Racemi Announces Support for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

Racemi has completed validation of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, enabling migration of heterogeneous workloads to vCloud Hybrid Service.
What is the easiest way for an enterprise to migrate to the vCloud Hybrid Service? Racemi makes that promise with its migration software that now supports vCloud Hybrid Service – an addition to other VMware platforms vSphere and vCloud. Racemi is the only VMware certified partner to offer the ability to migrate existing physical, virtual (Xen, Hyper-V, VMware, KVM), and even other cloud servers into vCloud Hybrid Service.
“We worked closely with VMware to offer support for vCloud environments,” said James Strayer, vice president of product management, Racemi. “With Racemi server migration software, we can quickly and easily migrate workloads from any platform, such as physical servers, other virtual platforms, and even other cloud providers, into vCloud Hybrid Service.”
Racemi’s server imaging technology automatically migrates data between dissimilar physical, virtual or private cloud platforms, streamlining the onboarding process from days to minutes. By comparison, manually migrating workloads to a public cloud built on different infrastructure can take manual labor, significantly impacting migration costs.
And from the VMware side, Mathew Lodge, vice president – Cloud Services, said: “This is important as our customers move their workloads across different environments and deploy into hybrid cloud environments.”

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Myths of the Cloud

Is it true that all IT will move to the cloud, i.e., computing resources available from hyperscale data centers accessed via the Internet, due to the benefits of cost reduction, business agility, and the transformation of CapEx to OpEx? Or how about that the industry will consolidate to a few global players, that IT spend will go down as price wars drive computing costs ever lower, and that security and electricity consumption are key issues?
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx, will correct popular myths, half-truths, and misconceptions regarding the future of the cloud.

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The Purely Public Cloud Deployment: The Perceived Risk

Let’s begin with a leading question: Can’t the hybrid economy model live within the public cloud? From the enormous number of conversations with top cloud thought leaders, CIOs, startups, and the like, it seems that the answer is YES. In this post, I will raise some basic questions and will delve deeply into this topic to debate the common resistance to what I call “pure cloud deployment.”
I started my journey in the technology world only 10 years ago. I started establishing an online cloud and SaaS solution for the SMB, and 6 years later I was exposed to the great wonderful world of enterprise IT factory. I experienced and documented the challenge of moving the multi-million dollar IT shop to AWS cloud. I also supported and kept records on projects of enterprises and ISVs that moved resources from their on-premise applications to the Amazon cloud, beginning with their initial integration and continual maintenance all the way to the education and implementation of the cloud pay-as-you-go and on-demand models. In my journey, I saw how Salesforce grows like crazy and how its ecosystem mushrooms along with it. I’ve closely followed Amazon’s every step of building the AWS cloud, which, without a doubt, has been a revolution from IT markets.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley | DDoS Attacks: Peeling the Onion

Taking down a competitor’s website can be very valuable. Unlike Hacktivists, with generally short attention spans, or regular cybercriminals, who usually give up when faced with adequate protection, these well-funded attacks persist over time, and employ multiple, sophisticated vectors.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Marc Gaffan, Co-Founder & VP of Business Development at Incapsula, will review a real case study defending against one of the largest, most sophisticated and persistent DDoS attacks. These include Networking Capacity, Client Classification, whitelisting / blacklisting / crowdsourcing, challenge mechanisms, anomaly detection and the secret sauce.

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VMware vCloud Hybrid Service

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is a secure, dedicated hybrid cloud service operated by VMware, built on the trusted foundation of VMware vSphere. The service supports existing workloads and third-party applications as well as new application development, giving IT a common platform for seamlessly extending its data center to the cloud. vCloud Hybrid Service is available in two service types – Dedicated Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud – and includes five primary service components.

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SUSE Extends Partnership with VMware in the Cloud

“Extending our partnership with VMware into the cloud is a boon for enterprise customers,” said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing for SUSE. SUSE extended its partnership to make SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware available through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.
Miller noted that “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is an ideal guest operating system for running Linux workloads in any virtual environment, notably VMware. Customers will be able to get these same benefits through VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.”

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Opening Up the Cloud for Real Business Value

Open source clouds are taking off fast, but some still doubt their practical business application. In reality, however, open clouds better deliver on all the benefits that made cloud appealing in the first place: interoperability, innovation and cost efficiency. With an open cloud, companies aren’t investing in obsolete technology; instead, an active community keeps them on the cutting edge of innovation.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Kyle MacDonald, Vice President of Cloud at Canonical, will explore the tangible benefits of open clouds and explain why open clouds strive to be interoperable with proprietary clouds too, ensuring that whatever cloud investments companies make, open clouds will add even more value to them.

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Hybrid clouds: From reluctant acceptance to strategic imperative

It’s been well over a year that Forrester’s James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that “you are already hybrid.” 

In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.

This week, a spate of articles from Forbes, WSJ (requires login) and elsewhere are telling the tale of a far more intentional approach to hybrid cloud.

This acceptance that certain workloads, for logistical, financial, or pragmatic reasons, are best housed locally – and that others, due to spikiness (technical term) or proximity to endpoint or resource profile, are best deployed to a service provider.

Infact, the Forbes article cites different tiers of an application potentially residing at different places.

There are a few implications of this current discussion …

VMware Announces Availability of vSphere 5.5

VMware announced the release of the latest generation of its flagship product, VMware vSphere 5.5. Enhancements include support for larger storage systems, support for management and deployment of big data environments, and support for Flash Memory performance improvements. VMware vSphere 5.5 also expanded its support by allowing configurations with two times the previous physical CPU, memory and NUMA node limits.

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Rapid Fire Summary of Opening Keynote at VMworld 2013

By Chris Ward, CTO, LogicsOne

For those of you who aren’t out in San Francisco at the 10th annual VMworld event, here is a quick overview of what was covered in the opening keynote delivered by CEO Pat Gelsinger’s opening:

  • Social, Mobile, Cloud & Big Data are the 4 largest forces shaping IT today
  • Transitioned from Mainframe –>Client Server –>Mobile Cloud
  • Pat sets the stage that the theme of this year’s event is networking – basically setting the stage for a ton of Nicira/NSX information. I think VMware sees the core of the software defined datacenter as networking-based, and they are in a very fast race to beat out the competition in that space
  • Pat also mentioned that his passion is to get every x86 application/workload 100% virtualized. He drew parallels to Bill Gates saying his dream was a PC on every desk in every home that runs Microsoft software.
  • Next came announcements around vSphere 5.5 & vCloud Suite 5.5…here are some of the highlights:
    • 2x CPU and Memory limits and 32x storage capacity per volume to support mission critical and big applications
    • Application Aware high availability
    • Big Data Extensions – multi-tenant Hadoop capability via Serengeti
    • vSAN officially announced as public beta and will be GA by 1st half of 2014
    • vVOL is now in tech preview
    • vSphere Flash Read Cache included in vSphere 5.5

Next, we heard from Martin Casado. Martin is the CTO – Networking at VMware and came over from the Nicira acquisition and was speaking about VMware NSX. NSX is a combination of vCloud Network and Security (vCNS) and Nicira. Essentially, NSX is a network hypervisor that abstracts the underlying networking hardware just like ESX abstracts underlying server hardware.

Other topics to note:

  • IDC names VMware #1 in Cloud Management
  • VMware hypervisor fully supported as part of OpenStack
  • Growing focus on hybrid cloud. VMware will have 4 datacenters soon (Las Vegas, Santa Clara, Sterling, & Dallas). Also announcing partnerships with Savvis in NYC & Chicago to provide vCHS services out of Savvis datacenters.
  • End User Computing
    • Desktop as a Service on vCHS is being announced (I have an EUC Summit Dinner later on tonight so I will be able to go into more detail afterward that).

So, all-in-all a good start to the event. Network virtualization/NSX is clearly the focus of this conference and vCHS is a not too distant 2nd. Something that was omitted from the keynote was the rewritten SSO engine for vCenter 5.5. The piece was weak for 5.1 and has been vastly improved with 5.5…this could be addressed tomorrow as most of the tech staff is in Tuesday’s general session.

If you’re at the event…I’ll actually be speaking on a panel tomorrow at 2:30 about balancing agility with service standardization. I’ll be joining Khalid Hakim and Kurt Milne of VMware, along with Dave Bartoletti of Forrester Research and Ian Clayton of Service Management 101. I will also be co-presenting on Wednesday with my colleague John Dixon at 2:30-3:30 in the Moscone West Room 2011 about deploying a private cloud service catalogue. Hopefully you can swing by.

More to come soon!