Category: News

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Kelley Katsanos.

For many midsize firms, the introduction of hybrid cloud computing into the business complicates initiatives. To complicate this further, the "canned" service-level agreement (SLA) currently offered by many MSPs may not work for every business. Many organizations have a need for customized hybrid cloud computing SLAs to ensure a better fit with their unique requirements.

Customized SLAs in 2015

According to MSPmentor, the hybrid cloud is now the "new normal." It is common for MSPs to take a one-size-fits-all approach when offering SLAs, but customers are increasingly expecting customized hybrid cloud computing service-level agreements. "Customers will demand a service provider that is willing and able to customize the service-level agreement to meet those unique needs of their organization so that they can take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, cost reductions, and resiliency that cloud computing offers," MSPmentor reports…

Grazed from DataCloudCongress. Author: PR Announcement.

Datacloud 2015 creates the largest European platform for datacentre and cloud IT infrastructure end users and business leaders. The conference June 3 and 4, aims to explore the very latest in technologies and markets, to inspire through rich content and hosts 2,000 senior executives to meet, connect, collaborate and do deals.

Extensively covering data and cyber security, cost, application management and performance, scalability of cloud technologies, enterprise IT control, and energy management, the datacentre remains at the epicentre of both the event and today’s businesses, enabling and securing the applications and services that are critical to operations and poised to transform radically through the explosive levels of new demand…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Leo Reiter.

When it comes to cloud computing, there is no "one size fits all" platform for getting work done. High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are not web applications. Thankfully, there are clouds specifically designed for running HPC workloads rather than web applications. An HPC cloud is very different to a commodity web services cloud. Before we discuss how an HPC Cloud is architected, we need to examine HPC workloads themselves to really understand how they differ from other applications:

• HPC jobs process data – most often enormous amounts of data (Big Data) and return results. In other types of clouds, "instances" (virtual servers) run when launched and listen for requests. HPC workloads typically run in "batch" mode, where the data and the parameters are queued together with the application for execution. Other types of cloud workloads offer services that often require further interaction to do any processing…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

ClusterHQ today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Accel Partners London, with participation from Canaan Partners and existing investors. The company may not be a household name yet, but its Flocker tool has gotten quite a bit of attention among developers because it makes it easier to move apps that run in Docker containers and their data. Almost by default, Docker is more about handling stateless services — that is, the application logic and not the data.

Whenever you shut down a Docker container, after all, all the data stored in it is lost. Flocker expands the Docker ecosystem by giving developers a tool for managing data volumes in Docker clusters and making them as portable as their Docker containers. It supports many of the most popular databases, key-value stores and message queueing services and runs on most cloud computing platforms, with support for CoreOS, Cloud Foundry and Mesosphere coming soon…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ProfitBricks, the price/performance leader in Cloud Computing IaaS, today announced it has earned recognition on The Channel Company’s CRN 20 Coolest Cloud Infrastructure Vendors of 2015. This annual list recognizes some of the most innovative cloud companies supporting the IT channel today. This marks the third year ProfitBricks made the list.

The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors honor is presented to companies based on their approach to creating innovative products, services or partner programs that have helped channel partners transform into true solution providers, ultimately helping customers take advantage of the ease of use, flexibility, scalability and savings that cloud computing offers…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Zenoss Inc., the leading provider of unified monitoring and analytics solutions for physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT infrastructure and applications, today announced it was named in a recent Forbes article as one of the best cloud computing companies and CEOs to work for in 2015. "It is an honor to be recognized by Forbes in this category and we congratulate the other top performing companies as well.”

This analysis was constructed using a combination of the latest Computer Reseller News CRN list, The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2015, as a baseline to compare Glassdoor.com scores. These standings include the (%) of employees who would recommend companies to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO…

Grazed from ARNNet. Author: Brian Karlovsky.

VCE has launched a new converged infrastructure solution with VMware and EMC to embrace the shift to hybrid Cloud. The Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is an integrated solution designed to further speed and simplify the deployment and management of hybrid Cloud environments.

According to a company statement, it drives an even greater degree of convergence by extending the standardised, repeatable practices of the unique “VCE Experience” to the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, enabling factory integration of additional VMware and EMC technologies including VMware NSX network virtualisation, VMware vRealize management and orchestration software, and EMC ViPR software-defined-storage…

Grazed from Microsoft. Author: Todd Thibodeaux.

Creating a unified operating system with Windows 8 seemed brilliant from a development perspective. But Microsoft (MSFT)’s inability to implement that vision led to less-than-enthusiastic adoption rates among enterprise customers (and contributed to the now notorious "Windows Pattern"). Microsoft is eager to correct these flaws with Windows 10 and has demonstrated a commitment to incorporating many enterprise-oriented features as well. Here are three of the top improvements that have the potential to make Windows 10 the new bedrock of corporate workstations:

A Smarter Command Prompt — While most of us have moved on to PowerShell to handle most of the heavy lifting, the fact remains that neither the command prompt nor PowerShell utility has received much attention from Microsoft over the years. Windows 10 is poised to change that with a variety of simple but helpful features, including text selection, transparency, text wrapping and keyboard shortcuts for common tasks…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Nick Booth.

HJ Heinz Company has become the first organization to number crunch its data both ‘in memory’ and across the globe, after hiring a migration specialist for its maiden cloud voyage. The food giant used Virtustream’s xStream to create a platform as a service (PaaS) environment on which SAP’s HANA in-memory database system could analyse masses of data quickly.

The company’s ‘in memory’ cloud system ran across its computing resources in 40 different countries. Heinz’s first foray in cloud computing has seen it roll out SAP HANA globally and, according to Heinz, ahead of schedule. Heinz said the exercise will give it a granular, real-time visibility into company performance, which it can budget for on a consumption-based billing model…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

Throughout the channel, it is obvious that the cloud is not only a great way to expand your business model but also to enhance the customer IT experience and drive incremental revenues. The opportunity is substantial. Gartner has predicted that the public cloud services market will exceed $244 billion by 2017. That’s only two years away.

This reality check has provided many of us–from ISVs, distributors, MSPs and VARs–to realign our business models and get a bigger piece of the proverbial pie. Is Infrastructure as a service or hybrid cloud the solution? Or, should DaaS or DBaaS be at the top of our list of initiatives?…