Category: News

Set up as a joint initiative by the Netherlands province of Overijssel and the cities of Zwolle and Kampen, Shared Service Center (SSC) Zwolle’s objective is to share and lower the costs of providing datacenter resources to local municipalities. Atlantis and its partner TenICT have created an entirely new IT infrastructure that has the ability to move data, virtual machines and application workloads between sites, enabling zero recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) between multiple data centers.

To support business growth and respond to the changing demands of the industry, PFD sought to modernise its data management strategy and information infrastructure, ensuring speed and flexibility.

"Food distribution is a fast and often unforgiving business; there is a narrow window to match supply and demand for customers, while the market is fiercely competitive," said Richard Cohen, Chief Information Officer of PFD. "We have to do everything we can to give ourselves that competitive advantage, which means the free flow of strategic business information. Systems downtime is simply not an option."

The modernisation of the food distributor’s data management strategy has coincided with the establishment of a second data centre, acting as a source for essential back-ups, decreasing the risk significantly. The data centre also operates as a corporate hot site, providing rapid up-to-the-minute failover if required.

Cohesity, the pioneer of converged secondary storage, today announced the public launch of the Cohesity Data Platform, the first product designed to consolidate all secondary storage use cases on a unified environment that helps organizations control growing data demands. The Cohesity Data Platform combines a web-scale storage architecture with standards-based hardware components that enable companies to transition from today’s expensive silos for different data use cases to a simple, pay-as-you grow solution for data management. By consolidating a wide range of functions onto a single platform, Cohesity can reduce storage costs by more than half and make enterprise data management incredibly simple.

According to the global research firm IDC, organizations will manage a total of 44 trillion GB of data by 2020, the vast majority of which will be held in secondary storage environments dedicated to a range of use cases, from backup and recovery to test/development and analytics. In order to manage this data, enterprises have traditionally invested in multiple solutions from different vendors to address each use case, resulting in a fragmented enterprise storage approach that is both expensive and difficult to manage. To bring order to data management, Cohesity has launched the first converged secondary storage solution, which scales seamlessly while maintaining the management flexibility necessary to handle a wide variety of workloads. Cohesity empowers companies to control the growing volume of data by replacing the sprawl of point solutions with a single, consolidated platform.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT. Ansible’s automation capabilities, together with Red Hat’s existing management portfolio, will help users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. With today’s announcement, Red Hat expands its leadership in hybrid cloud management, OpenStack and containers.

Ansible’s simple and agentless approach, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills, removing some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT. From deployment and configuration to rolling upgrades, by adding Ansible to its hybrid management portfolio, Red Hat will help customers to:

Grazed from FedScoop. Author: Greg Otto.

The on-premise data centers at the Federal Communication Commission’s headquarters are a mess. Wires are hanging out of the floor, discarded monitors are strewn about and server racks are all out of place. FCC chief information officer David Bray loves this mess. It means the agency’s data center is empty and the move to the cloud was successful.

There was a time over this past Labor Day weekend where it looked like that move could have been a failure. During the process of moving 200 servers and 60 racks to a commercial data center in West Virginia, Bray’s team of agency IT staff and contract workers rescued the project after spending 55 consecutive hours replacing all the cabling necessary to turn the system back on…

Grazed from EDGL. Author: Deena M. Amato-McCoy.

In effort to remove another barrier to the adoption of cloud computing across the public sector, Verizon is giving this segment access to its Secure Cloud Interconnect service, a software-defined networking offering that delivers the security, reliability, performance, simplicity and efficiency needed to support mission-critical workloads and applications.

Public sector organizations across federal, state and local, education and public safety are embracing the benefits of cloud computing, however many struggle with the complexity of seamlessly connecting, managing and securing their cloud environments — an issue that can extend across multiple clouds and data centers. Verizon’s Secure Cloud Interconnect service helps simplify this complexity by providing a secure, private Internet connection that features consumption-based bandwidth, pre-provisioned on-demand resources, application performance, multiple classes of service and usage-based billing models with simple provisioning and management via a centralized online portal…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Amazon and Wal-Mart must really not like each other. Not only are they going head to head in the retail market, but according to The New York Times, Wal-Mart is now taking aim at Amazon Web Services in the cloud too. Wal-Mart has embraced open source tools like OpenStack to build its own cloud instead of going all-in on public cloud services.

It does use some outsourced data center capacity for peak loads, however. Today Wal-Mart is opening up its cloud platform for others to use too. It is open sourcing its OneOps cloud platform in the hopes that other organizations will use it, improve upon the technology and let the greater open source community benefit from it…

Article written by David Marshall

This week, if you put the words "VMware" and "acquisition" in the same sentence, the mass majority of us would conclude you were talking about the $67b Dell acquisition of EMC, VMware’s parent company.

But in a small corner of VMworld Europe 2015, those two words are being paired up to talk about the VMware End-User Computing team’s announcement made earlier today that talks about the virtualization giant’s plans to acquire Boxer, Inc., a privately held company that offers a comprehensive and secure personal information management (PIM) solution for mobile devices to businesses and consumers.

At first blush, the acquisition news may give you pause. Boxer is after all a consumer oriented application, with apps being designed for use on iOS and Android devices. And that may bring up memories of the great VMware sell off in 2013 when the company "realigned its strategy" and sold off the likes of  Zimbra, Sliderocket and Wavemaker. But this latest move has more to do with security and control, and boosting VMware’s business mobility product line.

The addition of Boxer becomes part of VMware’s strategy around the digital workspace, which according to VMware, offers a single, central location for business users to access any application on any device, built on a mobile-cloud architecture that centralizes core services, simplifies management, and meets both user and business expectations. VMware adds that it provides businesses with the power to deliver innovative business processes and reach customers in new ways; but most importantly, it follows the VMware End-User Computing philosophy of consumer simplicity and enterprise-grade security so the solution can realistically be used in the real world of on-demand, mobile-cloud computing.

AUTOMIC, the leader in Business Automation, today announced the availability of the AUTOMIC Docker Action Pack within the AUTOMIC Plugin Marketplace.

Enterprises are looking to reduce the complexity of continuous delivery of enterprise applications by utilizing the benefits of container technology. AUTOMIC’s Docker Action Pack can now rollout and orchestrate their Docker container environments as a part of their enterprise continuous delivery pipeline. Adding yet another open source technology, such as containers, can potentially increase the speed of delivery of distributed applications … yet adds a new level of management to already overloaded IT teams.

The AUTOMIC Docker Action Pack can be found on the AUTOMIC Plug-in Marketplace – a one-stop shop where customers, partners and independent consultants can browse, buy, download or contribute plugins to drive automation across their enterprises. The addition of the new action pack for Docker allows developers and IT operations teams to take advantage of Docker container benefits with little fear of the new additional administrative overhead it creates and adds to your already busy teams. Pre-built Docker containers can be selected from the open-source AUTOMIC Marketplace and dropped seamlessly into the AUTOMIC Release Automation product for immediate deployment to production status.

Akanda, the major contributor and supporter of the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, today announced partnerships with Aptira and Cumulus Networks to provide OpenStack customers with innovative networking solutions that bring better consistency, performance, and flexibility to OpenStack clouds.  Together, Akanda, Aptira and Cumulus will help customers rapidly deploy the most comprehensive and supp