IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, like many other acronyms in the IT industry, leave us lost in translation. With the initial confusion aside, they simply explain the three main developments in cloud computing. As a pooled collection of resources and services that are hosted on the Internet, the Cloud, often referred to as a stack, is categorized into three main service models: Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Sservice translate to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, respectively.
These services function thanks to virtualization, with the availability of high-speed networks and capabilities of modern browsers. With the use of these technologies, it has become less necessary for businesses to have their own infrastructure or software. Yet still IaaS, PaaS and SaaS remain a grey area, and many individuals struggle to differentiate between them to find the optimum solution for their business.
Skyera Gets Better than $51M in Funding
Skyera has gotten $51.6 million in series B financing led by Dell Ventures and a syndicate of other strategic investors to accelerate its next-generation enterprise solid-state storage solutions.
Skyera is supposed to be positioned at the forefront of the hyper-growth solid-state storage sector and is supposed to enable a large class of applications with “extraordinarily fast performance, exceptionally lower power consumption, high density and cost effectiveness relative to existing enterprise storage systems.”
Naturally it supports the cloud, Big Data, increased mobility and social networking.
The general availability of Skyera’s skyHawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems is supposed to mark the first time that the new-generation 19/20nm solid-state technology can be used to replace the traditional hard disk-based system, at a system price of less than $3 a gigabyte.
Rackspace Survey: The Cloud Helps US Businesses Boost Profits
Cloud computing allows US businesses to reduce their total IT costs by a significant 26 percent, according to a new study released on Wednesday. In addition, a majority 62 percent of respondents agree cloud computing has helped them boost profits.
“Businesses of all sizes, from the very largest global corporations to startups, say their operations are seeing multiple benefits from cloud computing,” noted Rackspace Chief Technology Officer, John Engates. “Thanks to the cloud, at least half of businesses on both sides of ‘the pond’ are growing with increased profits despite the ongoing economic backdrop. Savings from the cloud have enabled these companies to hire new employees, increase wages and drive innovation.”
The study, conducted by Rackspace Hosting with support from Manchester Business School, a UK and world business school, found an overwhelming 94 percent of businesses in the US using the cloud had saved money.
Get Growing with Parallels Plesk Panel – New Marketing Resource Center on PartnerNet
Integrated products from Parallels, such as website building tools and antivirus and antispam solutions provide you the ability to differentiate your services and increase Average Revenue per User – so building consumer preference for Parallels Plesk Panel and related Parallels products can help you grow your business.
Now Parallels is making such growth easier with our new Get Growing with Parallels Plesk Panel – Marketing Resource Center. The center provides a wealth of resources to help you position, promote, and evaluate Parallels Plesk Panel on your own website. These include product messaging texts, promotional banners, data sheets, logos, ready-to-use and customizable point-of-purchase brochures, a hands-on demo integration guide, best practices white papers, and more. The resource center will help you learn more about Parallels Plesk Panel and related add-ons, get to market quickly with ready-to-use marketing resources, and grow your revenues with integrated add-on products. So check it out here – and get growing with Parallels Plesk Panel. If you have not signed up for PartnerNet yet, register now to take advantage of all these resources.
Let us know if there are other Product or Marketing Resources you need by adding a comment to this post.
Riverbed’s Whitewater Adds AWS Glacier, Google Storage Support
Riverbed Technology today announced Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) version 2.1 with support for Amazon Glacier storage and Google Cloud storage. WWOS 2.1 increases operational cost savings and high data durability from cloud storage services, improving disaster recovery readiness. In addition, Riverbed introduced larger virtual Whitewater appliances that allow customers to support larger data sets, improve disaster recovery capabilities, and manage multiple Whitewater appliances from a single window with a management console. These enhancements to the Whitewater cloud storage product family help enterprises use cloud storage to meet critical backup requirements, modernize data management strategies, and overcome challenges created by data growth.
“Once created, most unstructured data is rarely accessed after 30-90 days. Leveraging the cloud for storing these data sets makes a lot of sense, particularly given the attractive prices of storage services designed for long-term such as Amazon Glacier,” said Dan Iacono, research director from IDC’s storage practice. “The ability of cloud storage devices to cache locally and provide access to recent data provides real benefits from an operational cost perspective to avoid unnecessary transfer costs from the cloud.”
Cloud Storage Ecosystem Expansion Riverbed is offering customers choice and flexibility for data protection by adding Amazon Glacier and Google Cloud storage to its Whitewater cloud storage ecosystem. Now, Whitewater customers using Amazon Glacier cloud storage have immediate access to recent backup data while enjoying pricing from Amazon as low as one cent per gigabyte per month — approximately eight times cheaper than other currently available cloud storage offerings.
In addition, the extremely high data durability offered by Amazon cloud storage services and the ability to access the data from any location with an Internet connection greatly improves an organization’s disaster recovery (DR) readiness.
Larger Virtual Whitewater Appliances With the introduction of the larger virtual Whitewater appliances, Riverbed allows customers preferring virtual appliances to protect larger data sets as well as simplify disaster recovery. The new virtual Whitewater appliances support local cache sizes of four or eight terabytes and integrate seamlessly with leading data protection applications as well as all popular cloud storage services. To streamline management for enterprise wide deployments, WWOS 2.1 includes new management capabilities that enable monitoring and administration of all Whitewater devices from a single console with one-click drill down into any appliance.
“We have been successfully using Riverbed Whitewater appliances for backup with Amazon S3 in our facilities in Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. since June 2012,” said Drew Bartow, senior information technology engineer at Tipper Tie. “We were eager to test the Whitewater 3010 appliance with Amazon Glacier and the total time to configure and start moving data to Glacier was just 24 minutes. With Glacier and Whitewater we could potentially save considerably on backup storage costs.”
“The features in WWOS 2.1 and the larger virtual appliances drastically change the economics of data protection,” said Ray Villeneuve, vice president corporate development, at Riverbed. “With our advanced, in-line deduplication and optimization technologies, Whitewater shrinks data stored in the cloud by up to 30 times on average — for example, Whitewater customers can now store up to 100 terabytes of backup data that is not regularly accessed in Amazon Glacier for as little as $2,500.00 per year. The operational cost savings and high data durability from cloud storage services improve disaster recovery readiness and will continue to rapidly accelerate the movement from tape-based and replicated disk systems to cloud storage.”
Google Puts Touchscreen on Chromebook: WSJ
Google, it seems, has built the first touchscreen laptops for its poorly received Chrome operating system.
The Wall Street Journal says the cloud-based widgets that run web apps should be out and about sometime later this year so Google can go “toe-to-toe” with Microsoft’s touch-sensitive Windows 8operating system.
It’s thought the Touch Chrome devices will actually compete directly with Android, but that’s apparently okay. According to the paper “The company has said it is comfortable having two competing systems that help boost Google services such as its web-search engine and YouTube.”
Samsung, Acer, Lenovo and now HP are in the Chromebook trade.
The Journal says maybe 100,000 Chromebooks were sold in the US last quarter due to heavy promotion.
The Fracturing of the Enterprise Brain
Never mind BYOD (bring your own device), employee use of non-corporate online storage solutions could lead to the weakening of enterprise ability to access company data and intellectual property. In the worst case scenario, companies could lose information forever.
A post by Brian Proffitt at ReadWrite Enterprise explains:
Employees are the keepers of knowledge within a company. Want to run the monthly payroll? The 20-year-veteran in accounting knows how to manage that. Building the new company logo? The superstar designer down in the art department is your gal. When such employees leave the company, it can be a bumpy transition, but usually not impossible, because the data they’ve been using lies on the corporate file server and can be used to piece together the work that’s been done.
Of course, that’s based on the premise that, for the past couple of decades or so, data has essentially been stored in one of two places: on the file servers or the employee’s local computer.
Today, though, people store data in a variety of places, not all of it under the direct control of IT. Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive or a company’s cloud on Amazon Web Services…
Read the article.
Parallels says SMB market is driving business for hosting and cloud service providers
Roy Illsley, Peter Hall & Mile Sapien, Principal Analysts, Ovum IT
At the recent Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas, more than 1,300 attendees heard how the SMB market is driving new business for service providers and hosting companies alike. With headquarters in Seattle, Parallels is a private company that does not disclose its revenues. It has 900 employees worldwide and two-thirds of its business is focused on software solutions (including automation) that enable service providers to rapidly bring to market cloud-based services for the SMB market.
The remaining third of its business is a Mac consumer desktop virtualization business where it holds over 80% of US market share. At the event, Parallels made three new solutions announcements, the most significant of which was a cloud storage solution.
The SMB market is driving growth for the channel and attracting new major service providers
Parallels estimates the total global SMB IT …
AWS Unveils OpsWorks Cloud DevOps Solution
Amazon AWS just announced DevOps (beta) a no-charge solution for managing applications in the AWS cloud using Chef recipes, built on technology developed by Peritor, the creators of Scalarium, which was acquired by AWS in 2012:
AWS OpsWorks is a DevOps solution for managing applications of any scale or complexity on the AWS cloud. AWS OpsWorks features an integrated experience for managing the complete application lifecycle, including resource provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, software updates, monitoring, and access control.
AWS OpsWorks lets you model and visualize your application with layers that define how to configure a set of resources that are managed together. You can also define the software configuration for each layer, including installation scripts and initialization tasks. When an instance is added to a layer, all the configuration steps are applied for you. AWS OpsWorks promotes conventions but is flexible enough to let you customize any aspect of your environment. Since AWS OpsWorks uses Chef recipes, you can leverage hundreds of community-built configurations such as PostgreSQL, Nginx, and Solr.
Read details.
Fpweb.net Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Fpweb.net, a leading provider of managed, private hosting solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Since SharePoint’s inception, Fpweb.net, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, has been a leading SharePoint hosting provider, including being the very first to host the Microsoft® platform in 1999. Fpweb.net’s SharePoint Cloud success is grounded in the unmatched level of experience, dedication and unrivaled expertise that is trusted by customers in over 80 countries.