Chef™ (formerly Opscode) on Monday announced it has closed a $32 Million Series D funding round. Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) led the round, which included Citi Ventures, Citi’s corporate venturing arm, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, DFJ, and Ignition Partners, and also included Amplify Partners.
The new round of capital will be used to further accelerate the development of the company’s Chef IT automation platform, expand market penetration, and drive customer success.
Chef also today announced that Rory O’Driscoll, a partner with ScaleVP, has joined the company’s Board of Directors. In addition, the company has expanded its executive team and has changed the company name from Opscode to Chef.
Archivo mensual: diciembre 2013
IBM launches “cloud of clouds” offering, aims to stop vendor lock-in
IBM has developed technology which will allow clients to move data between clouds and backed up whilst avoiding the dreaded vendor lock-in, it has been claimed.
A press release on the IBM website explains how the Armonk firm’s patent pending invention enables a “cloud of clouds” theory – the idea that a series of clouds can offer greater protection against outages and data loss than any single cloud.
This is alongside a software toolkit developed by IBM which allows storage systems to access third party private and public clouds.
“Our cloud of clouds invention can help clients avoid service outages and security incidents that impact the reliability and security of individual clouds,” Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM fellow, said.
He added: “We are adding multiple levels of redundancy and reliability by making cloud migration and backup easier and faster than is currently possible.”
Pivotally, the solution uses object storage to target data …
SYS-CON.tv Interview: One Cloud, No Servers
«Lanlogic has been around since 1995 and we focus on helping customers that are traditionally less technical and need someone who’s an IT consultant, a trusted business adviser, to help them evaluate their needs,» explained Joe Foos, Director of Sales & Marketing at Lanlogic, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
2014 Is the Year That BYOD Bites Back
It’s that time of the year again. That time when we humans like to celebrate the annual revolution of our arbitrary measure of chronological quantities and units known as time. Or to put it another way, it’s that time of the year for 2014 predictions, postulations and hypothesizing on the state of the road ahead.
The very easiest and possibly most certain prediction we can make for technology as we head into 2014 is that we are precisely five years away from the next major paradigm shift in IT, as compared to where we stand today. Paradigm platform shifts come around just about every five years – you can count on it.
Synchronoss Reaches 10 Million Personal Cloud Subscribers
Synchronoss Technologies on Monday announced that it has reached 10 Million Personal Cloud Subscribers throughout the world since launching its Personal Cloud Platform this summer. Synchronoss’ Personal Cloud Platform is an industry leading personal cloud solution that enables mobile operators to provide subscribers the ability to backup, restore, sync and share their valuable content across smartphones, tablets, computers and other connected devices – accessible from anywhere at any time. In addition to our successful launch of the Personal Cloud Platform, Synchronoss continues to grow its cloud services across all its subscriber base, with over 60 Million subscribers, including Network Address Book, Social Gateways, and Smart Mobility worldwide.
Can We Finally Find the Database Holy Grail? | Part 3
In my first post in this three-part series I talked about the need for distributed transactional databases that scale-out horizontally across commodity machines, as compared to traditional transactional databases that employ a “scale-up” design. Simply adding more machines is a quicker, cheaper and more flexible way of increasing database capacity than forklift upgrades to giant steam-belching servers. It also brings the promises of continuous availability and of geo-distributed operation.
The second post in this series provided an overview of the three historical approaches to designing distributed transactional database systems, namely: 1. Shared Disk Designs (e.g., ORACLE RAC), 2. Shared Nothing Designs (e.g., the Facebook MySQL implementation), and 3) Synchronous Commit Designs (e.g., GOOGLE F1). All of them have some advantages over traditional client-server database systems, but they each have serious limitations in relation to cost, complexity, dependencies on specialized infrastructure and workload-specific performance trade-offs. I noted that we are very excited about a recent innovation in distributed database design, introduced by NuoDB’s technical founder Jim Starkey. We call the concept Durable Distributed Cache (DDC), and I want to spend a little time in this third and final post talking about what it is, with a high-level overview of how it works.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Ongoing Evolution of IT
«It’s been a great show for NetIQ – we’ve had the opportunity to speak about how NetIQ is enabling the cloud – how we are allowing customers to get access to cloud services that enable service providers to deliver cloud services in a secure, compliant manner,» explained Gary Ardito, Chief Architect for Cloud Service Provider Solutions at NetIQ, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Chef, Formerly Opscode, Closes $32 Million in Series D Funding
Chef™ (formerly Opscode) on Monday announced it has closed a $32 Million Series D funding round. Scale Venture Partners (ScaleVP) led the round, which included Citi Ventures, Citi’s corporate venturing arm, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, DFJ, and Ignition Partners, and also included Amplify Partners.
The new round of capital will be used to further accelerate the development of the company’s Chef IT automation platform, expand market penetration, and drive customer success.
Chef also today announced that Rory O’Driscoll, a partner with ScaleVP, has joined the company’s Board of Directors. In addition, the company has expanded its executive team and has changed the company name from Opscode to Chef.
Kevin L. Jackson Team to Deliver Business Focused Cloud Computing Training
Today I am announcing my partnership with EITAGlobal to produce and deliver a series of business focused training webinars on cloud computing.
Headquartered in Fremont, California, EITAGlobal is a continuing professional education provider with a difference. Their strategy delivers effective and relevant training to IT professionals via three delivery options – Live Webinars, Recorded Webinars and In-person Seminars.
Cloud and Mobile Security Management Gain Momentum
As more business applications move to the cloud, security seems to be top-of-mind for all concerned parties. Also, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work trend, along with more smartphones and tablets that require wireless connectivity in the workplace, has increased the level of concern for many IT managers and executives.
Keeping business systems safe and protecting the data that they hold has never been more difficult to achieve, according to the latest market study by Ovum. The typical corporate ICT environment continues to be threatened by security attacks — ranging from opportunistic hackers using pre-built tools through to targeted, well-resourced, state-sponsored cyber activity.
Ovum believes that online attack volumes will continue to rise and no business should consider itself immune — since any type of organization can be targeted by hackers. Even the best-protected government, military and business systems have already been breached, and in 2014 they will to be put under further pressure.
Business Technology Security Trends to Watch in 2014
- More proactive protection is needed to address the cyber security time bomb.
- Security-as-a-service will be the way forward for a growing number of organisations.
- Cloud and mobility will change the way we approach IT security and user protection.
«In 2014, cyber espionage and state-sponsored threats will continue to make headlines, but the concerning underlying trend is that similar technology can and will be used against ordinary businesses,» said Andrew Kellett, principal analyst at Ovum.
Security experts recognize the rise in use of sophisticated malware, and this is driving the need for better and more proactive security. However, organisations will be required to fundamentally shift their approach to security from a mainly static defensive posture to one of taking positive action before or as an attack takes place.
In 2014, enterprise organisations will need to gain positive advantages from security intelligence, Big Data analytics, and the ability to understand threat priorities and the actions needed to sustain the well-being of the organization and its users.
According to Ovum’s assessment, not every organisation has the budget or skilled security resources to meet its current protection requirements, let alone the extended use of cloud-based services and the BYOD-driven use of smartphones and tablets by employees.
Therefore, during 2014, more organizations will be forced to consider the practicalities of out-sourcing the requirement to managed service providers, utilizing their readily available security-as-a-service options.
Ovum believes the need for better security will be driven by ongoing operational demands — including the use of new technology that makes business information more readily available and consequently more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
«Ovum recommends that organizations should look to gain positive advantages from Big Data, security intelligence and analytics-based approaches to security management,» concludes Kellett. «Meanwhile, mainstream security vendors need to provide a range of products and services that genuinely meet the protection needs of both SMEs and large enterprise clients.»