Category: News

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Dan Richman.

Azure Stack, the important hybrid-cloud product that Microsoft announced in January, will be more limited than some developers hoped. Now in Technical Preview 1, Azure Stack is intended to help companies bridge on-premises and in-cloud computing — a challenge that many companies face as they move toward the cloud and assess which apps should run where.

Azure Stack’s promise is that developers can write a single application that runs unaltered on-premises or in Azure, and that management and automation tools will run equally well in both locations. Today, Microsoft VP Mike Neil wrote that Azure Stack’s general release, targeted for mid-2017, will combine software, hardware, support and services — and will be available only from Dell, HPE and Lenovo, at least initially…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sanjiva Nath.

Following the thrill of quickly onboarding your team to a new cloud application, following the excitement of being able to experience instant productivity, comes the realization of an additional silo that is disconnected from everything else — from other users, other business applications, and other processes. How will this new system work with all other existing applications?

How will your team share information and activities provided by this new application with others in your organization? And once again you start searching various marketplaces for point-to-point connectivity solutions. The rapid rise and adoption of cloud applications has amplified the silos within the enterprise, further disconnecting teams, processes, and information…

Bynet Data Communications Ltd. today announced a partnership with Stratoscale, the software company revolutionizing the data center, to deliver comprehensive, flexible and scalable data center cloud solutions to its customers in the organizational sector. As part of the agreement, Bynet will execute the marketing, sale, presale, assimilation and maintenance of Stratoscale’s solution. 

Stratoscale’s 360 degrees partner program, PartnerFirst, was created with an all-inclusive approach to maximize partner’s technology, products and services with the goal of bringing mutual benefits to customers and partners. By partnering with Stratoscale, Bynet is bringing new innovation to market and delivering value to its customers by leading them into the next generation of private cloud data centers. Bynet has already assimilated Stratoscale’s solution into the core of its own cloud platform.

Virtuozzo, powering more than five million virtual environments as the leading virtualization platform for service providers, announced along with hosting partner netclusive that Thomas Cook, one of the world’s leading leisure travel groups with more than 22 million customers, has adopted the unified Virtuozzo storage and virtualization solution as the foundation for its hosted e-commerce platform. netclusive, Thomas Cook’s hosting provider, cited the need for the travel company to cope with seasonal demand peaks that could impact the customer e-commerce experience.

“Thomas Cook needed a single platform to manage an e-commerce project,” said Robert Simon, Managing Director, netclusive. “Virtuozzo was the only solution that could deliver this flexibility on a single platform while providing high availability.”

"The threat landscape — particularly for malware — is evolving as more organizations shift workloads to the cloud and adopt online business productivity and operations applications," said John Amaral, Head of Product Delivery at CloudLock. "By extending the power of CloudLock’s cloud-native, multi-mode CASB through integrations with leading providers, our mutual customers gain powerful insight and threat mitigation capabilities to secure environments from the growing barrage of malware."

Tintri, a leading producer of VM-aware storage (VAS) for virtualisation and cloud environments, today announced that We Are Cloud (WAC) is using Tintri’s VMstore to simplify management of its virtualised workloads. Since deployment, WAC has eliminated the need to hire or retrain specialised storage admins and has clearer visibility into its servers, network and storage.

Founded in 2015, WAC is one of the fastest growing cloud service providers (CSP) in the UK, delivering a wide range of hosted services for its customers — including MS Exchange, Citrix XenApp-based virtual desktops, servers and online back up. WAC needed a storage platform that could both support a breadth of customer needs and reduce management effort.

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Any journey is a combination of where you start and where you want to go, and this is a critical component of the OpenStack vs. VMware debate. Enterprises have been using VMware for years but other IT vendors that work with those enterprises have committed to OpenStack. The outcome of the tug-of-war between VMware and OpenStack may depend on two emerging applications of the cloud — network functions virtualization and the Internet of Things.

Virtual resources create a new level of complexity for data center operations teams. Traditionally, many companies installed and integrated their applications manually, or relied on simple operating system scripting languages. But if you have to deploy applications to a resource pool, simple scripts leave too much room for configuration errors. Enterprises now rely on DevOps tools for agile deployment support…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Jeff Kaplan.

Nearly five years ago, Marc Andreessen famously proclaimed that “software is eating the world,” and he is probably surprised how much of the world is actually influenced by software today. Nowhere is this more true than in the brave, new world of the Internet of Things (IoT). No matter which market forecast you read, the commonly held view is that nearly every product and service will be connected over the next decade.

And these connections wouldn’t be of much value unless there is software in place to determine what data points should be captured and what actions should be taken in response to the information being collected. As I’ve stated in a previous Datamation commentary, there are three primary reasons to pursue an IoT initiative – to react faster when a problem arises, to better predict potential problems before they occur, and to identify new market opportunities…