Category: News

Do you regularly attend trade shows, conferences or exhibitions? If so, you may have already noticed that more and more business owners are using tablets as part of their exhibition booth. Tablets are most definitely rising in popularity, and when used in the right way can significantly improve your customer engagement and make the most out of your presence at a trade show or exhibition. If you’re considering upgrading your next booth to include tablet displays, here are just some of the reasons why you definitely should.

Attract More Visitors

It’s rare that you will find anywhere that attracts more competition than a trade show or fair. Whilst you are amongst many other competing businesses and products, it’s more important than ever to attract the attention of the visitors. Tablets and iPads are great forattracting visitors to your stall, as they’ll draw people in to find out what’s on them! Visitors will be curious to find out what they can discover by using your tablet which is bound to increase your visitor numbers.

PLUMgrid, a leader of secure and scalable SDN and NFV solutions for OpenStack clouds, today announced the latest version of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) 5.0 supporting OpenStack releases, Kilo and Liberty, for enterprises and service providers. Designed to deliver advanced SDN services that meet the production requirements of OpenStack clouds, ONS 5.0 delivers a rich set of new features and tools to simplify deployments and increase operational efficiency.

ONS 5.0 enables data centers with virtual machines, containers, and bare metal architectures to leverage SDN overlays to provide secure micro-segmentation for multi-tenancy, traffic isolation, and policy enforcement. It features SDN support for Docker containers, expanded gateway integration with Cisco Nexus 9000, IPv6, PLUMgrid SmartLogs and many new enhancements. ONS 5.0 further simplifies OpenStack operations with updated drag-and-drop configuration, rich automation, analytics, troubleshooting tools, and breakthrough SDN visualization and monitoring platform, CloudApex.

Sustainable IT solutions provider TurnKey Internet, Inc. announced today the launch of a suite of ‘TurnKey’ All-Inclusive Managed Cloud Server offerings that extend the capabilities of traditional cloud servers backed with all-inclusive IT managed services including high availability, security, cloud migration, implementation, and ongoing optimization.

TurnKey All-Inclusive Managed Cloud Servers provide premium technical service and support that help businesses leverage easy to use cloud-based IT infrastructure so they can focus on running their business. The new service tier provides 24 x 7 access to TurnKey Internet’s local U.S. Network and Application Engineers to provide on-going guidance, security and performance monitoring to maintain and optimize cloud-based hosted infrastructure.

IndependenceIT, a workspace automation software platform that allows IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver workspaces, applications and data from any cloud infrastructure, today announced Cloud Workspace Suite 5.0. Highlights of the latest generation software include automated cross platform software defined data center deployments and management; orchestration and workflow automation for third-party Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS) platforms; support for Azure Active Directory-as-a-Service across public/private/hybrid clouds, and hyper-scalable application services for the delivery of application workloads.

Technology buyers continue to gravitate toward WaaS solutions to increase business agility and lower costs. However, many challenges still remain with the majority of solutions on the market. Most of the available products are not built for cloud infrastructure, making it difficult or impossible to operate in cross-platform environments. As a result, large capital investments must be made by IT service providers on infrastructure to support distributed deployments. Because the majority of options are extremely complex, there is a steep learning curve that reduces time to deployment and revenue for WaaS providers. Additionally, the fragmented management of infrastructure, hypervisor, OS, application, master image, Active Directory, and end-user environments add extra layers of complexity and risk.

Speakers from OpenStack users including AT&T, OVH, SAP, Workday and Verizon will share how cloud computing has transformed their businesses at the 13th gathering of the OpenStack open source cloud community. More than 7,000 participants from 55+ countries are expected to attend the next OpenStack Summit in Austin, April 25-29, 2016, at the Austin Convention Center. Today is the last day to purchase OpenStack Summit tickets at a discounted rate.

Summit content will emphasize the foundational role that OpenStack now plays in enterprise IT strategies and service provider roadmaps, bridging cloud native software development with the optimization of legacy applications. The theme recognizes OpenStack as an integration engine to automate compute, storage and networking for a diverse set of technologies ranging from virtualization and bare metal to container orchestration like Kubernetes and Apache Mesos.

Whether new infrastructure is spun up in the cloud or whether new applications are launched in a rapid development environment, companies should be implementing security best practices and compliance checks as early and often as possible.  But, is that happening?  To find out more about compliance in the cloud and beyond, I recently spoke with Bart Westerink, senior director of security and compliance at CloudPassage, to dig in deeper and find out what we need to know.

VMblog:  To kick things off, give us some background on CloudPassage and tell us what type of problems you’re solving?

Bart Westerink:  The migration from traditional servers to agile, elastic infrastructure is putting a huge strain on enterprise compliance efforts. Servers and workloads that spin up automatically and on-demand make it difficult to manage and verify access controls, user privileges and security configurations. Implementing continuous monitoring and logging, while maintaining an accurate inventory of systems are also huge challenges. Compliance teams are being forced to expend lots of manual effort to keep up, which threatens to erase the business benefits of moving to agile infrastructure in the first place.

"Migration-as-a-Service is like subcontracting, but without the complexity, lack of accountability and uncertainty around pricing," said Jethro Seghers, lead program manager at BitTitan. "Our approach is fully white-labeled using the partner’s brand, offers 100 percent predictable pricing and includes advanced troubleshooting by the experts who developed the software in the event of any issues."

CloudRouter now includes Linux DPDK kernel enhancements, tested by the CloudRouter team, with throughput in excess of 650 Gig/sec on commodity hardware. The upgrades help network architects with staged deployments of SDN. 

Grazed from ReCode. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Use of the cloud-based collaboration app Slack grew by 77 percent while Microsoft’s Office 365 remained the most widely used cloud application by businesses in the second half of 2015. The findings are contained in a report out today from Okta, which provides a service to help companies manage access to all the cloud applications they use.

To gather the data, Okta tracked the use of more than 4,000 applications across more than 2,500 customers who use its service. Slack led an interesting pack of fast-growing apps in use by Okta customers. Tableau, the business intelligence app, was the second-fastest grower, up 65 percent. New Relic was third, rising 56 percent…

Grazed from 247WallSt. Author: Lee Jackson.

If there is one company in the tech universe that you don’t want to compete with it is probably Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Over the years, the tech giant has proven a worthy adversary in almost every field it has entered into, and the company’s increasing focus on the public cloud may prove to be no different.

In a new Merrill Lynch research report, analyst Kash Rangan makes the case that the company is increasing the focus on the public cloud and that Google NEXT last week highlighted the increased commitment to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Rangan feels the GCP has a host of positive features, he notes that there is a need to catch up in services offered, global scale and the overall ecosystem…