Archivo mensual: julio 2012

Cloud Services, Events, Gartner, Marketing, Parallels Automation, service provider, WPC12

Parallels Named a “Cool Vendor” in Cloud Services by Industry Research Firm

 

 

RENTON, WA and TORONTO – July 10, 2012 – Parallels® (www.parallels.com), the hosting and cloud services enablement leader, today announced technology research firm Gartner has recognized Parallels as a Cool Vendor for 2012 in the recent report, “Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerage Enablers, 2012.” The report recognizes those firms with new and innovative technologies for delivering cloud brokerage services. This announcement was made during the 2012 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, taking place this week in Toronto through July 12.

 

Recognized for its Parallels Automation software, including Parallels Automation for Cloud Marketplace, Parallels is helping service providers profit from the growing demand in Small and Medium Business (SMB) cloud services. Parallels Automation is a complete operational and business support system that automates all aspects of delivering, managing and billing for service providers, enabling them to offer services ranging from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform and Software as a Service (PaaS and SaaS).  Parallels also pre-negotiates wholesale contracts with ISVs and SaaS providers, and arranges relationships with customer support companies, enabling providers to create a Cloud Services Brokerage quickly and efficiently.  Additionally, Parallels Automation for Cloud Marketplace has a flexible architecture that makes it easy for providers to add additional applications enabled by the open Application Packaging Standard (APS). 

 

“We are honored to be recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor in Cloud Services Brokerage Enablement,” said Jack Zubarev, President of Parallels. “With Parallels Automation, including our Cloud Marketplace and our growing list of APS packaged applications, we are making it easy for service providers to quickly and efficiently deliver the full suite of Microsoft hosted applications that meet the diverse needs of SMBs.”

 

Parallels recently announced the general availability of Parallels Automation 5.4, the latest version of the most comprehensive hosting and cloud services delivery system used by hundreds of service providers worldwide — from the world’s largest telecom operators to top hosters and providers of vertical solutions (see the Gartner report for a list of reference partners). Parallels Automation 5.4 now includes support for delivering Microsoft® Lync and other Microsoft® hosted applications, and its built-in Parallels Windows Server® Provisioning Engine helps service providers manage the migration of Microsoft Hosted Exchange® and other applications from Microsoft’s former Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) solution.  

 

The full Gartner report is available courtesy of Parallels here.

 

About Parallels
Parallels is a worldwide leader in hosting and cloud service enablement and desktop virtualization. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with more than 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

 

For information on Parallels, visit www.parallels.com/spp, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ParallelsCloud and Like Us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ParallelsCloud.

 

Disclaimer: 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

 

 

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OpenNebula Project Releases OpenNebula Cloud Manager 3.6

The OpenNebula project has just announced the availability of OpenNebula 3.6 (Lagoon). This release is focused on stabilizing the features introduced in OpenNebula 3.4, improving the performance of some existing features, and adding new features for virtualization management and integration with the new OpenNebula Marketplace.
OpenNebula 3.6 features a new hotplug mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. Also for OpenNebula 3.6 we have re-written from scratch the Quota and Accounting tools, so now they are included in the OpenNebula core to enhance their integration with the existing AuthZ & AuthN mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone). There are some other new features like VM rescheduling, hard reboots, cloning of disk images, support for per-cluster definition of system datastores, etc.

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Dependencies Gone Wild: Testing Cloud Apps at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

The move to cloud-based applications has undeniably delivered tremendous benefits. However, the associated distribution creates various challenges from the quality perspective:
End-to-end tests need to pass through multiple dependent systems, which are commonly unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access for testing.
Accessing such system often involves transaction and bandwidth fees.
Teams need to test and tune the system under test against a realistic and broad range of performance and behavior conditions – yet such conditions are often difficult to achieve in a test environment.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Wayne Ariola, Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft, will explore how to teams can use service virtualization to overcome the access constraints that delay and limit the testing of cloud applications.

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UShareSoft to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that UShareSoft, provider of a cloud software factory and app store platform, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
UShareSoft helps cloud providers, enterprises and ISVs simplify software delivery to the cloud. UShareSoft’s UForge is a cloud software factory and enterprise app store platform that enables organizations to automatically build and migrate business-ready applications to private, public or hybrid clouds. UShareSoft has headquarters in Europe, an R&D center in Argentina, and offices in the United States and Japan.

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Coalfire to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that Coalfire, a leading independent information technology Governance, Risk and Compliance (IT GRC) firm, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Coalfire is a leading, independent information technology Governance, Risk and Compliance (IT GRC) firm that provides IT audit, risk assessment and compliance management solutions. Founded in 2001, Coalfire has offices in Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., and completes thousands of projects annually in retail, financial services, healthcare, government and utilities. Coalfire has developed a new generation of cloud-based IT GRC tools under the Navis™ brand that Coalfire clients use to efficiently manage IT controls and keep pace with rapidly changing regulations and best practices. Coalfire’s solutions are adapted to requirements under emerging data privacy legislation, the PCI DSS, GLBA, FFIEC, HIPAA/HITECH, NERC CIP, Sarbanes-Oxley and FISMA.

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Journey to the Cloud, Miscellaneous IT, Project management

Active Project Management; Facilitate, Don’t Dictate

It is estimated by the Project Management Institute that 90% of project management is communication. The tasks involved with setting up a project, identifying sponsors, defining resources, schedules, managing risks, and critical paths are all important elements of large complex projects. Facilitating the team’s communication channels is the single most important effort of a good project manager.

Rudyard Kipling once wrote “… the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”

A wolf has to support the pack but also has to be able to survive on its own abilities. When building project teams the goal is to assemble a “pack” with different strengths and opinions that can perform at their own peak level. A high performance pack has strength through the members of the project team.  An effective Project Manager needs to assemble individuals into a pack (or work with an existing pack), provide constant and useful communication, and assist as needed to guide them to their end goal together.

Five tips for building a better wolf pack:

  1. Listen
  2. Value ideas
  3. Positive thinking
  4. Try to close all conversations by asking what you can do to help
  5. Have a sense of humor

Preparing for project kickoff meetings creates an opportunity to listen to the team and get them engaged. An important part of pre-planning a successful kickoff is soliciting the team’s input and providing opportunities to talk about the project’s risks, schedules, and goals. The sooner the project manager begins to listen to the team rather than detailing his or her own thoughts on the project, the more likely and quickly the team will become engaged. Soliciting input from a diverse set of stakeholders substantially increases the chances of full engagement of the project team.

In addition to the project management role of ensuring the project meets the triple constraints of Scope, Time and Budget, taking an approach as a facilitator and understanding and deploying your team as a collaborative resource and working to integrate their skills will provide a more complete 360 degree, holistic view to the project. The project manager plays an important role in encouraging and engaging opportunities for collaborative conversations. The team’s input will allow for better commitment and buy-in from the stakeholders and the team, and ultimately better position the team to successfully meet pre-defined project objectives.

A Project Manager needs to rely on previous project experiences as well as foundations built from credentials (e.g. PMP certification). Often, tasks don’t flow exactly as expected and decisions are often made outside of planned meetings; however it is important to leverage meetings as a means to collaboratively check-in with the team on any decisions made, the impact of the decisions, and to establish meeting minutes as the reference point for the projects. The meeting minutes provide an important, literal “power of the pen” which enables Project Managers to lead and guide the project team.

On a recent Virtual Desktop Infrastructure project installation, there was a new member representing the customer’s infrastructure function, and this caused a sudden shift in the project deliverables. While a customer is not always right, the customer is most certainly paying for your ability to understand, adapt, and communicate changes within the team and manage to the approved Scope. In this particular example, the focus shift was remediated by adjusting weekly meetings to a daily standing meeting which provided for relevant and timely inputs and buy-in from the diverse team members and allowed for a very quick process adjustment and consensus for achieving Scope deliverables.

A Project Manager also relies on the team to identify critical project information in order to ideally circumvent any issue before problems may occur. When issues do occur, facilitating conversations and soliciting input from the team, both informally and formally, are usually far more effective than a project manager declaring a solution. A project team where teamwork, loyalty, and communication are the norm can provide a “howling” successful project.

 

InfiniBand, Mellanox, Mellanox Technologies, Partnerships, Quanta Computer, Quanta QCT

Mellanox Partners with Quanta QCT

Image representing Mellanox Technologies as de...

Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ:MLNX) (TASE:MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced a partnership with Quanta QCT, a leading provider of server, storage and network equipment to data center customers in the United States.

This partnership was developed as part of Quanta QCT’s increased focus on cloud technology-based solutions. The companies are partnering on solutions based on servers and storage from Quanta QCT and interconnect technology from Mellanox to deliver unprecedented price performance on cloud computing for enterprise and service provider data centers.

“Many of our customers are asking for interconnect solutions that support applications demanding high-bandwidth and low-latency,” said Mike Yang, vice president and general manager of Quanta QCT. “Mellanox delivers a high-performance solution for these applications, and we’re proud to offer it to our customers requiring higher levels of interconnect performance.”

Mellanox products – including the ConnectX-3 suite of products that accelerate application performance by increasing available bandwidth and decreasing the associated transport load on the CPU – are immediately available through Quanta QCT.

“Quanta QCT has recognized Mellanox as a leading vendor for Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions,” said Marc Sultzbaugh, vice president of worldwide sales at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox and Quanta QCT are partnering to offer some of the highest-performing cloud solutions currently available.”

Quanta QCT targets midsize and large enterprises, governments and service providers who want the engineering excellence of a global manufacturer of integrated datacenter solutions, but do not require the scale and resources of a full-service ODM. Quanta QCT is headquartered in Fremont, Calif., and its parent company is Quanta Computer, Inc., a $37 billion original design manufacturer. More information is available at http://www.QuantaQCT.com.


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Cloud Computing: ServiceMesh Teams with Apprenda, Cloud Cruiser & Derdack

ServiceMesh has teamed with Apprenda, Cloud Cruiser and Derdack, with sponsorship from Microsoft, to create a comprehensive set of cloud enablement solutions named the Private Cloud Solutions Suite (PCSS). By collective effort, the team that created PCSS offers Systems Integrators (SIs) an enhanced market solution for building private clouds using the Microsoft stack that eliminates stop gaps and enables full-spectrum delivery of enterprise private cloud capabilities to customers. Strategically aligned with Microsoft System Center, Hyper-V and Windows Server, PCSS ensures that SIs can attract new revenue from enterprise customers and deliver on outstanding private cloud project commitments.

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Azima, Azima DLI, Computer Electronics, Computer Hardware, IT Management, Predictive maintenance

Buzzword Alert: Reliability as a Service (RaaS) from Azima DLI

 

Image representing Azima DLI as depicted in Cr...

Azima DLI, the leader and premier provider of Predictive Maintenance (PdM) analytical services and products, today announced the new industry standard for delivery of highly-efficient, cost-effective machine condition monitoring programs: Reliability as a Service™ (RaaS). RaaS™ is delivered through a combination of Azima DLI’s TRIO family of data collectors and cloud-based access to its ExpertALERT™ vibration analysis software. Launched today, the TRIO™ CA6 with RaaS is the industry’s first cloud-based data collector and machine condition analyzer.

The second of a new generation of vibration data collectors and machine condition analyzers from Azima DLI, the CA6 with RaaS provides a complete, fully managed software and service solution. The CA6 is the first to market with a cloud computing solution providing access to the latest PdM analysis technologies and collaboration tools, while assuring lower total cost of ownership. Its durable design, unmatched software and wireless capabilities provide greater efficiency of collection and safety.

The TRIO line is a powerful computerized system in a mobile industrial package that sets aside the traditional data collection model to focus on productivity and elevating the overall success of PdM programs. Designed and engineered specifically for a new generation of data collection, the CA6 with RaaS features:

  • Reliability as a Service (RaaS): Includes locally installed
    ExpertALERT analysis software, cloud-based ExpertALERT analysis
    software web application, and cloud-provided WATCHMAN Reliability
    Portal™, hosted data storage and replication services, mentored PdM
    training and available professional analytical expertise. Azima DLI
    reduces the need for IT support, database management and capital costs
    associated with dedicated servers and static software fees. RaaS
    provides broad access to collaborate on critical assets across the
    enterprise or from Azima DLI’s certified analytical experts.
  • Advanced Computing Power: The embedded, Azima DLI ALERT™
    analysis software and Windows® 7 Ultimate operating system combine to
    provide the most capable data collector in its class. With its modular
    design allowing ease of replacing the industrial tablet PC user
    interface, downloadable software upgrades, and little-to-no need for
    new data acquisition hardware investments, TRIO offers the lowest
    total cost of ownership of any industrial vibration data collector /
    field analyzer.
  • Bluetooth Enabled: For improved safety and maneuverability, the
    CA6 supports hands-free, Bluetooth®-enabled, wireless data acquisition
    control up to 30 feet away from the sensor.
  • Greater Portability and Ease of Use: A lightweight, ergonomic,
    modular design enables greater portability and decreases the physical
    demands of data collection, thanks to the various body-worn and
    carrying options offered by Azima DLI.

“RaaS from Azima DLI is a PdM game changer as it provides a complete software as a service solution unmatched by any other provider,” said Randy Johnson, vice president of sales and marketing, Azima DLI. “This integrated solution incorporates the latest collection hardware with Azima DLI’s leading ExpertALERT software and WATCHMAN Reliability Portal, making enterprise-wide PdM collaboration possible for customers that want to manage their own maintenance programs.”

With a solid-state hard drive, bright sunlight-readable touch screen and Wi-Fi access, the CA6 can automatically connect with desktop or networked PCs and servers. The TRIO family of data collectors is the only one to include a digital camera, allowing the operator to take a video or still photos during routine machine inspections and either include them within the diagnostics report or send to remote analysts.

Pricing and Availability

The entire TRIO CA6 with RaaS solution is priced with an entry point of under $15,000 with hardware, software and IT infrastructure costs all provided by Azima DLI. Ongoing costs are as much as 60 percent less than non cloud-based models and are subscription based.

For more information, visit www.AzimaDLI.com/TRIO to view product videos, download the brochure and learn additional details about getting started with modernizing your current PdM program today..


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Cloud Computing: GitHub Raises Heady $100 Million A Round

GitHub, the cloud-based collaborative source code management site, has raised a whopping $100 million first round.
Almost all of the money is coming from Andreessen Horowitz. It’s the largest single investment the young VC operation has ever made and values the San Francisco start-up at $750 million according to the Wall Street Journal. Ron Conway’s SV Angel firm is taking the crumbs Andreessen Horowitz left on the table.
GitHub wants to be the standard in coding and is taking the dough to expand and build out an enterprise sales team.

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