Cloudian, Inc., has released Cloudian HyperStore ‘forever live’ FL3000 series arrays and HyperStore 5.2 software. The new appliances, which can start small and scale up to 3.8 petabytes of storage in a single data center rack, offer businesses the ability to scale with the demands of the business, from terabytes to hundreds of petabytes.
Archivo mensual: septiembre 2015
Okta raises $75m in funding as cloud identity management leader is valued as $1.2 bn
Cloud security vendor Okta has raised $75 million from existing shareholders, taking its market valuation at $1.2 billion.
A specialist in identity and mobility management, Okta raised the finance from lead investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. New investment has been attracted from Khosla Ventures, Altimeter, Glynn Capital and others.
Since its founding in 2009, Okta has now raised a total of $230 million.
Okta has added to its management team with Michelle Wilson, former general counsel at Amazon, joining as the first independent director on its board. In addition, Okta has appointed Michael Guerchon, ex-Riversoft HR man, as its Chief People Officer and Jon Runyan as its General Counsel. Runyan, formerly a partner in Goodwin Proctor’s technology companies practice, will oversee the company’s legal affairs worldwide.
In September Okta announced a ‘substantial investment’ in private cloud infrastructure rented from Amazon Web Services in Germany. An additional disaster recovery facility has been established in Eire. The use of the AWS facilities was a move to manage all European data in a single facility within Europe.
“We’re at an important inflection point where IT leaders, product developers and industry analysts see the critical role identity plays in connecting people, apps, devices and organizations,” said Todd McKinnon, Okta CEO, “Okta pioneered cloud-based identity management, which set us up to become the foundation for secure connections.”
Okta stakeholder Ben Horowitz, co-founder of investment partner Andreessen Horowitz, described Okta as the ‘runaway market leader in identity management’.
“This new round of funding will expand their scope and bring that solution to the world,” said Horowitz.
Since its start-up in 2009, Okta has won 2,500 customers globally catering to demand for cloud security with its identity management service.
Meanwhile, Cybersecurity vendor Webroot announced new channel to market for its cloud based services, in a partnership with New Zealand-based distributor exceed. The agreement gives retailers, IT resellers and managed service providers access to Webroot’s cloud-based big data analytics, automated machine learning and intelligent endpoint security.
Distributors, resellers and service providers are revising their business model to focus on cloud services, giving security vendors the scope for rapid expansion, according to Justin Tye, Exeed’s managing director. “We selected Webroot for its flexible, fast, and effective solutions, as well as its business model that clearly supports a multifaceted sales strategy,” said Tye.
HP overhauls Cisco in cloud infrastructure equipment space
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HP has finally overtaken Cisco in the cloud infrastructure equipment market, according to latest figures released by Synergy Research.
The two companies had been virtually neck and neck in the previous two quarters’ analysis, yet Synergy argues HP has grabbed the lead by virtue of its investment in the server and storage space, which now accounts for almost two thirds of the infrastructure market.
HP and Cisco maintain a huge lead over closest rivals Microsoft, Dell, and IBM, yet the two leaders represent only a quarter of the overall market. IBM was the market leader back in 2012 but has experienced a severe downturn since then, with a key reason being Big Blue selling its server business to Lenovo in 2014. Despite a slight upturn in fortunes this quarter, IBM remains behind Dell, having dropped from third place to fifth in the market between Q3 and Q4 of 2014.
At the top, however, the battle is well and truly joined – and the intriguing backdrop between the two companies adds fuel to the fire. Cisco recently unveiled new leadership in the form of CEO Chuck Robbins while HP is going ahead with plans to split the company in two, separating its computer and printer business from corporate hardware and services, with the latter forming Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
John Dinsdale, Synergy chief analyst, says the split – to be made official in November but already happening internally – could potentially enhance HP’s play in the cloud infrastructure equipment market. He told CloudTech in an email: “If anything the impact should be a positive one resulting from a tighter focus of the senior management team on issues that are critical to HPE’s success.”
Regarding the move as an overall strategic play, Dinsdale argues it is a “great idea” – theoretically at least. But he warned: “Of course everything will come down to how well the transition is managed operationally. There is a lot of potential for management to take its eyes off the ball as it handles issues surrounding the transition.”
Cisco maintains a commanding lead in public cloud infrastructure, while HP holds all the aces in private cloud. The overall market, including hardware and software, is now running at approximately $16 billion per quarter. With the market having grown by 25% year on year, Synergy notes the latest figures represent good news for all vendors.
Support for the cloud is over priced, say disillusioned CIOs
The vast majority of businesses now use cloud computing but most feel ripped off, according to a study.
Research firm Vanson Bourne has canvassed a sample of 200 chief information officers (CIOs) for their feedback on cloud computing. The results show that almost all (186 out of 200) use the cloud in some form. However, almost as many of them (160 of the 200 CIOs) agreed that ‘ripped off’ was the multiple choice answer that best described their feelings over support services.
If the survey was statistically significant and was representative of industry wide sentiment, then 80 per cent of British businesses feel they are paying a high premium for basic support on their cloud services. While the penetration of cloud computing is high, with 93 per cent of businesses now using ‘some form’ of the service, some 84 per cent of the total sample said that it has not met their expectations on reducing support.
The most common problems presented by the survey were: slow response times to customer service queries (which was identified by 47 per cent of the sample), call handlers lacking technical knowledge (41 per cent), over-use of automated phone lines (33 per cent), complicated escalation processes (28 per cent) and a lack of 24/7 cover (19 per cent).
The results suggest that support from service providers is poor, according to Richard Davies, CEO of service provider ElasticHosts, which sponsored the independent study.
Companies adopt cloud in order to remove the headache of managing IT and the burden on in-house IT staff, so they expect to provide less support themselves, Davies said. For precisely that reason, the cloud service provider must not run a skeleton support service, Davies argued. Too often, according to Davies, companies have to pay a high premium to get the same level of service they got from their internal support.
“When using any service, you want to be able to ask questions, whether to learn how to configure a server or to query a bill. You should be able to do this without having to pay a hefty premium,” said Davies.
Asking a cloud service a technical question frequently involves a long wait and a call that is re-routed through an automated service. Ultimately a human call handler will admit they don’t know the answer, according to Davies.
“The industry should be doing more to help customers,” said Davies, “the first contact for support should be an engineer with strong technical understanding of the service.”
HP overtakes Cisco in cloud infrastructure equipment leadership battle
HP is now the top selling supplier to the cloud infrastructure equipment market, having sat on the shoulder of market leader Cisco throughout 2013 and 2014, according to a study by the Synergy Research Group.
The research group’s sales figures for the two vendors showed them to be tied in the first quarter of 2015, but by Q2 HP had opened a lead after achieving much stronger sequential revenue growth. The two leading vendors are both achieving ‘stellar revenue growth’ in the burgeoning market, according to Synergy. However, while HP maintained a 13 per cent worldwide market share in Q2, Cisco’s share dropped by half a percentage point. The two front runners are followed by Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, Lenovo and Oracle.
In the public cloud infrastructure equipment market Cisco still has a ‘commanding lead’, but HP has a clear lead in private cloud. Total cloud infrastructure equipment revenues, including hardware and software, are now running at $16 billion per quarter, having grown 25 per cent year on year.
HP leads the cloud infrastructure competition because of its dominance in the cloud server sector and its strong contention in storage, according to Synergy. Cisco’s challenge is upheld by its domination of networking, with support from its rapid ascension in the server market. Microsoft owes its high ranking to the success of its server operating system and virtualization applications. In the chasing pack, Dell and IBM both maintain strong positions with a respectable presence in a range of cloud technology markets.
Servers, operating systems, storage and networking combined account for 89 per cent of the cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy’s figures. The balance of the market revenues are made from cloud security, cloud management and virtualization applications.
“The public cloud services market is clearly booming and driving heavy investment in cloud infrastructure, while a rapid transition to cloud is also in full swing in the enterprise IT market,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “The good news for all vendors is that this huge market is growing rapidly and in aggregate the two leaders only account for a quarter of it – much the same as they did a year ago.”
Yesterday cloud service provider Ormuco, an HP Helion Network charter member, appointed Norwich based MigSolv as its UK data centre partner, adding another HP installation to the cloud infrastructure.
Visual Studio and Parallels Desktop Pro Edition
Probably the most widely used developer tool is Visual Studio, and for that reason Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro Edition includes some special integration with Visual Studio. In this blog post I will describe and demo this integration. When the Parallels Tools for Parallels Desktop Pro Edition are installed in Windows, a Visual Studio plug-in, […]
The post Visual Studio and Parallels Desktop Pro Edition appeared first on Parallels Blog.
VMworld 2015: A Summary of Major Announcements from VMware
Earlier in the week, I posted recap blogs from Monday and Tuesday’s general sessions at VMworld. Below is a summary of the major announcements from VMware that came out of the event (with my own minor tweaks).
vCloud Air:
Disaster Recovery OnDemand™: VMware will add a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing option to VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Customers will pay a flat fee for each VM protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs. When a DR test is run or a DR event occurs, customers will only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.
Site Recovery Manager Air™: Site Recovery Manager Air is a SaaS offering that will provide VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery customers with a comprehensive management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralized business continuity and disaster recovery plans. VMware Site Recovery Manager Air will enable fast, reliable and orchestrated recovery of multi-VM applications and data centers protected in VMware vCloud Air.
VMware vCloud Air Object Storage – VMware vCloud Air Object Storage is a portfolio of highly scalable, reliable and cost effective storage services for unstructured data. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is based on Google Cloud Storage and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is based on EMC ViPR, offered by EMC Cloud Services and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage will be easy to setup and exceptionally durable and available, and will reduce the need for data protection with built-in redundancy. It will support global access use cases with easy access from any device, anywhere, anytime.
VMware vCloud Air SQL – VMware vCloud Air SQL is a new database as a service offering that will provide easy access to scalable, cloud-hosted relational databases. Delivered in a cost-efficient pay-as-you-go model, and built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, vCloud Air SQL will support hybrid data solutions that seamlessly and securely extend on-premises databases to the cloud. VMware vCloud Air SQL will support Microsoft SQL Server, with a variety of memory, compute and storage options, and plans to support other relational databases in the future.
SDDC:
VMware NSX™ 6.2 – VMware NSX 6.2 enables organizations to achieve application continuity through disaster recovery and metro-pooling for more efficient use of resources throughout a single data center and across data centers. With VMware NSX, customers can reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80%. VMware NSX 6.2 also adds better integration with physical infrastructure, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data center network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Finally, new capabilities such as Traceflow and Central CLI further simplify operations and visibility.
VMware vRealize™ Operations™ 6.1 – VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 will deliver a consistent management framework as organizations evolve from the private cloud and adopt technologies for the hybrid cloud. With the new Intelligent Workload Placement capability, VMware vRealize Operations will match the workload to a customer’s specific IT and business needs, and recommend the best placement location. Proactive Rebalancing enables customers to continually meet those needs. Operating system and application monitoring will be available natively in VMware vRealize Operations and predictive analytics help IT proactively identify and avoid potential issues across infrastructure and application stacks from a unified self-learning management solution.
vRealize Log Insight™ 3 – New features in vRealize Log Insight 3 will include double the scale and performance to 15,000 messages per second, improvements in fault tolerance around clustering, analytics improvements with new charting options and query snapshots, improved integration with vRealize Operations, and improvements in Big Data style query execution.
VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 – VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 will be based on OpenStack Kilo, making it current with upstream OpenStack code, and will include an industry-first seamless upgrade capability that will address one of the largest deployment and operational challenges for OpenStack clouds. VMware Integrated OpenStack will also include enhancements such as load-balancing as a service, Ceilometer and Heat Auto Scaling to make VMware-based OpenStack clouds more scalable, performant and resilient. VMware also announced VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available to service providers through the VMware vCloud Air Network program. Read this blog to learn more about VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.
VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 – VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 will integrate with VMware NSX 6.2, enabling IT to use network virtualization to simplify disaster recovery management and accelerate recovery in the software-defined data center. VMware Site Recovery Manager will orchestrate the live migration of VMs at scale between sites by automating cross-vCenter vMotion operations, enabling zero downtime disaster avoidance and data center migrations. VMware Site Recovery Manager will interoperate with VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management to enable automatic, policy-based disaster protection for VMs. VMware Site Recovery Manager will now add support for stretched cluster solutions including EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller. Read this blog to learn more about Site Recovery Manager 6.1.
VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering – VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering will enable ecosystem partners including Asigra, EMC, Infinio, PrimaryIO, Samsung, SanDisk and StorageCraft to offer third party software-based data services such as replication and caching. These data services will be fully integrated in vSphere and managed through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, which is the same framework used to manage all the software-defined storage services in vSphere.
GreenPages is hosting a webinar on 9/16, “How to Increase Your IT Equity: Deploying a Build-Operate-Transform Model for IT Operations” . Learn how to create long-term value for your organization and meet the increasing demand for services. Register now!
By Chris Ward, CTO
Blurred Lines: Why Your Network Should Trust No One | @CloudExpo #Cloud
The lines between the corporate network and Internet are getting increasingly blurry. As companies rely on the cloud, employees become more mobile and there is a rise in third-party users who need access to certain applications or resources. Traditional network perimeters, VPNs and the concept of trusting everyone as long as they had the right credentials to log in is simply not enough these days. In fact, this broad trust has resulted in serious breaches, with personal, corporate and government data being exposed to hackers.
[session] AgilData Sneak Peek By @DanKLynn | @CloudExpo #Agile #API #IoT #Cloud #BigData
The web app is agile. The REST API is agile. The testing and planning are agile. But alas, data infrastructures certainly are not. Once an application matures, changing the shape or indexing scheme of data often forces at best a top down planning exercise and at worst includes schema changes that force downtime. The time has come for a new approach that fundamentally advances the agility of distributed data infrastructures.
Come learn about a new solution to the problems faced by software organizations as their products become successful and the data grows beyond the initial scope of the database, whether it starts out as relational SQL, NoSQL, or somewhere in between.
BT and the IoT
It is often said that the Internet of Things is all about data. Indeed, at its absolute heart, the whole ecosystem could even be reduced to four distinct layers, ones that are essentially applicable to any vertical.
First of all, you have the sensing layer: somehow (using sensors, Wi-Fi, beacons: whatever you can!) you have to collect the data in the first place, often in harsh environments. From there you need to transport the data on a connectivity layer. This could be mobile or fixed, Wi-Fi or something altogether more cutting edge.
Thirdly, you need to aggregate this data, to bring it together and allow it to be exchanged. Finally, there’s the crucial matter of analytics, where the raw data is transformed into something useful.
Operators such as BT sense the opportunities in this process – particularly in the first three stages. Some telcos may have arrived a little late to the IoT table, but there’s no question that – with their copious background developing vast, secure infrastructures – they enjoy some fundamental advantages.
“I see IoT as a great opportunity,” says Hubertus von Roenne, VP Global Industry Practices, BT Global Services. “The more the world is connected, the more you have to rely on a robust infrastructure, whether it’s connectivity or data centres, and the more you have to rely on secure and reliable environment. That’s our home turf. We are already active on all four layers, not only through our global network infrastructure, but also via our secure cloud computing capabilities and a ‘Cloud of Clouds’ technology vision that enables real time data crunching and strategic collaboration across very many platforms.”
An example of how BT is positioning itself can be seen in Milton Keynes, a flagship ‘smart city’ in the UK, with large public and private sector investment. BT is one of over a dozen companies from various industries testing out different use cases for a smarter, more connected city.
“In Milton Keynes we are the technology partner that’s collecting the data. We’ve created a data hub where we allow the information to be passed on, but also make it compatible and usable. The governance body of this Milton Keynes project decided very early to make it open source, open data, and allow small companies or individuals to play around with the data and turn it into applications. Our role is not necessarily to go onto the application layer – we leave that to others – our role is to allow the collection and transmission of data, and we help turn data into usable information.”
One use case BT is involved in is smart parking – figuring out how to help traffic management, reduce carbon footprint, and help the council to reduce costs and better plan for parking availability. “Lots of ideas which can evolve as you collect the data, and that’s BT’s role.”
Another good example of how BT can adapt its offerings to different verticals is its work in telecare and telehealth, where the telco currently partners with the NHS, providing the equipment, monitoring system, and certain administrative and operational units, leaving the medical part to the medical professionals.
While BT’s established UK infrastructure makes it well positioned to assume these kinds of roles in developing smarter cities and healthcare, in other, more commercial areas there are no place-specific constraints.
“Typically our core customer base for global services are the large multinational players,” says von Roenne, “and these operate around the world. We are bringing our network and cloud integration capabilities right down to the manufacturing lines or the coal face of our multinational customers. Just a few weeks ago, we announced a partnership with Rajant Corporation, who specialise in wireless mesh deployments, to enable organisations to connect and gather data from thousands of devices such as sensors, autonomous vehicles, industrial machinery, high-definition cameras and others.”
Indeed, there are countless areas where data can be profitably collated and exploited, and next month von Roenne will be attending Internet of Things World Europe in Berlin, where he will be looking to discover new businesses and business opportunities. “I think there is already a lot of low hanging fruit out there if we just do some clever thinking about using what’s out there,” he says, adding that, often, the area in which the data could really be useful is not necessarily the same as the one it’s being collected in.
The capacity to take a bird’s eye view, bringing together different sectors of the economy for everyone’s mutual benefit, is another advantage BT will point to as it positions itself for the Internet of Things.