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

 

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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 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.


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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Total Defense Extends Cloud Security Protection for Businesses in Europe

Total Defense, Inc., a provider of solutions to combat the growing threat of cybercrime, today announced the launch of Total Defense Cloud Security, an integrated cloud based SaaS (Security as a Service) solution for Web and email protection, for businesses in Europe. This new offering provides organizations with a powerful and versatile Web and email security platform that protects users anytime and anywhere.

The widespread use of the Web as a business tool, coupled with an increasingly mobile workforce, has enhanced corporate productivity, but it has also created new security challenges for companies that must balance providing access with protecting critical corporate assets and data.

“The days of the typical business user accessing the Internet solely from the safety of a protected corporate network are over. Today’s workers are connecting from an array of different devices through a multitude of private and public networks, Wi-Fi hotspots and home networks. Traditional appliance-based Web and Email security solutions are unable to address the evolving security needs of modern businesses,” said Paul Lipman, CEO of Total Defense.

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Singapore Gets New Cloud Center

The island-nation of Singapore, located in the southwest of the ASEAN region, competes with Hong Kong more than 1,500 miles to the northeast for business and attention. It is now also competing with the Chinese special administrative region (SAR) as an emerging cloud-computing center.

A recent development comes from Citic Telecom International CPC Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that’s launched what it calls a SmartCloud center in Singapore. The center joins similar facilities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

The company expects cloud services to grow to 20-25% of its overall business within three years, according to a statement from company CEO Stephen Ho.

This is a complex facility, belying any belief one might have that cloud is simple. It incorporates technology from Dell, Riverbed, VMware, and HP (which is adding security management into the mix).

The Riverbed technology, designed to optimize performance, is a key aspect of Citic’s implementation. A local Riverbed spokesperson said the company’s technology will address “the vagaries of the Internet” with the idea of maximizing QoS (quality-of-service) issues.

Citic says Singapore will be its “communications hub” for Southeast Asia, and also says it will extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the near future.

The Singaporean government has been an active supporter of cloud computing, encouraging investment and developing an aggressive government cloud program that provides XaaS cloud services to local businesses. A non-profit organization in Hong Kong called Asia Cloud developed a “Cloud Readiness Index” last year that aggregated several factors into an Asian ranking. Hong Kong slightly topped Singapore, followed closely by Australia.

I prefer to be in Manila for many reasons, and think there is potential for any of the large-to-massive cities of the region – Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok – to emerge more fully. Sydney and Melbourne are present in regional-hub discussions as well.

With Singapore as its communication hub for the ASEAN region, Citic plans to extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future. Apart from Singapore, it has deployed more than 50 points of presence already in the Greater China and Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.

Several network-security vendors are also involved with the project, including Certes Networks, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and McAfee. The goal is to get Citic’s regional centers to work as disaster-recovery centers for one another.

Note that the technology vendors named here are all US Companies. Is anybody in Washington listening when we plead for them to pay more attention to the great and vast US cloud-computing innovation culture?

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The cloud news categorized.