San Francisco, StorageCraft Technology Corporation has recently announced that they are going to adopt a new pricing model as well as enhancements for its StorageCraft Cloud Services disaster recovery solution. This new model allows users to recover their systems and data without excessive costs by permitting users to customize cloud coverage. This customization allows the service to meet the unique needs and budgets of individual customers. Users will also have access to systems and data anytime with instant failover in a cloud built specifically for disaster recovery. Several recovery options are offered by StorageCraft Cloud Services to decrease system downtime as well as data loss. Users may choose from the myriads of options according to what fits their unique budget.

Mike Kunz, StorageCraft’s Vice President of Worldwide Sales, has commented: “Data is the life-blood of a business. A business owner with data in a cloud should not be forced to pay a ransom to gain access to his or her data after a disaster. The new, simple pricing model makes StorageCraft Cloud Services as affordable as generic clouds, while offering recovery options that other clouds do not offer. To put it simply, StorageCraft Cloud Services’ pricing allows users to focus on the recovery — not on what is affordable to recover or how to pay for a recovery. Other vendors charge high fees at the time of recovery, such as essential CPU, RAM, and bandwidth resources.  StorageCraft Cloud Services supports your business’ recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, including full virtualization.”

StorageCraft Cloud Services allows users to store backup images offsite in the StorageCraft Cloud and gives users the opportunity run networked systems in the Cloud when local access to systems and data is unavailable. StorageCraft Cloud Services is offered in a myriad of budget-friendly tiered options and service+ levels, Cloud Basic (Secure offsite storage of your critical business backups with full system restore via a bare metal restore drive), Cloud+ (Includes everything in Cloud Basic, plus immediate file and folder recovery), and finally Cloud Premium (Includes everything in Cloud+, as well as instant virtualization of data and systems in the cloud). Since its initial launch in 2012, StorageCraft Cloud Services has exemplified both extreme growth and stability. The company, StorageCraft, has been renowned for both its speed and reliability within the Cloud Industry.

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Cisco has given its channel a free software tool that may analyze cloud usage with organizations to find cloud solutions for businesses. Through this, Cisco hopes to inspire more cloud adoption and recurring revenues for partners. Chris Treille, director of cloud and managed services partner enablement at Cisco, has stated in an interview with CRN, “This is not Cisco selling its professional services; this is Cisco providing the intellectual property and the assets for partners to create their own professional services. This tool helps partners in the conversation with the customer by showing them how much they’re going to gain on their top or bottom line, and how much more competitive and productive they can be with cloud.”

The Cisco Business Cloud Advisor analyzes a company’s cloud adoption level, peer comparison by geography, industry and company size, and cost and time-to-market improvement estimates based on cloud adoption. Partners may then offer their own cloud services or Cisco’s cloud professional service options, such as Cloud-Consumption-as-a-Service, Cloud Threat Defense Service, UCS Director FastStart and solutions around Intercloud. Trielle added, “We know that our partners actually make very good money in the professional services that support cloud and hybrid IT, so this will help augment that for the channel.”

Bob Hollander, vice president of sales and marketing for Netelligent, which was one of the first partners of Cisco to pilot the tool, has claimed his company has begun to see results.  It’s helping my team go out in the market and organize the customers’ thoughts, score where they are in cloud and set a direction,” said Hollander. “We’ve already seen quantifiable opportunity come out. Now we’ve got a path forward with this customer versus, honestly, just three weeks ago, we didn’t.”

Partners of Cisco may give customers a short survey to receive a free, personalized report pertaining to the company’s cloud adoption and business benefits.  Then, in a deeper level of analysis, the new cloud advisor tool may measure the impact of potential cloud adoption across a wide range of performance factors. This cloud advisor tool was released along with a global study from market researcher IDC on cloud adoption. The study found that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years, although only 1 percent of organizations have an optimized cloud strategy. About 32 percent of the 3,400 companies interviewed across 17 counties say that they have no cloud strategy at all.

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It has been three months since tech giant IBM has purchased private cloud company Blue Box, and IBM has recently announced that it has ported the private cloud software it gained via the acquisition to the IBM SoftLayer cloud. Angel Diaz, VP of cloud architecture and technology at IBM, has stated, “Blue Box is now available in 40 plus data centers around the world. We think the fact that it took us less than 90 days to make the port shows how flexible Blue Box really is.” The managed hosting service removes complexity associated with deploying, updating, and managing an instance of OpenStack from an internal IT organization.

OpenStack, an open source framework that is relatively new, may be able to reduce the licensing costs that are connected with commercial IT management software. Because most IT organizations do not have the ability to not only manage their own but deploy it, they will take advantage of the opportunity to convert to OpenStack and rely on external IT providers. While OpenStack is still being developed, organizations may utilize the Blue Box private cloud on premise or in the Softlayer Cloud. Blue Box Cloud is now available on a global scale.  Jesse Proudman, CTO at Blue Box, has said, “I’ve been impressed by the way the IBM and Blue Box engineering teams have collaborated to quickly bring Blue Box Cloud to a worldwide infrastructure platform. Today, we’ve taken a big step toward our goal of delivering private clouds to customers anywhere in the world—and we’re offering deployment timelines that are unheard of within traditional private cloud.” IBM customers will be able to enjoy the better performance and reduced costs that are connected with the private cloud and support offered by public cloud services.

Through development, OpenStack should be easier to master and automation frameworks should become more sophisticated. IBM is focused on not only expanding the usage of OpenStack, but refining the scalability and interoperability. Overall, it is promising. “Implementing Cloudsoft AMP on Blue Box Cloud across IBM Cloud datacenters will allow us to meet the increased demand from customers for hybrid cloud solutions built on OpenStack,” Duncan Johnston-Watt, chief executive of Cloudsoft. “The combination of Blue Box’s best-in-class OpenStack service and IBM Cloud’s global footprint and legendary private network will enable us to model, deploy and manage our customers’ business critical applications and services worldwide.”

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The cloud computing sector of Alibaba Group, Aliyun, has launched an artificial intelligence service that is the first of kind in China. The platform, named DT PAI, combines the algorithms utilized by Alibaba with machine and deep learning techniques which are then presented in a drag and drop interface. The platform may be used by developers to predict user behavior without the unnecessary step of creating new code. The majority of Alibaba’s revenue is brought about through its developed ecommerce business, but the group is beginning to look toward the future with heavy investments in the cloud computing sector. In July, Alibaba had dumped one billion dollars into Aliyun with the hopes of expanding its cloud services on a global scale, with extension into Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.

China is in the midst of economic uncertainty, so the developing cloud computing sector provides some hope to an otherwise lackluster second quarter for Alibaba. Alibaba has claimed that quarterly revenue from its cloud computing and Internet infrastructure business jumped over 106 percent year-over-year to $78 million.

Aliyun still faces stark competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but hopes to stand out from opponents by conquering emerging markets like the one in China and aiding the expansion of Chinese based cloud infrastructure into the United States. DT PAI’s primary technology is Aliyun’s Open Data Processing Service (ODPS) platform, which it claims can process 100 petabytes of data in six hours. (A petabyte is equal to about 1,000 terabytes. Aliyun says that 100 petabytes can contain 100 million high-definition videos.) First revealed in 2014,ODPS was created to aid processing of loan application from vendors. The platforms applications extend far beyond the realm of e-commerce, however, with BGI using it sequence genes more efficiently.

Aliyun senior product expert Xiao Wei has said in a press release, “In the past, the field of artificial intelligence was only open to a very small number of qualified developers and required the use of specialized tools. Such an approach was prone to error and redundancy. However, DT PAI allows developers with little or no experience in the field to construct a data application from scratch in a much shorter period of time. What used to take days can be completed within minutes.”

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Intel has begun to dive into the world of cloud services, leading a $100 million round of funding in a pure play OpenStack company. This investment into Mirantis will aid in the company’s optimization of its enterprise features and will drive industry adoption. OpenStack cloud software, first introduced in 2010, is built by a team of expert open source contributors under management of OpenStack. Under a relatively small time frame of just five years, OpenStack has become the fifth most popular cloud platform among global companies according to research done by Forrester Research Inc. This round of investment is set to coax adoption of cloud services by allowing it to be both installed and integrated into data centers easier.
Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager at Data Center Group, Intel, has stated, “As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds.”
Intel, Goldman Sachs, August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital have all invested in this most recent round of funding. However, Intel appears to be going the extra mile, collaborating with Mirantis on technical features. Intel’s deep technological insight will increase capability of enterprise deployments. The goal of this collaboration is to create thousands of new clouds to serve under Intel’s Clouds for All initiative. This collaboration will address issues such network integration and support for big data.

Alex Freeland, co-founder and president of Mirantis, is excited to exemplify that open design, open development, and open licensing are all important features in the future of cloud infrastructure software. “Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster.”
Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, also gave his opinion on the collaboration: “Obviously, Mirantis is trying to make headway in the OpenStack space. There are a lot of other IT vendors, including IBM and HP, that have all jumped on board as well and there’s a clear commitment to the OpenStack market. In order for the cloud really to take off it requires a collective effort from all the vendors involved. There’s really a who’s who now in the OpenStack space. This is a good commitment from Intel.”

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GCI has announced the purchase of Anchorage-based Network Business Systems on August 6th. They did not disclose the amount they paid. The purchase will double their cloud computing and IT services sector and can capitalize on the expanding cloud service market. The Network Business Systems will add about 30 employees to GCI’s existing infrastructure.

Network Business Systems has been offering cloud services in Alaska since 2009, but the market for the Cloud was rather sluggish. Recently, however, the demand for such services has grown.

GCI did not offer the most cash for Network Business systems, but owner Annette Jones was convinced to let GCI purchase her company for other reasons. “They did not make us the best offer, however we felt that they were the best buyer,” Jones said. “What I mean by that is we thought that our employees had the best growth opportunities with GCI and so that’s why we went with them.”

Because of this purchase, the amount of employees in GCI’s cloud sector would double from 30 to 60. Jones will continue to work with Network Business Systems as current employees will keep their jobs. GCI spokesman David Morris has said this purchase will better serve GCI’s existing customers who would like to know where their data is stored. He has stated, “Cloud computing is an emerging market, and the thing that we’ve found about Alaska businesses is that they would prefer that their data be stored in Alaska rather than some other place internationally. It makes a difference if you can come and touch and feel where your data is stored.”

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F5 Networks has recently announced the launch of its new F5 Ready program that will make it easier for customers to utilize the F5 solutions necessary for their cloud environment. F5 Ready will verify F5’s solutions to be able to encapsulate the needs of cloudproviders throughout the globe. This program plans to make the efficiency of the cloud more accessible to the world.

F5 Ready promotes both interoperability and efficiency, allowing for a smooth transition from industry’s applications and services into private, public, and hybrid clouds. Alex Rublowsky, Sr. Director, Licensing Business Models at F5, has stated, “Organizations going to the cloud want to know that they don’t have to give up their valuable application services to get there. Through the F5 Ready program, customers can keep their trusted security, availability, and acceleration services—even as they evaluate cloud service providers, combine technologies from multiple vendors, and look to scale additional application resources to public cloud environments.”

This program verifies compatibility with many cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bluelock, BT, Cisco Intercloud, Datacom, Dimension Data, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and SingleHop. Brian Singer, Senior Vice President, Products and Marketing at Orbitera has said, “Building and running our applications within AWS is key to modernizing our data center, and core to driving a more agile business that responds quickly to our customers’ needs. Now with F5 BIG-IP virtual editions directly available and verified within AWS, we are able to extend our existing F5 skills and policies to ensure the performance, availability, and security of our cloud-based applications.”

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