All posts by Richard

Backup, Code 42 Software, CrashPlan, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity

Code 42 Software Expands Endpoint Backup Solutions Ease-of-Use

Code 42 Software Inc., developers of cloud-based endpoint backup solutions for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, today announced at Cloud Expo West 2012 expanded capabilities for its entire family of CrashPlan endpoint backup solutions. This new version of CrashPlan expands the company’s recognized dedication to ease-of-use by both end users and data backup administrators, and provides powerful new enterprise functionality for managing private clouds.

“Code 42 is committed to giving enterprise administrators the private cloud management capabilities they demand,” said Matthew Dornquast, chief executive officer, Code 42 Software. “Our new functionalities make our solution unique and give admins what we believe is the best private cloud management solution on the market today. In addition, a key differentiator of all our CrashPlan offerings is our ability to support a variety of platforms – Mac or Windows, Linux or Solaris. We give users the powerful, trusted backup solutions they need, on the platforms they want to use; and Windows 8 upgraders will be happy to know that CrashPlan is already fully compatible.”

Available today are a variety of additional capabilities for Code 42’s enterprise solution CrashPlan PROe which extend the solution’s ease-of-use for administrators, such as:

  • Single-point upgrades of private clouds – With this new version
    comes automatic upgrade functionality for storage servers, which makes
    managing private clouds easier and less time-consuming. Once all
    servers are individually upgraded to the current version,
    administrators can upgrade their entire private cloud with a
    single-point upgrade for future releases.
  • Support for Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) –
    This version of the SAML
    OASIS
    standard for exchanging authentication
    and authorization
    data between security
    domains enables web-based authentication and authorization
    scenarios including single
    sign-on (SSO). Organizations utilizing SAML 2.0-based SSO
    technologies (such as Shibboleth) can now integrate CrashPlan PROe
    with those systems, which simplifies the authentication process by
    delegating all authorization to the organization’s identity provider.

CrashPlan PROe is lauded by global organizations such as Google, Adobe, Netflix, LinkedIn and Salesforce.com for its reliability, performance and invisible nature. In addition to its new capabilities, PROe gives the enterprise:

  • Continuous, silent backup – Works quietly, continuously in the
    background to unobtrusively protect data according to admin or user
    settings.
  • Self-service restore – When a restore is required, users can
    initiate it themselves – with only a few clicks – and without needing
    IT intervention.
  • End-to-end security – Encrypts data on the device and again
    during transit, and keeps it encrypted during data storage.
  • Flexible data storage options – Offers both public and private
    cloud data storage across multiple physical locations via a hybrid
    architecture.
  • Superb performance – Innovative compression and multi-threading
    technologies provide superior performance; a byte-level differential
    only transmits and stores new information.
  • Dynamic data balancing – Provides optimum use of available
    storage and bandwidth within and between servers and data centers.
  • Easy monitoring and administration – Gives admins a real-time
    view of the entire system and an easy way to control every aspect of
    the backups – whether for 200 users or two million – via an
    intuitive admin dashboard and console.
  • Easy, trusted access to data while on-the-go – Gives users
    secure access to all their data from anywhere via mobile apps for
    Apple iOS, Android or Windows Phone; apps feature one-touch update and
    the same industry-leading security as the PROe desktop applications.
  • Customizable backup sets – Provides an easy way to back up
    different groups of files and folders on different schedules and/or to
    different destinations.


Actuate Corporation, ActuateOne, Big Data, Partnerships, VMware

Actuate, VMware to Deliver Faster Insights from Big Data in the Cloud

Actuate Corporation is partnering with VMware to provide a cost-effective way for companies to gain insight from any source of Big Data in hybrid cloud environments, by deploying seamless, dynamic and accessible business information solutions.

ActuateOne is designed to support private, public and SaaS (software as a service) cloud deployments by eliminating the need for hard-coded configuration, thereby enabling fast and easy deployment with VMware solutions. VMware solutions provide multiple benefits to IT administrators and users. VMware virtualization creates a layer of abstraction between the resources required by an application and operating system, and the underlying hardware that provides those resources.

Customers can extend the reliability and agility offered by the new VMware vFabric™ Data Director™ to their virtualized ActuateOne cluster, by provisioning and managing the data sources visualized in an Actuate dashboard as well as the vFabric Postgres database that manages the Encyclopedia Volumes of that ActuateOne deployment. This multi-layered coupling of ActuateOne upon VMware simplifies IT management tasks, while ensuring the highest levels of mission-critical availability, security and scalability for any Actuate / VMware deployment.

“We are pleased to be working with Actuate to provide our customers with a solution for analyzing and visualizing large data sets that reside in hybrid cloud environments,” said Fausto Ibarra, Senior Director, Product Management, VMware. “With VMware vFabric™ Data Director, VMware vFabric Postgres and ActuateOne, organizations can securely and efficiently extract actionable insights from their data to make informative business decisions.”

“Actuate’s technology scales linearly across any number of virtual instances, interfacing well with VMware solutions, and further delivering on the Actuate promise of better insights for better decision making by more people in the organization,” said Wenfeng Li, Vice President of Product Development at Actuate. “ActuateOne sources multiple instances of Big Data, merging it with traditional relational data via our data integration features, and then presents this blended content as interactive, customizable visualizations to large numbers of simultaneous users.”

ActuateOne – Actuate’s BI platform and suite of interactive applications built on open source BIRT – has already earned VMware Ready™ status. The VMware Ready designation signifies that ActuateOne has gone through VMware’s advanced testing and evaluation process to certify product compatibility. As part of the partnership, Actuate and VMware demonstrated linear scalability of ActuateOne in conjunction with VMware vSphere®, vFabric™ Data Director™, and VMware vFabric Postgres.

Together, the solution delivers three unique capabilities:

  • An efficient and secure approach to using shared infrastructure for
    servicing highly frequent requests
  • A standardized, portable, and extensible approach to enable workloads
    to be deployed across multiple clouds without manual configuration
  • Agile access to shared infrastructure for provisioning workloads in
    demand

 


Cease and Desist, Pano Logic, Thin client, Venture Funding, Virtualization

Pano Logic: the Well-Funded Thin-Client Startup That Just Disappeared

Last year we reported on Pano Logic, the then-hot desktop virtualization startup that made thin-client PC replacements for businesses and institutions looking to replace desktops with cloud-connected terminals.

What a difference 18 months can make. Pano Logic has closed its doors with no explanation. As Business Insider put it, “The company has shut down, its leaders have vanished, and its customers have been left hanging.”

According to Network World’s Buzzblog the closing may have had “something to do with a cease and desist order that Pano Logic couldn’t fight,”

 


Intellectual Property, Mobile phone, Patent, United States Patent & Trademark Office, United States patent law

8×8 Issued Two New Communications Patents

8×8, Inc. has been awarded two new patents related to its communications technologies. On October 30, 2012, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued United States Patent numbers 8,300,552, entitled “Network Interface Unit Control System and Method Therefor” and 8,300,634, entitled “Mobile Device Communications Routing.”

The “Network Interface Unit Control System and Method Therefor” patent relates to an arrangement for processing external services data including an audio, video and data signal bussing arrangement adapted to distribute audio, video and data to designated points in a user facility. The external services data are processed in a manner that enables easy user interface and control.

The “Mobile Device Communications Routing” patent relates to a variety of methods, systems, devices and arrangements for communications using a mobile communications device. In connection with various embodiments, one such method relates to routing calls specifying an endpoint device, from a mobile communications device to the endpoint device, using a call forwarding/routing service provider that establishes a connection with the endpoint device. The established connection may include, for example, a Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) connection. In some implementations of the invention, an authentication server is contacted (e.g. via the Internet) to authenticate the call to be made via the call forwarding/routing service provider.

Since its establishment in 1987, 8×8 has been awarded eighty-five (85) United States patents covering a variety of voice and video communications, signaling, processing and storage technologies. 8×8’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bryan Martin, is a named inventor on both of the newly issued patents.


Application programming interface, Tinypass, Tools

Tinypass Launches Cloud-Based, Content Metering Tool for its Digital Paywall Platform

Tinypass, a flexible and consumer-friendly paywall platform for digital publishers, announced today a new content metering capability that allows publishers to provide a specified amount of free – or “metered” – access to their site’s content before visitors are asked to pay. The technology offers publishers a broad range of control in implementing a metered access model, enabling them to set the amount of free content users are able to view based upon either the number of articles/resources retrieved or by time frame. For example, offering 24-hours of free access to allow visitors to preview site offerings.

“We’re committed to empowering digital publishers with the ability to monetize their content in effective, affordable and consumer-friendly ways,” said David Restrepo, Chief Operating Officer of Tinypass. “What’s great about the new, metered access capability is that it allows content owners of any size to quickly and easily implement a customized access model that their visitors will already be familiar with from experience accessing content on the sites of several of the world’s largest publishers. Like the rest of our cloud-based technology platform, the metering tools are completely scalable and, with zero upfront costs, can be deployed by operators of all sizes.”

The metering functionality is built into Tinypass’ plugins for WordPress and Drupal, as well as Tinypass’ PHP- and Java-based APIs. Media owners Worldcrunch, Summit Business Media and the Chicago Phoenix are among the first publishers to begin rolling out the new meter tool on their sites.

In addition to offering site owners a choice between a quantity or time frame approach, the Tinypass metering tool can be implemented in two separate technology modes – a client-side mode or a client- and server-side mode. The client-side mode operates in a manner similar to the paywall offerings of the New York Times and The Financial Times and works through cookies added to the user’s browser. After users have accessed a preset amount of free content, they are asked to create an account to continue reading.

A more secure approach includes both client- and server-side user confirmation. The addition of a small amount of code to the publisher’s content management system (CMS) prevents users from circumventing the access meter simply by clearing the cookies in his or her browser.

Using the Tinypass meter, publishers are free to make their own decisions in regards to inbound, referring links to their site. Visits that originate from social networking and other news sharing sites can be counted against the meter or treated as separate interactions that do not count against free views.


Open Source, PaaS, RabbitMQ, Redis, VMware

AppFog Adds Redis, RabbitMQ Support Across Cloud Providers

AppFog today announced support for Redis and RabbitMQ, two of the most in-demand and widely used solutions for developing enterprise-class, web scale applications.

Used by both enterprise developers and those building cutting-edge, new start-up technologies, Redis is an open source RAM-based key-value memory store providing significant value in a wide range of important use cases. The popular and powerful NoSQL database has become a coding staple for developers worldwide and depended on for scalability by companies with websites serving a massive number of customers and users. Redis has also been the most-requested feature across all developers. Used by companies ranging from GitHub to Blizzard and from StackOverflow to Flickr, Redis has become a best practice for all looking to create solutions with excellent performance.

“Redis has become a required go-to tool for developers looking to solve performance issues for their applications,” said Krishnan Subramanian, Founder and Principal Analyst at Rishidot Research. “Interestingly, it is recommended to add Redis to your stack to take advantage of it in cases where your existing database is of no use. As a critical component of many highly performant stacks, Redis is rapidly becoming the standard for memory-based key-value stores.”

RabbitMQ is an open source enterprise message broker solution, enabling robust and easy-to-use messaging for applications. The messaging queue software provides support for a wide range of languages, platforms and third-party services. Supported by VMware, RabbitMQ is used by a huge number of developers and companies to develop robust and reliable applications.


Data Center Disasters, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Hosting, Hurricane Sandy, Outage Alert

Hurricane Sandy and NYC Data Centers: How They Prepped, What Happened

Water and servers don’t mix. Storms can do more than cut the power to a data center, they can also breech walls, flood, or otherwise damage a center. A natural disaster like Hurrican Sandy can also make it difficult for staff to even be there to do their jobs, and can delay the arrival of replacement parts, fuel for generators, and so on.

Two posts at Data Center Knowledge do a good job of outlining how they prepared, and what actually happened.


Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Data visualization, HardMetrics, IQor, M&A Activity

iQor Acquires HardMetrics

iQor, a provider of intelligent customer interaction and outsourcing solutions, today announced that it has acquired HardMetrics, a provider of cloud-based visual business intelligence, business analytics and reporting solutions. HardMetrics enables organizations to integrate disparate data from any part of the enterprise, then structures and translates that data into actionable insight, including user-friendly info-graphics, scorecards, charts, and dashboards.

With its customer and transactional databases, iQor’s industry-leading Big Data analytics engine QuantuMatch® helps clients uncover insights into their customer base. This agreement extends iQor’s analytics and self-service reporting capabilities by enabling on-demand, interactive drill-down reporting for more targeted customer interaction campaigns and faster recognition of, and response to, emerging trends.

“We are excited about the acquisition for our customers,” said Brian Turley, outgoing CEO of HardMetrics, Inc. “iQor brings resources, technology prowess, and market muscle that we simply could not match on our own.”

HardMetrics will continue to serve its existing customer base and operate as a standalone company. In addition, iQor will incorporate and market the HardMetrics Performance Manager product in a new offering called QeyMetricsSM for its broad base of customers.

“With iQor, HardMetrics clients now have the weight and ambition of an acknowledged technology and analytics innovator driving the product and the business,” said Bryce Engelbrecht, iQor Vice President and General Manager of HardMetrics. “We look forward to expanding HardMetrics’ proven, innovative platform for delivering operational metrics to business end users.”

“iQor has led the way in developing the digital network, tools and processes to capture, analyze, and act upon the Big Data generated with every customer interaction,” said Norm Merritt, President and CEO, iQor. “iQor’s analytics engine, coupled with HardMetrics’ leading data visualization tools, provides an unparalleled analytics toolset for both existing and new clients to help them generate value adding insight.”


Bill Ackman, Business Intelligence, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Hedge fund, Investment management, Mobile, MoneyChakra, Warren Buffett, Xignite

MoneyChakra iPad App Tracks Investments by Top Hedge Fund Managers

MoneyChakra today announced the availability of its iPad app that tracks top hedge fund managers’ actions using the Xignite Market Data Cloud. MoneyChakra uses innovative data services from Xignite to reveal the portfolios and buy/sell actions for top hedge fund managers, including Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Bill Ackman and other leading money managers.

The first company to offer an iPad app in this category, MoneyChakra differs from other services that post the actions of hedge fund managers by using Xignite’s web services to clearly and simply display real-time data. MoneyChakra is outshining the competition by presenting big picture perspectives with dynamic visualization that can be understood at a glance. MoneyChakra also allows users to drill down into data to:

  • View top hedge fund managers’ portfolios as soon as they are filed
    with SEC
  • Visualize top hedge fund managers’ buy/sell actions for the quarter
  • See patterns across the top hedge fund managers’ portfolios
  • Get news and other actions, such as Form 4 and SC 13 filings
  • Make watchlists for the stocks you are considering for buying/selling

The MoneyChakra iPad app, with Xignite data, is available as a free download in the iTunes Apple Store.


Archiving & Regulatory Retention, E-mail archiving, Electronic discovery, iPad, Mimecast, Mobile, SharePoint

Mimecast Beefs up Email Archiving, Adds iPad Search App

Mimecast, a supplier of cloud-based email archiving, security and continuity for Microsoft Exchange, Hosted Exchange and Office 365, has revamped its cloud archiving capabilities, with end users now able to access their personal archive from their chosen email client or mobile device. Mimecast has also introduced file archiving and now provides users with the ability to search their archived documents from within Outlook, Mimecast Personal Portal (web), or iPad. The company’s new iPad app, Mimefiles, displays all of a user’s documents stored in email, as well as Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, network shares and home drives (My Documents).

Mimecast has also added tight integration between SharePoint and email, with users able to search their email archive from within SharePoint, or their SharePoint documents from Outlook.

“The archive is now so much more than just a dusty data store,” comments Grant Hodgkinson, Product Director, Unified Email Management, at Mimecast. “We see it as a highly available, highly secure, but most of all incredibly useful source of information for IT professionals and their end users. And not just for occasional eDiscovery cases but for day to day interactions. The Mimecast archive can now store more than just email, but perhaps more importantly we’re providing users with the tools to be able to find what they need, quickly, in ways that suit their personal preferences, whether they are iPad users or Outlook junkies. In short, archiving is not just about what goes in; it’s how useful it is when it comes out.”

The key elements of today’s announcement are:

Mimecast File Archive provides a solution for archiving files from SharePoint, Box, Dropbox, network shares and home drives, with a single point of eDiscovery and management that supports regulatory compliance needs.

Mimecast Services for Outlook Version 4 gives users full access to their entire archive history from within Outlook. Users can browse their historical email folders or use the archive search feature, which enables quicker decision-making and transforms responsiveness. They can also drag and drop emails to their inbox when browsing, or view, reply and forward messages returned by the archive search.

Mimecast Services for SharePoint is designed to allow users to search their email archive from within SharePoint.

Mimecast Personal Portal is a web mail portal that allows users to search emails and files in their personal archive, manage their permit/block lists and continue to send and receive email in the event of a mail server outage.

Mimefiles, which will be available from the Apple AppStore in November, is a custom-built iPad app that provides users with a unified view of all their files from Box, Dropbox, SharePoint, network file shares and email attachments. Users can also view the audit trail associated with each file – who emailed whom and when – and can preview the email that the file was associated with.