With privacy often voiced as the primary concern when using cloud based services, SyncriBox was designed to ensure that the software remains completely under the customer’s control. Having both the source and destination files remain under the user?s control, there are no privacy or security issues. Since files are synchronized using Syncrify Server, no third party ever sees these files.
Monthly Archives: March 2018
Cloudian acquires Infinity Storage to help customers reduce IT workloads
16 Mar, 2018
Cloudian has acquired software-defined storage business Infinity Storage, helping the object-based storage company reduce its customers’ IT workloads with a scalable file system.
Cloudian’s integrated file and object-based storage services collate unstructured data into a scalable storage pool, making it easier for IT teams to manage and significantly reduce costs compared to traditional NAS-based systems.
Learn more about the benefits of deploying both an object storage platform and enterprise file services together in this whitepaper from IDC and Cloudian.
“For more than a decade, Infinity Storage software has helped enterprise customers simplify file management with enterprise-class features that provide a familiar user experience on next-generation storage platforms,” Infinity Storage’s founder Caterina Falchi said.
“While launching HyperFile with Cloudian, we immediately recognised that our company cultures and technologies meshed perfectly. We are genuinely thrilled to be joining the Cloudian team.”
Cloudian and Infinity Storage have worked together on a number of projects in the past, including the launch of the Cloudian HyperFile NAS controller, which delivers enterprise-level file storage services such as SMB(CIFS)/NFS support, snapshot, WORM, non-disruptive failover, scale-out performance, POSIX compliance and Active Directory integration from Cloudian Hyperstore.
“This acquisition further accelerates Cloudian’s efforts to reduce IT workloads with self-protecting and easy-to-scale file systems that analysts agree are critical for next-generation storage management,” said Michael Tso, CEO of Cloudian.
“Not only does Infinity bring deep technology expertise to the table, but also our two companies’ cultures fit perfectly, with the same uncompromising dedication to the customer, to the team and to technical excellence. We are excited to be growing together.”
Infinity Storage is Cloudian’s first ever acquisition but demonstrates the company’s drive to build upon its core services and offer businesses a wider range of enterprise services to help them realise the benefits of object-based storage.
UK companies unprepared for cloud outages
16 Mar, 2018
More than three quarters of businesses have not fully analysed the financial cost of a cloud outage, meaning they’re putting their business’s security at risk.
A survey by Veritas has revealed that a third of organisations only anticipate their services to go down for less than 15 minutes a month, yet figures show the average outage lasts 16 minutes per month.
Despite the majority of the 1200 business and IT decision makers saying they expect to move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24-months, two-thirds think keeping on top of outages is the responsibility of their cloud provider. More than three quarters think it’s the cloud provider’s job to protect workloads.
However, what they don’t consider is that the majority of SLAs only protect the infrastructure layer and they are not responsible for ensuring applications come back online when service is restored or data recovery.
If businesses aren’t prepared to take on some of the load when a cloud service is knocked offline, it could have pricey consequences for the organisation, unless the firm has an on-premise failover strategy in place, to backup apps and data, should a cloud service suffer an outage.
“Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business,” Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer, Veritas said.
“Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organization’s control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud. Getting this right means less downtime, financial impact, loss of customers’ trust and damage to brand reputation.”
Mike D. Kail Joins @CloudEXPO NY Faculty | @MDKail #AI #DevOps #FinTech #Blockchain
As Cybric’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike D. Kail is responsible for the strategic vision and technical direction of the platform. Prior to founding Cybric, Mike was Yahoo’s CIO and SVP of Infrastructure, where he led the IT and Data Center functions for the company. He has more than 24 years of IT Operations experience with a focus on highly-scalable architectures.
Cloudian: On acquiring Infinity Storage, multi-cloud and machine learning
To say it has been a busy few weeks for object storage provider Cloudian would be an understatement. The company has pocketed $125 million in funding, issued its most recent product update, and touted a record year with particular growth in Europe cited.
With the latter in mind, the company today announced it had acquired Infinity Storage. The Milan-based company focuses on software-defined file storage and had previously partnered extensively with Cloudian prior to acquisition. The company’s name may not be obvious to those except long-term industry watchers – “they’re technologists, not marketers and salespeople”, as Cloudian CMO Jon Toor puts it – but their kudos cannot be doubted, with founder Caterina Falchi an inventor of WORM (write once, read many) technology.
Toor explains the rationale behind the move. “Two things became clear,” he tells CloudTech. “One is their technology was completely complementary with ours, zero overlap – there was a very nice point of intersection because they have supported the S3 instance for some years now – it was really clean from that perspective. The other thing was they had a very similar culture. They’re technologists that really strive to product a best in class solution, and very focused on making sure it meets all customer expectations.”
The continued rise of object storage is naturally a subject dear to Toor’s heart – and one which can be expanded on at some length. The benefits – inclusion of metadata, API accessibility, scalability – are known, but it’s what’s on the horizon that piques particular interest.
Multi-cloud, as regular readers of this publication will be aware, is being taken up by more and more companies, and vendors – never ones to miss an opportunity – are putting the term everywhere in their marketing materials. Cloudian is no different; but this one is genuine. Through a single API, users can access storage assets both on-premise and in public clouds, including Microsoft, Google and AWS.
“There’s been a huge interest in this, and it’s driven by all the usual suspects,” explains Toor. “One driver is people just want to have flexibility. Different clouds have different APIs. The second thing is the clouds are competing. They’ve all got different strengths, and people will want to use Microsoft for one thing, Google for something else, Amazon for something else, and the reality is the IT guy inside the organisation doesn’t really have any control over what the people in the company are doing.”
An example Toor gave was around a Cloudian customer in the industrial IoT space. All of the company’s software is written for S3, but there was also a requirement for Azure in certain scenarios. By running a controller in Azure and providing a fully compatible S3 interface into the Azure environment, the problem was solved.
Machine learning, if it’s possible, is even more of a buzzword than multi-cloud. With even the flimsiest chat applications offering ML capabilities according to the willing, it shows the one direction the industry is heading. Having data sat in silos being accessed every so often just won’t cut it anymore, whichever profession you are in. Another customer of Cloudian’s is WGBH, a Boston-based TV station, which is moving its archive from tape and hard disk drives – estimated access time 24-72 hours – to object storage.
Here’s where the benefits of attached metadata come in. “What companies want to do is learn from the data – they want to be able to analyse the data and benefit from it, and it’s very hard to do if that data is sitting on a shelf,” says Toor. “You need it to be sitting there with real-time access – preferably something that is cloud-integrated so you can also use tools in the cloud to help you learn about that data.
“You want to be able to analyse the data and then record the product of that analysis in some way that makes sense.”
The Infinity Storage team has entirely joined Cloudian, and for Toor it marks another step in what he says is a very interesting time for unstructured data. “Traditional file storage, traditional unstructured data storage has been around for 30 years now, and there really hasn’t been a lot of innovation in the space during that 30 years,” he says. “Enterprises are facing a scale problem, collecting massive amounts of unstructured data in the form of videos, image, archiving… across the board. A self-driving car, for example, can generate a petabyte of data every year just on the basis of observing the road conditions around it.
“For Cloudian and our customers, [Infinity] adds files services to our object storage environment. Customers can consolidate all unstructured data types, files and objects to a single limitlessly scalable pool where they can manage everything as one," Toor adds.
René Bostic Joins @CloudEXPO NY Faculty | @IBMCloud @IBMBlockchain #Blockchain #DevOps
René Bostic is the Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America. Enjoying her career with IBM during the modern millennial technological era, she is an expert in cloud computing, DevOps and emerging cloud technologies such as Blockchain. Her strengths and core competencies include a proven record of accomplishments in consensus building at all levels to assess, plan, and implement enterprise and cloud computing solutions.
René is a member of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) and a member of the Society of Information Management (SIM) Atlanta Chapter. She received a Business and Economics degree with a minor in Computer Science from St. Andrews Presbyterian University (Laurinburg, North Carolina). She resides in metro-Atlanta (Georgia).
Microsoft expands data centre plans in Europe and the Middle East
Microsoft continues to expand its data centre empire, with new locations in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates planned, the company has announced.
The expansion takes Azure to 50 regions worldwide, with other data centres in the works including South Africa and Australia. The UAE data centres will be the first inroads Microsoft has made into the Middle East, with the company citing its ‘long-standing expertise and deep local relationships’ in the area to accelerate technological innovation.
“By delivering the comprehensive, intelligent Microsoft Cloud from data centres in a given geography, we offer scalable, available and resilient cloud services for companies and organisations while meeting data residency, security and compliance needs,” wrote Jason Zander, Azure corporate vice president, in a blog post.
Alongside this, Microsoft announced the France regions were open for business with general availability of Azure and Office 365, with Dynamics 365 to follow early next year.
“With this milestone, Microsoft is empowering organisations like Naval Energies, a global player in renewable marine engines, Astrimmo, a leading provider of housing services in France, and Ercom, a French company specialising in cybersecurity, with greater scalability, agility, and the opportunity to develop new cloud-based solutions,” Zander added.
Microsoft made a point that it operates more regions than any other cloud provider. Naturally, the nomenclature slightly differs depending on who one talks to. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has 19 regions at present, with five more on the way, but in terms of availability zones – each AWS region has a minimum of two, ideally three – AWS has 54 at present.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a greater push towards its government cloud offerings, with government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.
Should AI Fool You? | @ExpoDX #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitalTransformation
In the 67 years since Alan Turing proposed his Imitation Game – the infamous ‘Turing test’ for artificial intelligence (AI) – people have been confused over the very purpose of AI itself.
At issue: whether the point of AI is to simulate human behavior so seamlessly that it can fool people into thinking they are actually interacting with a human being, rather than a piece of software.
Such deception was never the point of Turing’s exercise, however. Rather, he realized that there was no way to define true intelligence, and thus no way to test for it. So he came up with the game as a substitute – something people could theoretically test for.
Regardless of Turing’s intentions, setting the bar for AI based on its ability to snooker an audience has become fully ingrained in our culture, thanks in large part to Hollywood.
Running Multiple Incompatible Browsers Simultaneously
There are a number of tasks that are easier, safer, and less costly if run in virtual machines (VM) instead of physical computers. One example is testing beta (or alpha) software. By its very nature, beta software can contain bugs—even quite serious and damaging bugs. Run beta software on your main PC, and you run […]
The post Running Multiple Incompatible Browsers Simultaneously appeared first on Parallels Blog.
Why we’re becoming savvier in our cloud initiatives – with object storage and containers key
The latest research report, this time from cloud cost management provider Cloudability, reveals some interesting findings: only four infrastructure services comprise almost 85% of spend among the company’s customers, while changing trends in object storage and containers are becoming apparent.
The study, which features data comprised from anonymous analysis of Cloudability’s analytics platform, found Amazon EC2 was by far the most popular service, accounting for 58.7% of spend, compared with Elastic Block Store (EBS, 9.9%), AWS’ relational database (9.3%), and S3 object storage (6.3%).
Cloudability’s customers are in the main Amazon houses, so the fact this data is AWS-heavy should not be a surprise, nor should it detract from other cloud providers. However the trend here is around ‘lift and shift’ migrations dominating enterprise cloud adoption. Cloudability argues there is still a lot of work to be done and many workloads to move over.
The data also finds that the second quarter of 2017 was the tipping point between legacy and current generation compute instances. May (below) saw cloud overtake legacy among Cloudability’s customers for the first time, and by the end of the year the divide had grown significantly to 70/30.
Organisations aren’t just moving to the cloud in greater numbers; they are also becoming savvier about their options. Object storage is a case in point. The report argues capacity has grown by more than 40% over the past 12 months, with 22% of companies opting for the infrequent access AWS S3 option – a combination of low cost and high performance – up from 10% this time last year. Standard usage has dropped almost in parallel, from 68% to 55%, while usage of Glacier, the super-low-cost ‘cold’ storage option, remained stable.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool, steadily gaining its lead over Mesos, Rancher and OpenShift throughout the course of 2017. Kubernetes, which ‘graduated’ out of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) earlier this month, and how its trends were related to AWS were described thus in the report: “With ECS, Fargate and EKS offerings starting to become available and delving further into microservices, we anticipate that container adoption will accelerate.
“As a result of container growth, the management complexity (including cost management) will grow significantly as well, since containers are typically seven to eight times the number of VMs and are more ephemeral in nature.”
According to the recent RightScale State of the Cloud report, AWS continues to see its lead in the overall market shrink at the hands of Microsoft Azure, with enterprise cloud spend – as this report affirms – continuing to rise.
You can find out more about the report here.