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network functions virtualisation, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, OPNFV

OPNFV announces first major software release

OPNFV has launched the first version of its NFV platform

OPNFV has launched the first version of its NFV platform

Linux Foundation driven open source NFV organisation OPNFV has announced the availability of the first version of its software, which it is calling Arno, reports Telecoms.com.

OPNFV was formed just eight months ago by a group of NFV veterans including Chairman Prodip Sen, who was at Verizon and now also heads up NFV at HP. Its aim is to develop an open platform for NFV, which in turn should accelerate the growth of the technology and shorten the time to market for NFV solutions.

As the first release Arno, which commences a sequence of river-based names the second of which will presumably begin with B, is aimed at those exploring NFV deployments. It provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture.

“Only eight months after its formation, OPNFV has met one of its major goals by creating an integrated build, deployment and testing environment that accelerates NFV implementation and interoperability,” said Sen. “With Arno, we now have a solid foundation for testing some of the key resource orchestration and network control components for NFV. This is great a testament to the power of an open source collaborative model and the strength of the NFV ecosystem.”

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what Arno (which is available to download here) brings to the table, according to the OPNFV announcement:

  • Availability of baseline platform: Arno enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch. It allows developers and users to automatically install and explore the platform.
  • Ability to deploy and test various VNFs: End users and developers can deploy their own or third party VNFs on Arno to test its functionality and performance in various traffic scenarios and use cases.
  • Availability of test infrastructure in community-hosted labs: Agile testing plays a crucial role in the OPNFV platform. With Arno, the project is unveiling a community test labs infrastructure where users can test the platform in different environments and on different hardware. This test labs infrastructure enables the platform to be exercised in different NFV scenarios to ensure that the various open source components come together to meet vendor and end user needs.
  • Allows automatic continuous integration of specific components: As upstream projects are developed independently they require testing of various OPNFV use cases to ensure seamless integration and interworking within the platform. OPNFV’s automated toolchain allows continuous automatic builds and verification.
Enterprise IT, Gaia Gallotti, IDC, News & Analysis

IDC: Cloud high on the list for utilities sector but skills shortage pervades

The utilities sector is struggling with an ageing workforce and lacks critical cloud skills

The utilities sector is struggling with an ageing workforce and lacks critical cloud skills

About three quarters of utilities see moving their on-premise apps and workloads into the public cloud as a dominant component in their IT strategies, according to a recent IDC survey. But Gaia Gallotti, research manager at IDC Energy Insights told BCN the firms need to first overcome a pretty significant skills gap and an ageing workforce if they are to modernise their systems.

According to the survey, which polled 38 international senior utility executives, the vast majority of respondents are sold on the benefits cloud could bring to their IT strategies.  About 87 per cent said cloud services provide better business continuity and disaster recovery than traditional technology, and 74 per cent said public cloud migration will be dominant within their broader IT strategy.

Interestingly, while 76 per cent of respondents believe cloud providers can offer better security and data privacy controls than their own IT organisation,  63 per cent said ceding control to a cloud provider is a barrier to their organisation’s adoption of cloud services.

“The utilities industry can no longer afford to deny the advantages of ‘going into the cloud.’ As security concerns are further debunked, utilities expect to see a significant push in their cloud strategy maturity in the next 24 months, so much so that they expect to make up lost ground and even supersede other industries,” Gallotti said.

But most also believe internal IT skillsets not up to speed with new cloud standards, methodologies, and topologies. 74 per cent said they will need a third-party professional services firm to help develop a public cloud strategy.

“This is a huge problem the industry is facing, but not exclusively for cloud services. Utilities are struggling to attract talent in all IT domains, especially for the ‘third platform’, as they compete with companies in the IT world that attract ‘Generation Y’ talent more easily,” Gallotti explained.

“The utilities industry also has an issue with aging workforce outside of IT and across its other business units. In the short term, we expect utilities to rely more on their service providers to fill skills gap that emerge, in the hope of more easily attracting the right talent as the industry transforms and becomes more appealing to Gen Y.”

Big Data, David Stokes, Europe, IBM, Jo Johnson, News & Analysis, Public Sector, STFC, uk government

IBM, UK gov ink $313m deal to promote big data, cognitive compute research

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

IBM and the UK government are pouring £313m into big data and cognitive computing R&D

The UK government has signed a deal with IBM that will see the two parties fund a series of initiatives aimed at expanding cognitive computing and big data research.

The £313m partnership will see the UK government commit £113m to expand the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, a publicly funded facility geared towards reducing the cost and improving the efficiency and user-friendliness of high performance computing and big data for research and development purposes.

IBM said it will further support the project with technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200m, including access to the company’s cognitive computing platform Watson. The company will also place 24 IBM researchers at the Centre, who will help the researchers commercialise any promising innovations developed there.

The organisations will also explore how to leverage OpenPower-based systems for high performance computing.

“We live in an information economy – from the smart devices we use every day to the super-computers that helped find the Higgs Boson, the power of advanced computing means we now have access to vast amounts of data,” said UK Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson.

“This partnership with IBM, which builds on our £113 million investment to expand the Hartree Centre, will help businesses make the best use of big data to develop better products and services that will boost productivity, drive growth and create jobs.”

David Stokes, chief executive for IBM in the UK and Ireland said: “We’re at the dawn of a new era of cognitive computing, during which advanced data-centric computing models and open innovation approaches will allow technology to greatly augment decision-making capabilities for business and government.”

“The expansion of our collaboration with STFC builds upon Hartree’s successful engagement with industry and its record in commercialising technological developments, and provides a world-class environment using Watson and OpenPower technologies to extend the boundaries of Big Data and cognitive computing,” he added.

Alibaba, Aliyun, Chris Sharp, Equinix, Infrastructure as a Service, Networks, News & Analysis, Sicheng Yu

Equinix to offer direct access to Alibaba’s cloud service

Equinix will offer direct links to Alibaba's cloud

Equinix will offer direct links to Alibaba’s cloud

Equinix has signed an agreement with Alibaba that will see the American datacentre incumbent provide direct access to Chinese ecommerce firm’s cloud computing service.

The deal will see Equinix add Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud computing division, to its growing roster of cloud services integrated with its cloud interconnection service, and offer direct access to Aliyun’s IaaS and SaaSs in both Asia and North America.

Equinix said it’s aiming this primarily at large multinationals looking to expand their infrastructure into Asia.

“Our multi-national enterprise customers are increasingly asking for access to the Aliyun cloud platform, as they deploy cloud-based applications across Asia,” said Chris Sharp, vice president of cloud innovation, Equinix.

“By providing this access in two strategic markets, we’re empowering businesses to build secure, private clouds, without compromising network and application performance,” Sharp said.

Sicheng Yu, vice president of Aliyun said: “Aliyun is very excited about our global partnership with Equinix, who not only has a global footprint of cutting-edge datacentres, but has also brought together the most abundant cloud players and tenants in the cloud computing ecosystem on its Equinix Cloud Exchange platform. Connecting the Equinix ecosystem with our Aliyun cloud services on Cloud Exchange will provide customers with the best-of-breed choices and flexibility.”

The move will see Equinix expand its reach in Asia, a fast-growing market for cloud services, and comes just one week after Equinix announced it would bolster its European footprint with the TelecityGroup merger.

Cloud Security Alliance, CSA, Daniele Catteddu, data protection, News & Analysis, Paolo Balboni

CSA tool helps cloud users evaluate data protection posture of providers

The CSA says the tool can help customers and providers improve their cloud data protection practices

The CSA says the tool can help customers and providers improve their cloud data protection practices

The Cloud Security Alliance this week unveiled the next generation of a tool designed to enable cloud customers to evaluate the level of data protection precautions implemented by cloud service providers.

The Privacy Level Agreement (PLA) v2 tool aims to give customers a better sense of the extent to which their providers have practices, procedures and technologies in place to ensure data protection vis-à-vis European data privacy regulations.

It also provides a guidance for cloud service providers to achieve compliance with privacy legislation in EU, and on how these providers can disclose the level of personal data protection they offer to customers.

“The continued reliance and adoption of the PLA by cloud service providers worldwide has been an important building block for developing a modern and ethical privacy-rich framework to address the security challenges facing enterprises worldwide,” said Daniele Catteddu, EMEA managing director of CSA.

“This next version that addresses personal data protection compliance will be of significant importance in building the confidence of cloud consumers,” Catteddu said.

The tool, originally created in 2013, was developed by the PLA working group, which was organised to help transpose the Art. 29 Working Party and EU National Data Protection Regulator’s recommendations on cloud computing into an outline CSPs can use to disclose personal data handling practices.

“PLA v2 is a valuable tool to guide CSPs of any size to address EU personal data protection compliance,” said Paolo Balboni, co-chair of the PLA Working Group and founding partner of ICT Legal Consulting. “In a market where customers still struggle to assess CSP data protection compliance, PLA v2 aims to fill this gap and facilitate customer understanding.”

Blue Box, Cisco, Hilton Romansky, IBM, Jim Comfort, News & Analysis, Open Source, Piston

Cisco, IBM spend big in OpenStack-focused land grab

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both signed deals to acquire OpenStack vendors this week, with Cisco acquiring Piston Cloud Computing, a firm specialising in OpenStack-based private cloud software and IBM buying up managed private cloud provider Blue Box.

Piston offers what it calls Piston CloudOS, a supped up version of OpenStack for private clouds alongside custom cluster management and monitoring software and APIs. Underneath that sits a custom Linux micro-OS that contains all of the necessary code to run CloudOS; the company said it can be characterized as a “bare-metal operating system that is tailor-made for pools of hyper-converged, commodity resources.”

Cisco said Piston will help it deliver on its Intercloud vision, which sees a Cisco-based set of cloud services that can federate with one another; OpenStack seems increasingly to be at the heart of that effort.

“Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud,” said Hilton Romanski, corporate development lead at Cisco.

“Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners,” he added.

The move will also give Cisco some strong in-house OpenStack expertise. One of Piston’s co-founders, Chris MacGown, was among the originating members of OpenStack’s Nova-core (compute) development team.

This is the second big OpenStack-focused acquisition Cisco has made in recent months. In September last year Cisco acquired Metacloud, a provider of commercially supported OpenStack. Metacloud also had IP in the networking technology it has integrated into its OpenStack distribution, which gave Cisco’s OpenStack play an SDN boost.

IBM, meanwhile has acquired managed private cloud provider Blue Box, which the company said would help bolster its hybrid cloud and OpenStack strategy.

The company said the move would enable it to provide a public cloud-like experience within its customers’ datacentres by allowing it to offer a remotely managed OpenStack offering, which it hadn’t previously.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM said it will continue to support Blue Box customers and use the company as a channel to sell its own cloud services.

Both acquisitions are a sign the old-hat vendors are putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to OpenStack – particularly when some of them, like HP and Red Hat, are digging their heels in and aggressively pushing their OpenStack wares.

DeepSecure, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Simon Hansford, Skyscape

Skyscape, DeepSecure strike cloud data compliance deal

Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure to bolster its security cred

Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure to bolster its security cred

Cloud service provider Skyscape is partnering with DeepSecure in a move the companies said would help public sector cloud users meet their compliance needs.

DeepSecure traditionally sells to the police, defence and intelligence sectors and provides secure data sharing and data management services as well as cybersecurity systems, and the partnership will see Skyscape offer its customers DeepSecure’s suite of data sharing and security services.

The move could give Skyscape, which already heavily targets the public sector, a way in with some of the more heavily regulated clients (security-wise) there.

“We’re delighted to announce our partnership with DeepSecure, a likeminded company with a significant track record when it comes to helping organisations share data securely,” said Simon Hansford, chief executive of Skyscape Cloud Services.

“DeepSecure is certainly a good cultural fit for us as a fellow UK sovereign SME that specialises in delivering secure digital services to the UK public sector.  The firm also shares our commitment to offering a consumption-based pricing model for its security services, which aligns with our own pay-as-you-go model for our full catalogue of assured cloud services,” Hansford said.

Datacentre, HP, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Orlando Bayter, Ormuco, Steve Dietch

Ormuco taps HP Helion for mid-market hybrid cloud offering

Ormuco is partnering with HP on hybrid cloud

Ormuco is partnering with HP on hybrid cloud

Ormuco is partnering with HP to launch a Helion OpenStack-based hybrid cloud solution the company said is designed specifically with workload portability in mind.

Hybrid cloud is still high on the agenda for many CIOs but challenges abound – security and compliance management, service automation and orchestration and of course, workload portability. The company is relying on HP’s implementation of OpenStack to solve some of those challenges, and said its ConnectedCloud offering will help enterprises move their workloads across OpenStack-based private and public clouds.

“Ormuco is entering the cloud services market since there is a vital need for a hybrid cloud solution with streamlined functionality for enterprise customers,” said Ormuco chief executive Orlando Bayter. “HP Helion OpenStack and Ormuco’s new data centres enable us to create environments that focus on service delivery regardless of the underlying infrastructure.”

Ormuco has datacentres in Dallas, Texas; Sunnyvale, California and Montreal, Quebec, and said it has others planned for New York and Seattle as well as an expansion into Europe with datacentres in Frankfurt and London.

The company is a member of HP’s Helion Partner Network, a federation of HP-certified OpenStack cloud incumbents globally that private cloud users can burst into, which is for the time being primarily how the company delivers scale.

“Ormuco requires extensive geographic reach and the ability to meet customers’ in-country or cross-border cloud requirements,” said Steve Dietch, vice president, HP Helion, HP. “With HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Network, Ormuco’s Connected Cloud customers will have access to hybrid cloud services from a global, open ecosystem of service providers.”

Azure, Datacentre, Kevin Turner, Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics, News & Analysis, Office 365

Microsoft to open two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is adding two cloud datacentres in Canada

Microsoft is opening two cloud datacentres in Canada, the company said this week. The facilities, one in Toronto, Ontario and one in Montreal, Quebec, will deliver Azure, Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics to local customers.

The company said the datacentres would help companies and organisation in highly regulated sectors like healthcare, the public sector, higher education and financial services overcome data storage and compliance regulations.

“Companies and organisations that have to adhere to data storage requirements and compliance standards can now take advantage of the advantages offered by Microsoft services here in Canada,” said Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner.

Turner said the announcement speaks to Microsoft’s “deep and growing commitment” to Canada and its public and private sector organisations.

“Now customers will be able to enjoy the benefits of all commercial cloud services on their terms across Canada.”

This is Microsoft’s first big cloud datacentre push since the company announced the launch of Azure in Australia last year. Lately, however, Microsoft has seemed more focused on bolstering its position through hybrid cloud, announcing Azure Stack – a series of updates and architectural changes (more microservices) to its server and cloud technologies aimed at blending the divide between Azure and Windows Server.

Amazon, Avinash Lakshman, Cassandra, Facebook, Funding, Hedvig, News & Analysis, software defined storage

Hedvig bags $18m for software-defined storage

Hedvig secured $18m this week which will help fuel expansion of its software-defined storage offering

Hedvig secured $18m this week which will help fuel expansion of its software-defined storage offering

Distributed storage platform provider Hedvig has secured $18m in a round of funding the company said will be used to double down on development and expansion.

In the cloud space storage heterogeneity can cause big performance bottlenecks – particularly in tightly integrated systems, which many applications and services are quite clearly becoming – and legacy datacentres are struggling to keep pace.

Hedvig, which came out of stealth earlier this year and was founded by former Facebook and Amazon NoSQL and storage specialist Avinash Lakshman (also the brains behind Cassandra), offers a highly scalable storage platform (block, file and object) that the company says provides fully programmable, highly granular storage provisioning – software-defined storage in other words.

The platform supports pretty much every hypervisor or Linux container service above it, and uses REST-based APIs so cloud users can tap into the platform in a fairly straightforward way.

The investment round, which brings the total amount raised by the firm to just over $30m, was led by Vertex Ventures with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Atlantic Bridge. As part of the deal Vertex Ventures General Partner In Sik Rhee will be joining Hedvig’s board of directors.

“We’ve identified the potential in a broken and fragmented storage market, and are not only looking to bring software-defined storage mainstream, but fundamentally change how companies store and manage data,” Lakshman said.

“Riding the wave of momentum from our recent company launch, this new investment round further validates our technology and approach, and will fuel our unwavering commitment to be the leading force of innovation in software-defined storage.”

Hedvig’s success comes at a time of rising popularity of the concept of the software-defined datacentre, which sees the orchestration of almost everything – storage, compute, networking – through software.