Category: News

Pivot3, a pioneer and innovator in the development of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), today announced that it will acquire NexGen Storage, a privately held leading provider of hybrid storage appliances, dynamic all-flash arrays and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities. By adding NexGen’s portfolio of products, Pivot3 will deliver the industry’s most complete set of dynamic hyper-converged solutions. For the first time ever, enterprise and mid-market companies will have access to a suite of solutions that will allow them to apply the right infrastructure and priority to each workload, application or business service according to business value.

By adding NexGen’s strengths in accelerated all-flash and hybrid storage, Pivot3 is uniquely expanding the traditional notion of hyper-convergence. Now, customers have complete implementation flexibility and QoS management, so IT no longer has to overprovision for peak workloads, but instead can use just-in-time dynamic provisioning of resources and scale as the business grows. Pivot3 intends to market and enhance all current and planned NexGen products.

StoneFly, Inc., a wholly owned business unit of Dynamic Network Factory and a VMware technology partner is rolling out the third generation of its Unified Storage and Server (USS) series of appliances which allows users to consolidate all data center needs into one redundant and highly available appliance. This next generation product redefines simplicity by delivering virtualization, compute and storage in an agile, scalable, easy to manage hyper-converged infrastructure solution.

Available as a single easy-to-manage appliance, the hyper-converged infrastructure greatly accelerates time to market by enabling customers to go from power-on to virtual machine conception within a few minutes. By using a virtualized framework, users can completely utilize their entire hardware and thus be rewarded with reduction in power and cooling costs.

CloudBolt, a leader in cloud management technology, today announced that the company’s cloud management platform has earned the 2016 Modern Infrastructure Impact Award for Best Private/Hybrid Cloud Management Product. CloudBolt was recognized for its ease of use, comprehensive features, compatibility, and ability to be deployed as part of a new private cloud build or easily integrated with existing infrastructure.

Now in its third year, The Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards are judged by the Modern Infrastructure e-zine editorial staff in conjunction with users, readers, and industry experts. They recognize tools that help enterprise businesses to run with efficiency and insight.

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

There was a time long ago when IBM ruled the cloud, although no one used that word back then. The company’s mainframe line in the 1960s and ’70s was the original distant and unseen pile of metal and silicon meant to be shared among all users. Each program got a slice of the big machine’s time, and everyone understood they were “time sharing,” which sounds a bit more precise than the amorphous word “cloud.”

That was then. Today, no one should be surprised that IBM is playing in the modern cloud business because it practically invented the idea decades ago. The current clouds generally use the same slicing and dicing as IBM’s original time-sharing 360 architecture, although the modern cloud sales lingo hides this fact behind the metaphor that these are individual “instances” that act like individual machines…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3026459/cloud-computing/review-ibm-cloud-is-built-to-order.html

Grazed from TheNation. Author: Ekaraj Panjavinin.

Technology empowers people to do great things. In our early history, Microsoft’s mission was to put a personal computer on every desk and in every home. Today we have 1.5 billion people using Windows in 190 countries around the world, and over 200 million devices are running the best Windows. The launch of Windows 10 marked the first step to an era of more personal computing. With an ever-growing network of connected devices in today’s digital world, we believe experiences should be mobile – not just devices.

Apps, services and content should move with you across devices, seamlessly and easily. In our connected and transparent world, we are also aware that people care deeply about the privacy and security of their personal information. We also believe that interacting with technology should be as natural as interacting with people – using touch, voice, pen, gestures and even facial recognition…

Read more from the source @ http://www.nationmultimedia.com/technology/Creating-more-personal-computing-in-a-mobile-first-30277850.html

Grazed from CIO. Author: John Riberio.

VMware is cutting about 800 jobs as it transitions from its traditional products to newer, emerging technologies. The company expects 2016 will be a key transition year as "we expect the effect of our new products to outweigh the decline in our compute products," CEO Pat Gelsinger said in an earnings conference call Tuesday.

The company has been facing challenges in its software business as its customers are increasingly using public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. "Public cloud providers do provide VMware, but for many of the newer, cloud workloads, many are opting for containers or even OpenStack which doesn’t require what’s considered expensive VMware licenses," wrote Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email…

Grazed from AFR. Author: Editorial Staff.

Telstra’s ventures subsidiary has made a strategic investment in Chinese cloud services provider, Qiniu, for an undisclosed sum. The telecom giant said Qiniu offers data hosting and processing for companies in China and across Asia. Telstra Ventures managing director Matthew Koertge said the deal builds on the company’s momentum in Asia.

Telstra has made five venture investments in the region in just over a year, and acquired Asian telecommunications services provider Pacnet in 2015. "The opportunities created by the digital explosion underway across Asia, particularly in the Chinese market, underpin this latest investment," Mr Koertge said….

Read more from the source @ http://www.afr.com/technology/telstra-invests-in-chinese-cloud-computing-firm-qiniu-20160127-gmf6x2#ixzz3ySsob5Sx

Grazed from CCI. Author: Andrew Murphy.

Cloud has brought both benefits and downsides. Yes, it can reduce capital expenditure and make it easier and faster to update software, without taking months of internal work on hardware and software. On the other hand, many organisations are concerned about the loss of control and visibility over what is happening to their data and systems in the cloud.

Plus, dare I say that we have gone backwards: the ability to buy off-the-shelf cloud applications has its advantages, but it does tend to give users a pre-set choice of options, rather than technology that is created to fit their precise needs. However, cloud has also been the catalyst for totally new way of creating apps and one which removes the limitations of the ‘one size fits all’ approach: the growth of the low-code/no-code movement…

Grazed from MarketRealist. Author: Editorial Staff.

Previously in this series, we discussed how Amazon (AMZN) had started 2016 with its decade-old strategy of price cuts, and Microsoft (MSFT) has followed its lead, by cutting prices for Azure. Amazon is, unquestionably, the leader in the overall cloud space. However, Microsoft is catching up fast in the cloud and holds the second position after Amazon.

According to research company FBR & Co., Microsoft Azure is likely to reach an annual run rate of $8 billion in 2016, compared with AWS’s (Amazon Web Services) annual run rate of $7 billion in 2015. Wall Street also believes Amazon’s AWS is likely to face stiff competition from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, in 2016…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: John Dix.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) changed a rule in December that will make it harder to capitalize the cost of cloud set-up and implementations expenses, a change that may encourage some enterprises to opt instead for traditional on-premise software.

The FASB Accounting Standards Update to “Intangibles – Goodwill and Other – Internal-use Software (Subtopic 350-40)” addresses “Customer’s accounting for fees paid in a cloud computing arrangement.” And while the update didn’t set out to address how to account for cloud migration costs, the new rules, combined with the FASB’s decision “not to provide additional guidance on the accounting for upfront costs,” will mean enterprise shops can no longer depreciate some fees involved in a cloud migration…