources than they need. The customer can then "rightsize" the VM and see what the costs would be to run the smaller, more appropriate VM in the public cloud.

"Today’s IT administrators are constantly asked if the enterprise can save money by moving applications to the cloud. The answer can only emerge after rightsizing each and every on-premises VM to its appropriate public cloud instance," said Chris Schin, VP, Products at CloudPhysics. "Now IT teams can quickly and easily make data-supported decisions about the costs of running applications in the cloud — based on the actual resource needs of their VMs. The savings are real. We’ve seen customers save more than 50 percent  of costs by rightsizing with CloudPhysics."

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jo Best.

Someone grabbed my wrist and pointed sharply below us: ‘Quick, look down!’ I swam to face the seabed and gasped through my snorkel. A shark stretching some 8m long, as long as a bus, had moved silently underneath us — and I hadn’t noticed it at all. The whale shark, a beautiful creature, a filter-feeder whose giant mouth gives it a benign look, is good at escaping detection.

It’s still not known how large the global population of whale sharks is, how they migrate across the oceans, and where they give birth, despite being the largest fish species alive today. For a few minutes off the coast of Ningaloo in Western Australia, I was able to swim with one such shark, before it disappeared off into the Indian Ocean, too deep and too fast for humans to follow…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Shirley Siluk.

Shareholders of EMC Corp. today overwhelmingly voted in favor of the company’s planned merger with Dell Inc. — a more than $60 billion transaction that’s been described as the biggest tech deal in history. According to a preliminary tally, 98 percent of EMC shareholders who voted were in favor of the merger.

Final results are set to be filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission later this week. The shareholders casting votes represented about 74 percent of EMC’s outstanding common stock. As part of the transaction, Dell, which ceased being a publicly traded company in 2013, must compensate EMC shareholders for taking the firm private…