Monthly Archives: August 2012

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Gartner: cloud makes the IT world go round

Cloud, social, mobile and information are the new ‘Nexus of Forces’ with cloud at the apparent epicentre

The convergence of four IT forces – cloud, social, mobile and information – has formed what analyst house Gartner has described as a new “Nexus of Forces” which will become the paradigm for the future of IT.

The research firm predicts that while the four ‘forces’ are currently disruptive as they are, combined they will tear up old enterprise IT models.

Cloud computing, according to Gartner, provides the “glue” for all the forces, thus being the pivot for everything around it.

“Without cloud computing, social interactions would have no place to happen at scale, mobile access would fail to be able to connect to a wide variety of data and functions, and information still would be stuck inside internal systems,” Gartner notes.

An important point to note is how the cloud has changed the paradigm …

Avnet, M&A Activity, Pepperweed Consulting

Avnet Acquires Pepperweed Consulting

Image representing Pepperweed Consulting as de...

Avnet, Inc.  announced today that it has acquired Pepperweed Consulting, an IT enterprise management and integration provider. As an HP Software Elite Partner and winner of multiple HP Partner-of-the-Year awards, Pepperweed Consulting works with channel partners and customers to buy, deploy, support and manage HP IT Performance Suite, Converged Cloud and Insight software stacks. With more than 3000 successful engagements at Fortune 500 clients and large-scale government agencies, the company helps customers architect, implement and operate the right solution to meet their data center and cloud initiative goals on time and on budget. The company generated revenue of approximately US$12 million in the 2011 calendar year.

“The acquisition of Pepperweed supports our strategic focus of expanding our services and software portfolio to help drive growth for both our supplier and reseller partners,” stated Jeff Bawol, president, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas. “The addition of Pepperweed Consulting will complement our industry leading vertical market practices by providing software and services to help our HP reseller partners deliver increasingly complex and customized IT solutions needed by customers in high growth markets such as government, healthcare, energy, financial and retail.”

Founded in 1996, Pepperweed Consulting provides multi-vendor technology expertise, services and support, complemented by internally developed components to meet each project’s specific goals. This acquisition will be integrated into the operations of Avnet Technology Solutions in the Americas.


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TwinStrata Earns Top Scores for Value, Product Features

TwinStrata earned top marks in Info-Tech Research Group’s new report “Vendor Landscape: Cloud Backup Gateways.”
TwinStrata was given Best Overall Value award for “coupling its impressive product with an appealing price,” said the Info-Tech Research Group Research Document.
TwinStrata CloudArray was the only product in the report given an overall score of “exemplary.”
Nicos Vekiarides, chief executive officer at TwinStrata, stated, “The Info-Tech results validate our focus on meeting customer needs through our industry-leading feature set, broad solution partner ecosystem and flexible pricing models. We are pleased to have been rated top honors in both value and overall product; it’s a testament to what we deliver to our customers every day.”

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Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Service, AWS, KnowYourCloud Analytics, Newvem, Reserved Instances, Tools

Newvem Launches New Tool to Help Amazon Web Services Customers Make Sense of Reserved Instances

 

Image representing Amazon Web Services as depi...

Newvem has launched a new tool as part of its KnowYourCloud Analytics web application. Newvem’s new Reserved Instances Decision Tool helps Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers make the right decision on exactly which On-Demand Instances should be moved to Reserved Instances. With KnowYourCloud Analytics, AWS users have insight into their cloud usage patterns and can now easily determine – based on flexibility, availability and cost considerations – whether a long-term commitment to Reserved Instances is the right decision for their business.

To keep ahead of competitors and give customers more value, Amazon is promoting Reserved Instances, which, compared to On-Demand Instances – the popular pay-as-you-go model that AWS is known for, offer even more cost savings and assured capacity availability. Reserved Instances require long-term commitments to Amazon with contracts ranging from one to three years. The problem is that moving to Reserved Instances is an extremely complex decision for IT and finance managers, who must weigh the tradeoffs between costs and utilization over time and between flexibility and a long-term commitment.

“Newvem’s KnowYourCloud Analytics is like Google Analytics for cloud computing,” said Zev Laderman, Newvem’s co-founder and CEO. “It scans AWS usage patterns and lets AWS users know if they can benefit from Reserved Instances, indicates which parts of their cloud would benefit the most, and offers recommendations on how to execute the move.”


DropBox, spam, Storage

Dropbox Employee Account Hack Led to Customers being Spammed

Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...

Dropbox this week fessed  up to having been hacked, most notably an employee account that contained project data including a list of customer emails (at least it shows they use their own product). That resulted in a rash of spam that eventually led to the discovery of the compromised passwords.

A couple weeks ago, we started getting emails from some users about spam they were receiving at email addresses used only for Dropbox. We’ve been working hard to get to the bottom of this, and want to give you an update.

Our investigation found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to a small number of Dropbox accounts. We’ve contacted these users and have helped them protect their accounts.

A stolen password was also used to access an employee Dropbox account containing a project document with user email addresses. We believe this improper access is what led to the spam. We’re sorry about this, and have put additional controls in place to help make sure it doesn’t happen again.

They claim it was usernames and password stolen from other sites that led to the trickledown effects on Dropbox accounts. Another reason to use a different password for every site you sign up for.

Their post on the topic includes news of a new page that lets you examine all active logins to your account.


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Is Cloud Foundry Becoming the De facto PaaS Standard?

I have been following Cloud Foundry from the day it got announced. It was very clear that VMware invested in it with a clear strategy – democratize PaaS by making it is absolutely easy for the hosters and enterprises to deploy it. Between 2008 and 2011, PaaS was associated with Google (App Engine), Microsoft (Windows Azure), Salesfore.com (Force.com / Heroku) and Engine Yard. But in the last one year, there are half-a-dozen new players that entered the niche PaaS market. And, one thing that is common among these new entrants is that all of them are powered by Cloud Foundry. Whether it is ActiveState, AppFog, Tier 3, Uhuru Software, PaaS.io or VMware’s own CloudFoundry.com, all of them use the same set of APIs and tools based on Cloud Foundry.

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Apple Loses Chip Designer to AMD

AMD has poached the director of Apple’s mobile-focused Platform Architecture Group Jim Keller, credited with architecting several generations of the ARM-based chips found in the iPad, iPhone, iPod and Apple TV.
It will be Keller’s second go-round at AMD. He was there years ago working on the Athlon 64 and Opteron 64 processors that featured the world’s first native x86-64 bit architecture, a scheme Intel was forced to follow.
He also co-authored AMD’s HyperTransport specification and the x86-64 instruction set.

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Primary Storage Using the Cloud: Glass Half Empty or Half Full?

Back in April 2012, we published the results of our cloud storage survey to share customer insights into current and intended use cases for cloud storage. As expected, the results indicated that data protection and disaster recovery were among the top use cases. While the benefits of cloud storage around data protection and disaster recovery were further confirmed in our follow-up survey in June 2012, it was notable that our initial survey revealed over 48% of respondents used or planned to use cloud for primary storage. While we found this result eye-opening, the numbers may suggest to some that the glass is a bit more than half empty for primary storage users; we found it rather surprising that the glass is nearly half full.Is Primary Storage using the Cloud Becoming a Reality?

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Rackspace Open Cloud Offers Scalable Computing

Rackspace on Wednesday announced the unlimited availability of Cloud Databases and Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful new Control Panel. These solutions, backed by Rackspace’s Fanatical Support, further expand Rackspace’s broad Cloud hosting portfolio, which is used today by over 180,000 customers worldwide.
Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace, stated: “We have delivered on our promise to implement OpenStack in our cloud offerings, and to free customers from the vendor lock-in that they face at other major cloud computing providers. We’re delivering open, high-performance, scalable and easy-to-use cloud solutions, while empowering customers to choose features, services, prices and locations based on the needs of their business.”

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