Monthly Archives: April 2015

Cloud computing, Featured, hybrid cloud, Public Cloud, vCloud Air

vCloud Air: Helping a customer move to a hybrid cloud environment

As you most likely know, vCloud Air is VMware’s offering in the hybrid/public cloud space. In my opinion, it’s a great offering. It allows you to take existing virtual machines and migrate those up to the cloud so that you can manage everything with your existing virtual center. It’s also a very good option to do disaster recovery.

I worked on a project recently where the client wanted to know what they needed to do with their infrastructure. They were looking for solid options to build a foundation for their business, whether it was on-prem, a cloud-based offering, or a hybrid approach.

In this project, we ended up taking their VMs and physical servers and put a brand new host on site running VMware that’s running a domain controller and a file server. We put the rest of the production servers and test dev environment in vCloud Air. Additionally, this helped them address their disaster recovery needs. It gave them a place where they could take their systems without a lot of upfront money and have a place where they could recover their VMs in case of the event of a disaster.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP3qO-SI6SY

 

Are you interested in learning more about vCloud Air? Reach out!

 

By Chris Chesley, Solutions Architect

3D Printing, Creativity On-the-Go, Mobile 3D Printing, Parallels Access, Remote access, Remote Access App, Remote Desktop, Remote Desktop App

Getting Creative with Parallels Access

Believe it or not, you can use Parallels Access for more than productivity. In fact, a lot of our customers use Parallels Access to create amazing things. I’ve talked before about how much I love using Parallels Access for Adobe Photoshop when I need to make a graphic while on-the-go. I’m not alone—in fact, one […]

The post Getting Creative with Parallels Access appeared first on Parallels Blog.

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SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition Software Now Microsoft Azure Certified

SIOS Technology Corp. has announced that its SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition software is Microsoft Azure certified and now available in the Azure Marketplace. The new SIOS offering is the only Azure certified software that enables customers to create a SANLess high availability cluster in Azure using Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering.

By adding SIOS DataKeeper software to Windows Server Failover Clustering, customers can quickly and easily help protect business-critical Windows environments from downtime and data loss in a cloud or a combination of physical, virtual, or hybrid cloud environment. Now, for the first time, applications depending on SAN-based Windows server failover clusters for protection can be moved to Azure and achieve the more comprehensive high availability protection they need.

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Adobe @CreativeCloud Session at @CloudExpo New York | @Adobe [#Cloud #Adobe]

Businesses are looking to empower employees and departments to do more, go faster, and streamline their processes. For all workers – but mobile workers especially – utilizing the cloud to reconnect documents and improve processes without destructing existing workflows can have a dramatic impact on productivity.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Mark Grilli, vice president of Acrobat Solutions marketing at Adobe Systems Incorporated, will outline new ways that the cloud is changing the way people work – from wherever they are.

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Cloud Expo Silicon Valley ‘Call for Papers’ Open | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

The 17th International Cloud Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. 17th International Cloud Expo, to be held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, brings together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Microservices, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC to one location.
With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

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Uncharted Territory of Microservices By @XebiaLabs | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Our recent webinar “Exploring the Uncharted Territory of Microservices” featured a panel of thought leaders who combined brought more than 30 years of collective experience to explore Microservices and their surrounding environments.
Almost as informative as the session itself, we featured an insightful audience participation Q&A session at the end which allowed listeners to ask questions directly to the panel. The questions and responses both gave deep insight into Microservices as a practice, not just a philosophy. The following questions were discussed.

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Cloud Expo Launches “Microservices Journal” | @CloudExpo [#Microservices]

The world’s leading Cloud event, Cloud Expo has launched Microservices Journal on the SYS-CON.com portal, featuring over 19,000 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries.
DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
Microservices Journal offers top articles, news stories, and blog posts from the world’s well-known experts and guarantees better exposure for its authors than any other publication.
Follow new article posts on Twitter at @MicroservicesE

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Cisco, Converged Infrastructure, Nebula, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Vendor

Converged OpenStack cloud pioneer Nebula closes its doors

Nebula, an OpenStack pioneer, is closing its doors

Nebula, an OpenStack pioneer, is closing its doors

Converged infrastructure vendor Nebula, one of the first companies to pioneer integrated OpenStack-based private cloud hardware, announced it will close its doors this week.

A notice posted by the Nebula management team on its website says the company had no choice but to cease operations after exhaustively searching for alternative arrangements that would allow the company to keep operating.

“When we started this journey four years ago, we set out to usher in a new era of cloud computing by curating and productizing OpenStack for the enterprise. We are incredibly proud of the role we had in establishing Nebula as the leading enterprise cloud computing platform. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait.”

“Nebula private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally, however support will no longer be available. Nebula is based on OpenStack and is compatible with OpenStack products from vendors including Red Hat, IBM, HP and others, providing customers with a number of choices moving forward.”

One of the original players behind the OpenStack codebase, Nebula offered Nebula Cosmos, a fast and secure deployment, management, and monitoring tool for enterprise-grade OpenStack private clouds, and converged infrastructure solutions based on x86 servers running OpenStack- the Nebula One.

Nearly five years after the creation of OpenStack the market is clearly still in its early stages despite loads of vendor hype and a flurry of acquisitions in this space. Indeed, the first challenge for independents like Nebula is their ability to gain critical mass and maintain operations – at least before being acquired by firms like Cisco, Red Hat, HP and other IT vendors that have snapped OpenStack startups in recent years in a bid to grow their portfolios based on the open source platform; the second is, of course, competing with the Ciscos, Red Hats and HPs of the world, which is no small feat.

Cisco, Dante Malagrinò, Embrane, Hilton Romanski, M&A, network function virtualisation, Networks, News & Analysis, NFV, Virtualisation

Cisco to buy Embrane in NFV automation play

Cisco is consolidating its NFV portfolio with an increasing focus on automation

Cisco is consolidating its NFV portfolio with an increasing focus on automation

Networking giant Cisco announced its intent to acquire network function virtualisation (NFV) and Cisco tech specialist Embrane for an undisclosed sum this week, a move intended to bolster the company’s networking automation capabilities.

“With agility and automation as persistent drivers for IT teams, the need to simplify application deployment and build the cloud is crucial for the datacentre,” explained Cisco’s corporate development lead Hilton Romanski.

“As we continue to drive virtualization and automation, the unique skillset and talent of the Embrane team will allow us to move more quickly to meet customer demands. Together with Cisco’s engineering expertise, the Embrane team will help to expand our strategy of offering freedom of choice to our customers through the Nexus product portfolio and enhance the capabilities of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI),” he said, adding that the purchase also builds on previous commitments to open standards, open APIs, and playing nicely in multi-vendor environments.

Beyond complimenting Cisco’s ACI efforts, Dante Malagrinò, one of the founders of Embrane and its chief product officer said the move will help further the company’s goal of driving software-hardware integration in the networking space, and offer Embrane an attractive level of scale few vendors playing in this space have.

“Joining Cisco gives us the opportunity to continue our journey and participate in one of the most significant shifts in the history of networking:  leading the industry to better serve application needs through integrated software-hardware models,” he explained.

“The networking DNA of Cisco and Embrane together drives our common vision for an Application Centric Infrastructure.  We both believe that innovation must be evolutionary and enable IT organizations to transition to their future state on their own terms – and with their own timelines.  It’s about coexistence of hardware with software and of new with legacy in a way that streamlines and simplifies operations.”

Cisco is quickly working to consolidate its NFV offerings, and more recently its OpenStack services, as the vendor continues to target cloud service providers and telcos looking to revamp their datacentres. In March it was revealed Cisco struck a big deal with T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom’s enterprise-focused subsidiary, that will see the German incumbent roll out Cisco’s OpenStack-based infrastructure in datacentre in Biere, near Magdeburg, as well as a virtual hotspot service for SMEs.

Evan Grim, Josh Alexander, Microsoft, multifactor authentication, News & Analysis, PingIdentity, RSA, Salesforce, Toopher

Salesforce buys mobile authentication startup

MFA is becoming more prominent among enterprises

MFA is becoming more prominent among enterprises

Salesforce has acquired Toopher, a Texas-based mobile authentication startup, for an undisclosed sum.

The company, which offers multifactor authentication (MFA) for mobile platforms, was acquired by the CRM giant less than a month after it secured $200k in new investment.

“Today it is with great excitement that we can unveil our ability to super-charge our superpower—because we are being acquired by Salesforce,” the company’s founders Josh Alexander and Evan Grim wrote in a statement on the Toopher website.

“While we will no longer sell our current products, we are thrilled to join Salesforce, where we’ll work on delivering the Toopher vision on a much larger scale as part of the world’s #1 Cloud Platform. We can’t imagine a better team, technology and set of values with which to align.”

Toopher said it will continue to support existing customers.

Salesforce is aligning itself with a number of enterprise IT vendors including Microsoft, PingIdentity and RSA, which have over the past few years moved to acquire MFA vendors in order to bolster the security posture of their offerings.

Given the rise in MFA adoption among enterprises (a recent SafeNet survey suggests 37 per cent of organisations used MFA in 2014, up from 30 per cent the previous year), the performance improvements associated with tight technical integration between MFA and the services they protect, and the fact these enterprises are becoming more and more mobile, it’s not surprising to see some vendors swoop in to acquire the technology outright.