ICT services provider niu Solutions on Thursday extends its managed services portfolio with the launch of its cloud integration services. Knitting together multiple cloud products and services from best of breed providers, niu is enabling mid-market organisations to right-source the platforms, processes and technologies that best suit business needs, and delivering them as a single solution with a flexible service wrap.
The new service brings together third party clouds as one unified, independent solution, and tightly integrates this with other products and services, both on and off site, to create a truly tailored approach to application delivery. With the ability to move workloads and apps between any physical, virtual and cloud platform on-demand, niu is providing the agile, scalable and resilient approach to cloud that today’s mid-market organisations demand.

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SoftLayer, a provider of global, Internet-scale cloud infrastructure, has unveiled its new SoftLayer Private Clouds solution that provisions and configures full private cloud deployments on demand. These scalable, secure and high-performance deployments leverage the company’s automated architecture, worldwide data center locations and private network, and customer-controlled infrastructure management system.
“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.”

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Before signing any cloud computing contract, or indeed, renewing his on-premise IT agreement, the CIO should sit down with his CFO to clearly identify and understand the total cost of the IT department to the business, and compare his current solution to a cloud-based alternative. And to complete this cost justification process, the CIO must look at each of the following areas:

The IT Crowd

Whilst a company’s employees are its biggest asset, they are also its biggest cost. And if a business employs a five-strong IT team, when arguably only two are needed, the remuneration required to pay the other three members of staff is simply money down the drain. Generally speaking, up until now, the IT department’s sole responsibility has been to maintain the organisation’s infrastructure. And whether that be to make sure all of the employees’ desktops are running or to resolve any downtime …

Before signing any cloud computing contract, or indeed, renewing his on-premise IT agreement, the CIO should sit down with his CFO to clearly identify and understand the total cost of the IT department to the business, and compare his current solution to a cloud-based alternative. And to complete this cost justification process, the CIO must look at each of the following areas:

The IT Crowd

Whilst a company’s employees are its biggest asset, they are also its biggest cost. And if a business employs a five-strong IT team, when arguably only two are needed, the remuneration required to pay the other three members of staff is simply money down the drain. Generally speaking, up until now, the IT department’s sole responsibility has been to maintain the organisation’s infrastructure. And whether that be to make sure all of the employees’ desktops are running or to resolve any downtime …

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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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 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 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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