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SoftLayer Offers "Private Clouds" at Cloud Expo

Dallas-based cloud infrastructure company SoftLayer announceds it Private Clouds solution at Cloud Expo at the Javits Center in New York this week. The idea is to bring the scalability of off-site (public) deployments to on-site (private) initiative for enterprise IT customers who like to control their infrastructure within the comfortibable, traditional local environment.

“For some time our customers have used our portfolio of dedicated servers, network resources, and virtualization options to build their own private clouds. Now, with SoftLayer Private Clouds, instead of starting at square one, you begin with a pre-configured cloud ready for whatever you want to do with it,” said Duke Skarda, Chief Technology Officer for SoftLayer. “We’ve built our Private Clouds solution out of our experience creating and managing our own cloud, and our unique capabilities in automating sophisticated deployments. At the push of a button you have a dedicated cloud at your command, with full access and control over every aspect, and the ability to scale infinitely, on demand.”

SoftLayer Private Clouds will allow customers to “choose the number of physical servers that they need as client hosts and then customize the configuration and resources for those servers as desired. In as few as two hours,” according to the company. Customers can add physical nodes and virtual servers to their Private Clouds as needed through the company’s Customer Portal and API.

The initial Private Clouds solution is built on Citrix CloudPlatform (with what’s now known as Apache CloudStack). Apache CloudStack zones in each data center are controlled from a single pane of glass and centralized management server, and Private Clouds can be managed with RightScale myCloud. The company says Private Clouds will be available August 1, with pricing starting at $1,218 per-month for a base configuration including one management server, one host server, and associated software licenses.

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Dell to Pay Dividend

In an effort to overcome investor hostility Dell is going to do something it’s never done before – despite the fact it had no R&D to speak of – and that’s pay a quarterly dividend beginning in its third quarter which ends in November.

It’ll pay 32 cents a year, a return of roughly 2.7% based on the stock’s closing price of $11.86 on Monday. The expense will cost the company about $560 million a year.

Dell figures it’s got the cash flow, which has generated $4.9 billion in the last four quarters, to buy back stock and pay the dividend despite its nasty earnings and revenue slip last quarter.

While still the world’s third-largest PC supplier, Dell claims it’s “changed the conversation we’re having with our customers. We are a solutions company first, vertically focused, and creating more value for customers with innovative offerings that provide competitive advantage.”

At the end of April Dell had $17.2 billion in the bank and wants to keep making acquisitions to get out of its PC hole. It made eight acquisitions in the last 12 months, doubled the number of engineers developing enterprise solutions and more than tripled the number of specialists selling solutions over the past five years.

The result has been a shift in Dell’s sales to higher-margin data center solutions consisting of servers, networking, storage and related software and services. It says it’s getting 50% of its gross margin and more than 30% percent of its revenue from enterprise solutions and services. It projects they will grow at compound rate of 10% a year through fiscal 2016 and represent an increasing percentage of its operating income margin.

It made the announcement at its annual analysts meeting.

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Dell vCloud Trial Drives Cloud Adoption

Dell is throwing more chum in the water expecting customers will snap up its cloud.

Back late last year it put VMware’s vCloud Datacenter Services on its cloud and offered American users a 60-day introductory trial to try out a hybrid or simply Dell’s public cloud for $999. Apparently it worked and now Dell is extending those trials through July 31 and adding Canada. A similar offer will be made to UK users – and any EMEA accounts not restricted by data residency rules – starting August 31.

When the trial is over, customers can continue to use the vCloud widgetry in dedicated or multi-tenant environments and pay for compute by the hour or by the month.

Kevin Hanes, the executive director of infrastructure and cloud computing services at Dell, says the exercise is teaching Dell how to sell the cloud. It all depends on getting people to articulate what it is they think they want.

Dell concedes that public clouds – while tempting because of their capacity, agility and lower costs – can be flat-out scary because of security issues.

Hanes makes the point that some private data centers are even scarier than public clouds because of lax security and Dell claims the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services addresses security concerns by offering some of the industry’s most robust security services, including active monitoring from SecureWorks, data encryption services from Trend Micro, and multiple layers of virtual and physical security in Dell data centers. All are included in the trial offer.

The company is playing to research that finds adoption of hybrid and private clouds out ahead of public cloud adoption although Amazon doesn’t seem to be doing too badly.

It also says that 45% of vCloud customers are generally SMBs, 29% are large enterprises and Fortune 500s, and 26% in the public sector

Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is of course enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosted in a secure Dell data center.

Dell can provide the software, hardware and services needed to become an extension of a company’s data center environment and let VMware customers transition existing VMware virtualized workloads to the cloud and manage them using their existing VMware cloud infrastructure.

Dell claims to have a lot of customers already using VMware for virtualization.

The widgetry is built using a common management platform based on open industry cloud standards. With the same VMware cloud infrastructure for connectivity across both the private and public cloud creates a “virtual datacenter” where applications are portable across the clouds.

Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is backed by Dell’s ProSupport, which provides 24x7x365 phone support to help customers minimize downtime or interruption.

Dell says its believes that cloud isn’t a technology, it’s a corporate strategy – and that true business agility comes from an integrated hybrid approach that links applications, data and infrastructure seamlessly wherever they are.

It wants people to build and operate an on-premise private cloud infrastructure, and access secure multi-tenant or community clouds.

Gartner predicts that 50% of the Global 1000 will store customer-sensitive data in the public cloud by 2016.

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Interxion Launches Eucalyptus-based Cloud Test Lab

Interxion Holding NV, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation services, said at Cloud Expo East in New York that it’s launching a new Cloud Test Lab based on Eucalyptus, the widely deployed on-premise cloud platform.

The test lab, based at Interxion’s Frankfurt Data Center Campus, is meant for enterprises and integrators looking to deploy private and hybrid cloud environmentsInterxion.

It will provide a turnkey proof-of-concept environment consisting of industry-leading software, connectivity, systems and colocation capabilities. Users will be able to create Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments to build, develop and test cloud services with what are called best-in-class performance guarantees.

Eucalyptus maintains high-fidelity performance with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API, enabling Cloud Test Lab customers to build and test a hybrid cloud deployment,and move workloads between the test lab and the AWS cloud. The pair figures the model is particularly suited to digital media and gaming companies that start a service in a public cloud environment and later look to move stable workloads into their private cloud to improve performance and lower costs.

Interxion’s cloud marketing manager Jelle Frank van der Zwet said, “Interxion’s Cloud Test Labs are targeted at companies that want to trial a private cloud before migrating it to a fully functioning production environment. Our partnership with Eucalyptus for this Cloud Test Lab takes that one step further, giving systems integrators and enterprises the option to not only test the service in a private cloud environment, but also scale into a public cloud.”

Moving to a hybrid cloud is reportedly the goal of 61% of the companies currently using a public cloud although migrating to a hybrid cloud may present costs and other risks that prevent them from making the move without first testing for functionality.

Starting July 1, companies will be able to sign up online at Interxion’s web site and apply for a free trial of the new Cloud Test Lab.

Connectivity for the test lab will be provided by Atrato IP Networks, a supplier of IP transit, carrier services, remote peering and managed services. The 10-gigabit test lab is built on top of Arista Networks’ switching platform, providing a high-performance, low-latency cloud platform.

Interxion’s Frankfurt Data Center Campus – one of the largest Internet hubs in the world – provides access to more than 400 carriers and ISPs and houses the core infrastructure of the DE-CIX, the world’s largest Internet exchange in terms of peak traffic. A recently opened FRA7 facility adds roughly 1,500 square meters of new equipped data center space to the campus. Interxion figures the site is the logical choice for connectivity-intensive companies, particularly in the digital media, financial services and cloud services.

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ScaleOut StateServer Version 5 Launched

ScaleOut Software, a provider of in-memory data grid (IMDG) solutions, has released ScaleOut StateServer Version 5 with increased scalability and public cloud support. Released in beta earlier this year, StateServer Version 5 also integrates expanded analysis capabilities with property-based parallel query, includes global data integration, and contains other important new features.
Version 5’s new membership architecture significantly advances IMDG scalability. Currently, the use of IMDGs is quickly expanding, and the need for scalability to hundreds of servers has emerged as a requirement to handle increased workloads and to enable the use of IMDGs for real-time data analytics. With Version 5 it is now practical to deploy very large in-memory data grids holding terabytes of data that provide seamless elasticity and have powerful operating characteristics that set a new standard for speed, reliability, and ease of use.

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Deloitte, Embotics, IT Management, Magirus, Private Cloud, Venture Funding, VentureLink LP

Embotics Gets $8.4 Million for Private Cloud Management

Image representing Embotics as depicted in Cru...

Private cloud management vendor Embotics Corporation today announced that it has closed $8.4 million in equity financing. Bringing Embotics’ total financing-to-date to $18 million, this latest round includes $2.5 million from VentureLink LP and $2.5 million from Covington Fund II Inc. (Covington), with the remainder of the funds coming from other private investors. Embotics will use the funding to accelerate global sales and marketing efforts, as well as to hire more software engineers.

This mix of pragmatic growth, strategic marketing and sales investments will build upon the momentum of the past year’s 300 percent growth in sales to further strengthen Embotics V-Commander’s leadership position in the private cloud management market.

“We continue to support Embotics because of its proven track record of successfully developing products that address the problems in virtual data center environments,” said Phil Reddon, managing partner of Covington. “Our experience investing in the virtualization sector, along with Embotics’ success in assisting companies with private cloud management, automation and self-service provisioning, make for a smart business and investment partnership between our two organizations.”

“We have a strong belief in Embotics and its virtualization and cloud management technology. Due to the market need for its solutions, we are confident that Embotics’ business will continue to grow,” said Jim Whitaker, managing partner of VentureLink LP. “Embotics’ clear differentiation in cloud management made its business and this opportunity very attractive to us.”

This round of financing comes on the heels of Embotics’ most successful year to date. The company has experienced 300 percent growth in sales over the past year and 220 percent year-on-year growth in new customers, which now include Bell, Deloitte, Cisco, CSC, Dutch Ministry of Defence, MITRE and numerous universities and public sector departments. In addition, Embotics has signed new channel partnerships, including one with Magirus in Europe.

“We are thrilled to continue our partnership with Covington and to begin our new relationship with VentureLink because of their proven success when it comes to supporting technology innovation,” said Jay Litkey, CEO of Embotics. “The significant increase in our sales demonstrates the opportunity that exists in the market. This financing will enable us to match that opportunity with clearly defined differentiation, corresponding sales and an increased engineering team to support new and existing customer opportunities.”


M&A Activity, Pricing, Retail, Retail Optimization, Return on investment, Revionics

Revionics Acquires Retail Optimization, Inc. to Offer End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solutions

Image representing Revionics as depicted in Cr...

Revionics, Inc. and Retail Optimization, Inc., a provider of cloud-based assortment and micro and macro space optimization solutions, today announced that Revionics has acquired Retail Optimization’s business and related assets. This acquisition extends Revionics’ Life Cycle Price Optimization Solutions with the addition of Retail Optimization’s cloud-based Assortment and Micro and Macro Space Optimization Solutions.

The combination of these two solutions brings all the merchandise planning levers – price, promotion, assortment, space – together to deliver the most powerful End-to-End Merchandise Optimization Solution available in today’s market. Together these solutions help retailers breakdown merchandising organizational siloes and improve demand forecasting to better meet shopper needs and ensure retailers have the RIGHT product, price, promotion, placement and space allocation for optimal financial results and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Offered on a highly scalable, high performance cloud-based platform, the solutions future-proof retailers from Big Data/Fast Data challenges, while providing speed-to-ROI.

“The key to becoming demand driven lies in the ability to effectively manage the intersection of demand, supply and product,” said Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner Research Vice President. “Demand-driven retailers gather information at each customer moment of truth, and utilize five interrelated strategies to translate demand insight into effective response and shaping activities, delivering higher return on assets, more inventory turns and greater revenue growth than their peers.”*

The new Revionics products that are now immediately available from the acquisition include:

  • Revionics® Assortment Optimization
  • Revionics® Macro Space Optimization
  • Revionics® Micro Space Optimization

For more information about these new offerings, please visit: www.revionics.com/merchandise-optimization

Retailers are battling intense competition and price-conscious, informed shoppers that rapidly shift their buying behavior. To compete effectively, retailers need to be more responsive to their shoppers’ product needs ensuring their assortments are tailored to the individual store and space, and are on-shelf available. Doubling in the last decade, out-of-stocks have been one of retailers’ largest headaches and profit loss areas, estimated to be a $107B problem in 2012. Studies show that a typical retailer loses 40% of intended purchases when a shopper encounters an out-of-stock, resulting in a 4% yearly revenue loss.**

According to a 2011 RSR Research study, retailers indicated that out-of-stocks remain a top retail challenge. Assortment and space optimization technologies that can effectively provide simultaneous top down/bottom up recommendations are required to enable a shopper-centric merchandising strategy that protects against out-of-stocks while reducing excess inventory and carryings costs. Improving shelf-availability at a lower cost helps to maximize return on inventory and store real estate while improving customer satisfaction.

“This acquisition underscores our commitment to continually innovate with cloud-based solutions focused on addressing retailers’ most critical business challenges,” said Marc Hafner, Revionics’ President and CEO. “Retail Optimization has the same approach we do, which is to incorporate next-generation predictive analytics and demand-based science into our offerings to ensure our customers have best-of-breed solutions that drive a competitive advantage.”

Leveraged and proven by tier one retailers and manufacturers throughout North America, Retail Optimization’s solutions deliver advanced predictive analytics and demand-based science that incorporates macro and micro spatial constraints and tradeoffs into assortment planning and optimization to determine the right product, placement and space allocation at the store/aisle/category/SKU level.

The solutions bring together otherwise separate but critical information in determining an optimal merchandising execution program – shopper demand information, loyalty data, market data, market basket data, store layouts, planograms, business rules and strategy, and financial objectives. Real-time ‘what-if’ scenario planning capabilities allow retailers to compare and contrast the optimized results of different strategies before selecting one for implementation. Using a proprietary simultaneous ‘top down/bottom up’ optimization approach, retailers can now boost productivity of existing shelf space by determining the highest benefit product mix while simultaneously reducing both the out-of-stocks of that product mix and cutting its inventory requirements.

This acquisition is part of Revionics’ master product roadmap and vision to be the first and only vendor that can offer retailers a next-generation, fully integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization solution, which eliminates the remaining siloes in the merchandising organization by infusing price and promotions into the assortment and space decisions. Bringing assortment, space, and pricing together requires two critical integrations – Space-aware Pricing and Price-aware Assortment. Combined with the existing integration available today, Revionics’ integrated end-to-end merchandise optimization will be able to deliver a Coordinated Master Demand Plan.


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Cloud Expo: McAfee Extends Its Security Leadership in the Cloud

McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company continues to extend its security leadership to the Cloud with new enhancements to its security platform for the Cloud. The McAfee Cloud Security Platform provides a framework that allows organizations to extend their security and policy enforcement into the Cloud by securing the three primary channels of traffic – email, web and identity – delivering a secure and trusted bridge between the enterprise and the Cloud.
The challenge for Cloud-adoption in the enterprise is not only to secure data that resides or travels through the Cloud and prevent sensitive data from leaking, but also to protect their organization, their remote offices and their mobile workers from being attacked by cybercriminals who utilize the Cloud and new technologies – mobile apps and Cloud APIs for example – as new in-roads to unleash malware and conduct targeted attacks on organizations.

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Actifio, Data management, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, VMware

Actifio Announces PAS 5.0, Radically Simple Copy Data Management

Actifio today launched PAS 5.0, a major platform upgrade that extends the company’s signature capability – the ability to recover any application instantly for up to 90 percent less total cost of ownership (TCO) – to large scale enterprises and cloud service providers. This new version of its Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform – a proven virtualized storage solution with more than 100 users worldwide – addresses more deployment scenarios by delivering new cloud-based services including multi-tenancy, networking optimization and reporting capabilities. It also offers improved workflow to accelerate application development lifecycles, now including Oracle, with efficient self-service database cloning to lower test/development storage costs across large enterprises.

PAS has disrupted the enterprise storage industry by transforming its underlying economics with a purpose-built system optimized for the real driver of today’s data storage explosion: copy data. By focusing on smarter and more efficient copy data management – where it is not unusual for a business to maintain 13-120 redundant copies of production data – Actifio provides faster recovery and more reliable data protection for up to 90 percent less cost than traditional backup and recovery point tools.

“The copy data explosion is creating significant problems for the enterprise and the reason is that a whole slew of traditional, expensive and siloed data backup and recovery applications can’t instantly find, manage and protect ever-increasing data assets,” Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “With PAS 5.0, enterprises can create and maintain a single copy of everything in their production environment, eliminating the need for multiple redundant copies. It also recovers data within seconds, which is more important than ever in mission-critical environments.”

Through Actifio’s radical simplification of the copy data management problem, organizations are freed to reinvest dollars often counted in the millions of annually recurring expenses into more strategic IT initiatives driving growth and innovation. PAS users – including Boston University Medical Campus; Audax Group; NaviSite, a Time Warner Cable Company; City of South Portland; and Jones & Bartlett Learning – are already realizing such savings and putting those resources to better use inside their own organizations.

“Finding ways to extend our current IT investments into new areas can make a good technology decision a great technology decision,” said Erik Dubovik, vice president of IT, Audax Group. “This is exactly the case with PAS 5.0 because it lets me simplify copy data management for more of our environment in addition to lowering test and development storage costs by 95 percent.”

“Our work in the fight against disease is essential but it generates unwieldy ‘Big Data’ that’s hard to store, share and protect using conventional tools,” said Dr. John Meyers, assistant professor of medicine and director of technology for the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. “PAS 5.0 will let us recover anything, physical or virtual, across our entire data center – instantly – with a single solution with 80 percent less dedicated backup storage. For us, that will save time, money and trouble – and allow us to focus on the advancement of science.”

This new release coincides with the accelerating worldwide adoption of PAS, which has been installed by hundreds of customers and sold by more than 120 value added resellers worldwide. This momentum has enabled Actifio to double revenues for seven consecutive quarters and expand in key regions across Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Middle East. It has also resulted in tremendous industry-wide acclaim for Actifio, which was recently chosen as one of Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies1 for 2012.

The new PAS 5.0 supports larger deployments and more diverse enterprises while accelerating the test and development process in Oracle environments. Actifio has significantly bolstered the scalability and performance of PAS 5.0 with these powerful new features:

  • 200 percent dedupe capacity increase
  • 2x increase in throughput
  • 10x bandwidth increase with 10GbE
  • 75 percent network bandwidth savings with DeDup Async™ replication
  • Faster on-boarding of remote applications via portable storage
  • Actifio Enterprise Manager – a new software capability that enables
    simple management of large scale PAS deployments

PAS 5.0 gives developers and IT teams copies of production data within minutes to dramatically hasten the arduous testing process. Within Oracle Test and Development environments, PAS 5.0 eliminates more than 95 percent of storage costs by creating multiple copies at a fraction of footprint. Actifio now enables immediate self-service database cloning – taking less than 15 minutes to clone a five terabyte database when it previously took several days using legacy approaches.

For cloud service providers, PAS 5.0 offers a wealth of public and private cloud data management services including backup, remote backup, and test and development. It also provides several new, in-demand features including DeDup Async, secure multi-tenancy and the Actifio Enterprise Reporter.

This new version of PAS now supports a wider variety of environments – including all file system data on Windows and Linux including DAS, NAS and SAN. It provides comprehensive protection and availability for heterogeneous networked and direct-attached server environments, supporting a range of in-band, out-of-band, physical, VMware, structured and unstructured environments.

Additional Multimedia Assets

  • [Video] – Solving
    the Big Data Problem with Actifio
  • [Video] – Boston
    University: Discovering Effective Big Data Management with Actifio
  • [Video] – NaviSite:
    Delivering the Economic Promise of Cloud Backup with Actifio
  • [Video] – Accelerated
    Oracle App Development, Protection & Delivery with Actifio PAS 5.0

PAS 5.0 will be available the week of June 18.  Contact info@actifio.com for more information.


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PEER 1 Hosting Launches Powerful, On-demand HPC Cloud

PEER 1 Hosting’s HPC Self Serve Cloud delivers a flexible and cost-effective high performance computing environment by fusing virtual and physical servers with a private net. The result is a seamless, self-serve solution that is fast, secure and available on-demand.

“In today’s competitive market, businesses with intense graphic processing requirements simply can’t wait months or years for improvements to their in-house IT infrastructure,” said Greg Rusu, General Manager of Zunicore, a division of PEER 1 Hosting. “With PEER 1 Hosting’s new HPC Self Serve Cloud, businesses will benefit from maximum performance on-demand – whenever they need it ­– while managing ever-tightening constraints on business resources and budgets.”

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