Archivo de la categoría: hybrid cloud

hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, VMware hybrid cloud

VMware’s new launches target hybrid cloud and software defined data centres

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation giant VMware has announced two new updates which promise to strengthen its management of the hybrid cloud and of hyperconverged software.

The new version of VMware vRealize Suite is purpose-built for the Hybrid Cloud claims the vendor. Meanwhile, in another release, the new Virtual SAN 6.2 could cater for all-flash hyper-converged systems to turbo-drive cloud computing, creating new options for data deduplication, data compression and erasure coding for as little as one dollar per usable gigabyte.

The new VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7 promises to address intelligent operations, infrastructure modernisation and DevOps challenges. VMWare claims the vRealize Suite manages all the computing, storage, network and application services across hybrid cloud environments. The DevOps-ready IT, for example, lets IT teams build a cloud for development teams that has a complete application stack and can support developer choice in the form of both API and GUI access to resources. The possibilities are widened by continuous delivery of Code Stream, a feature which speeds up application delivery.

Meanwhile, in the engine room of the cloud, VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 creates the capacity for intelligent workload placement and tight integration with VMware’s vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler.

Meanwhile, it has carried out new engineering improvements on the high performance infrastructure for the software-defined data centre (SDDC). The key to this improvement is the VMware Virtual SAN technology which has been sold to 3,000 enterprise data centre customers in the 21 months since its initial release.

The new hyper-converged software created by a blend of VMware vSphere, Virtual SAN and vCenter Server converts Intel based x86 servers and direct-attached storage into unified, simple and ‘robust’ units of high performance computing infrastructure, VMWare claims. This slashes the hard and software costs and the management complexity while boosting performance, VMWare claims.

“VMware’s hyper-converged software is gaining customer traction due to its simple, cost-effective and high-performance architecture,” said Yanbing Li, general manager of Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware. Virtual SAN 6.2 delivers up to ten times the efficiency, he claimed.

hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Oracle, Research

Cloud merits acknowledged but adoption concerns linger – Oracle report

cloud question markCloud technology is almost universally acknowledged for its catalysing effect on invention and customer retention, according to new research from Oracle. However, there are still major barriers to adoption.

In Oracle’s study 92% of its sample group of industry leaders testified that the cloud enables them to innovate faster. It also helps companies keep afloat better, with nearly three quarters (73%) reporting that using cloud technology has helped them to retain existing customers more effectively. The cloud also comes out well as a strategic weapon, with 76% of enterprises saying that the newer, more flexible model for handling information helps them to win new customers.

However, the study conducted for Oracle by IDG Connect indicates there is much room for improvement in the adoption of cloud computing. Only half (51%) of the survey sample say their businesses will have reached cloud maturity within two years. According to an Oracle statement, this is a consequence of current uncertainty about moving to the cloud.

Though a compromise between privately owned IT systems and publicly available services is seen as the obvious choice, there are grave concerns about hybrid cloud adoption. Instead of getting the best of both worlds with a hybrid system, many users (60%) reported that the thought of managing multiple IT architectures was off putting. There are fears about the reliability and availability of network bandwidth, which was cited by 57% of the survey as a barrier to adoption. The lack of trust in the relationship with IT suppliers was also a major concern with 52% of the survey sample. Meanwhile those building private cloud infrastructures continue to see security as the prime concern, according to Oracle.

Attitudes could change, but that involves converting the considerable opposition of cloud-sceptics.  There are still significantly large numbers of IT experts who say that winning over key business decision makers is their biggest challenge. This was identified as an issue for 29% of those surveyed.

Johan Doruiter, Oracle’s Senior VP of Systems in EMEA, remained optimistic. “As cloud rapidly reaches maturity, we are seeing a shift in how enterprises perceive the chief benefits and barriers to adoption,” he said. “Traditional concerns have been replaced by the operational worries.”

Cirba, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis

Cirba expands its infrastructure management optimiser to the public cloud

CloudInfrastructure management vendor Cirba has announced a new workload routing and management option for hybrid clouds. The Cirba infrastructure resource juggling service can now support cloud systems from Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM SoftLayer, allowing users to extend their internal management to straddle the public cloud too.

Cirba’s service provides the decision control points which automatically determine where applications can safely run in hybrid environments. It decides where each task runs by conducting detailed analysis of each application’s requirements. It then calculates how best to match them against the available security, cost and technical resources available across. Now the service extends beyond the private infrastructure to include the public clouds.

Though originally designed as an internal system for juggling resources more efficiently, from Thursday Cirba is offering new integrations to Azure, AWS and SoftLayer in order to bring centralised management for enterprise applications across hybrid cloud environments.

Cirba claims that customers will now have extended visibility into applications that are hosted externally. This means the client’s can judge whether their cloud vendor is apportioning the appropriate level of resources, it claims. Clients will also be able to assess these applications against on-premise hosting environments in order to determine whether they should be brought back in-house, claims Andrew Hillier, co-founder and CTO of Cirba. “Without analytics, organisations cannot automate their processes nor can they effectively determine how to meet application requirements without risk or excessive cost,” said Hillier.

Cirba says that the new additions mean that it can now support a range of system that already including internal versions of VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM PowerVM on AIX and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation-based environments.

In June 2016 Cirba aims to update its Reservation Console in order to create a centralised policy-based control system for hybrid clouds.

Horizon, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, VMware

VMware broadens its Horizon 7 and Horizon Air

VMWare campus logoCloud infrastructure vendor VMware has announced that VMware Horizon 7 and VMware Horizon will be simpler to set up, faster, easier to maintain and more flexible.

Version 7 of Horizon promises new features that VMware describes under the headings of just in Time Delivery, Blast Extreme, application life cycle management, smart policies and Integration with VMware Workspace ONE.

The new Just in Time Delivery option, a product of Instant Clone Technology (formerly Project Fargo) means managers can provision 2,000 desktops in under 20 minutes. Blast Extreme offers options for GPU off-load to increase scale and mobile network support. The new Application Lifecycle efficiencies promise to cut storage and operational costs by up to 70% and slash the time needed for managing images by up to 95%. Smart Policies and integration with VMware Workspace ONE will both improve management of internal resources.

Meanwhile VMware’s Horizon Air has a hybrid-mode that will pave the way for a simple out of the box set-up, the vendor says. Having achieved that, users can create and scale desktops faster, with new Instant Clone technology integrated with VMware’s App Volumes and User Environment Management technologies.

Another major advantage, according to VMware, is greater hybrid cloud flexibility. In practical terms this will mean that applications and desktop workloads can be moved back and forth from on-premises data centres to the cloud more effectively. The process will be managed from a consistent Cloud Control Plane and will support the use of the cloud as a primary system for everyday work, or as a secondary use case for desktop bursting or disaster recovery.

VMware Horizon 7 and VMware Horizon Air with Hybrid-mode are expected to be generally available before March 2016. VMware Horizon 7 pricing starts at $250 per user for on-premises perpetual licenses. VMware Horizon Air Hybrid-mode cloud subscription pricing starts at $16 per user per month for named users and $26 per user per month for concurrent connections.

“VMware Horizon Air will provide our team with the opportunity to scale desktops on an as needed basis with access to VMware’s public cloud in both Europe and the United States,” said user Jason Bullock, executive director of IT global infrastructure and support at BDP International.

Catalogic Software, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis

IBM and Catalogic Software combine to slash costs of data management

IBM and Catalogic Software have jointly launched a new set of systems which combine Catalogic’s copy data manager ECX with IBM’s storage offerings, in a bid to help clients trim the excessive costs of duplicate data.

The objective is to make DevOps and Hybrid Cloud initiatives easier and less wasteful for IBM clients by automating storage and data management, creating self-service options and creating access to Catalogic software though IBM’s RESTful API management.

Catalogic’s ECX is described as a virtual appliance that runs on a client’s existing infrastructure and acts as a lever of power over storage controllers, storage software systems and hypervisors. IBM claims it has validated the system through months of testing and the two can work in tandem to improve the operations of the core data centre. The combination of the two creates new tools that are necessary for supporting new workload environments and use cases, according to a Catalogic statement.

Today’s core data centre architecture and associated processes don’t lend themselves to agility and flexibility, though they are reliable and secure. Catalogic’s ECX has given IBM a method of creating the former, without sacrificing the latter, said IBM. The key to this is making the storage infrastructure more flexible so that data can be virtualised and kept in one place rather than endlessly replicated for a variety of different project teams. One of the benefits is that live environments can support key IT functions that rely on copies of production data without having to massively expand the data footprint. ECX and IBM’s service services can jointly create a culture of

elasticity and sharing of cloud resources across a variety of functions including Disaster Recovery, Test and Development, Analytics and other departments.

The lower operating costs of cloud resources and saved manual efforts through ECX’s cloud automation will bring up to a 300% return on investment, claims IBM.

Among the systems that ECX can now combine with are IBM’s Storwize family of hybrid flash/HDD systems, the SAN Volume Controller, FlashSystem V9000, Hybrid Cloud Operations with IBM SoftLayer and IBM Spectrum Protect.

“Copy data management can significantly improve data access and availability and create remarkable cost savings,” said Bina Hallman, VP of IBM Storage and Software Defined Systems.

hybrid cloud, Microsoft Azure, News & Analysis

Microsoft unveils new Azure Stack migration strategy

Microsoft is to build its Azure Stack by increments on a foundation of consistency and continuity, it has pledged. The software turned cloud service vendor has blogged about the next move in its hybrid cloud strategy. Later this week it will offer the first technical preview of the new Microsoft Azure Stack.

In deference to its increasing numbers of Azure users who are nervous of committing to the public cloud, Microsoft announced it will provide incremental upgrades and changes on a foundation of continuity and consistency. While Azure Stack will use identical application programming interfaces (APIs) to the ones that reach into Microsoft Azure, developers are to be given guidance on creating .Net or open source apps that can straddle both public and private cloud. Meanwhile, according to Mike Neil, Microsoft’s enterprise Cloud VP, IT professionals can transform on-premises data centre resources into Azure IaaS/PaaS services without losing their powers of management and automation.

Microsoft is seeing nearly 100,000 new Azure subscriptions every month but many enterprises fear going fully public because of the data sovereignty and regulatory issues, Neil said. Microsoft’s strategy is to work around a client base with one foot in the public cloud and one on-premises. It will do this by providing a consistent cloud platform that spans hybrid environments. In a series of Technical previews, starting on Friday 29th of January, Microsoft is to show how Azure Stack inventions for the hyperscale data centre can be layered onto the hybrid cloud.

Since the APIs are the same, in future apps can be written once and deploy to Azure and Azure Stack and use the Azure ecosystem to jumpstart their Azure Stack development efforts. The same management, DevOps and automation tools will apply said Neil. The application model is based on Azure Resource Manager, so developers can take the same declarative approach to applications, regardless of whether they run on Azure or Azure Stack. Tooling-wise, developers can use Visual Studio, PowerShell, as well as other open-source DevOps tools, creating the same end user experiences as in Azure, Neil said.

A series of technical previews will be the vehicle for adding services and content such as OS images and Azure Resource Manager templates. “Azure has hundreds of applications and components on GitHub and as the corresponding services come to Azure Stack, users can take advantage of those as well,” said Neil, who disclosed that open source partners like Canonical are contributing validated Ubuntu Linux images to make open source applications work in Azure Stack environments.

The first Technical Preview of Azure Stack on Friday, January 29 will be followed by a web cast on February 3rd by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and Chief Architect of Enterprise Cloud Jeffrey Snover.

Actifio, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis

Actifio claims Global Manager will slash costs of managing hybrid cloud data

cloud storm rainVirtualisation company Actifio claims its new Global Manager can create the same savings for hybrid cloud managers that its earlier systems achieved in product data management.

Actifio’s virtualisation technology inventions aim to cut costs by preventing the endless, expensive replication of massive data sets by each different DevOps team across an enterprise. The new Actifio Global Manager (AGM) offers enterprises and service providers a way to manage data more efficiently across the full lifecycle of applications in hybrid cloud environments.

Actifio claims it can scale thousands of application instances associated with petabytes of data deployed across private data centres, hybrid and public clouds. After an early access programme with 100 beta testers, Actifio has launched AGM on general release, targeting web-scale environments.

Users are evolving to multi-site, multi-appliance environments and use public cloud infrastructure like Amazon AWS as part of their data centre. At the same time data migration, load balancing and migration become increasingly fraught and expensive, according to David Chang, Actifio’s Senior VP of Solutions Development.

The new AGM system will allow companies to save on storage by obviating the need for petabytes of duplicated data, improving on service levels, cutting capital and operational expenses through software defined storage, load balancing, simplifying capacity management, deepening the integration of systems and giving managers a better view of their virtualised estate, according to Actifio.

By helping clients to ‘scale up from one to multiple instances’, Actifio said, its AGM system will manage thousands of applications, petabytes of data, independent of hardware infrastructure or physical location. This, it claims, makes for a painless application data lifecycle across private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructures.

After validation testing of Actifio Global Manager and its RESTful API this year, beta tester Net3 Technologies, a cloud service provider, is building it into its automation platform. “Now we can scale and manage the data infrastructure of clients more easily,” said Jeremy Wolfram, Director of Development at Net3 Technologies.

“Actifio Global Manager unshackles the infrastructure dependency and makes it faster and easier for our largest customers and service provider partners to access and manage their data at global web-scale,” said Actifio founder Ash Ashutosh.

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, NFV, Virtualisation

New Service Director from HPE could simplify hybrid cloud management for telcos

HPE street logoHPE claims its new Service Director system could put comms service providers back in control of their increasingly complex hybrid computing estates. It aims to achieve this by simplifying the management of network function virtualisation (NFV).

HPE claims that Service Director will automate many of the new management tasks that have been created by the expanding cloud environment and provide a simpler system of navigation for all the different functions that have to be monitored and managed. The new offering builds on HPE NFV Director’s management and orchestration (MANO) capacity and bridges existing physical and new virtualized environments.

As virtualisation has expanded it has extended beyond the remit of current generations of operations support systems (OSS) and the coexistence of physical and virtual infrastructure can introduce obstacles that slow the CSPs down, HPE said. It claims the Service Director will help CSPs roll out new offerings quicker.

The main benefits of the system outlined by HPE are automation of operations, shared information, flexible modelling of services and openness. With a single view of the entire infrastructure and dynamic service descriptors, it aims to make it easier to spot problems and create new services, HPE claims. As an open system the Service Director platform will have interfaces to any new third party software defined networking controllers and policy engines.

Since there is no such thing as a green field NFV set up there has to be a system to rationalise the legacy systems and the new virtualised estate, said David Sliter, HPE’s comms VP. “Service Director is a transformational change in the relationship between assurance and fulfilment, allowing the OSS resource pool to be treated, automated and managed as a service,” said Sliter.

The telecoms industry needs an omnipotent service orchestration system that can span every existing NFV MANO and OSS silo, according to analyst Caroline Chappell, principal analyst of NFV and Cloud for Heavy Reading. A model-driven, fulfilment and assurance system like Service Director could speed up the delivery of services across a hybrid physical and virtual network, Chappell said.

HPE Service Director 1.0 will be available worldwide in early 2016, with options for pre-configured systems to address specific use cases as extensions to the base product, starting with HPE Service Director for vCPE 1.0.

Accelerite, Citrix, hybrid cloud, M&A, News & Analysis

Citrix to sell CloudPlatform and CloudPortal to Accelerite, improve XenApp

CitrixCitrix has announced it will sell its CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager systems to infrastructure software vendor Accelerite. The acquisition is expected to close in Q1 2016, subject to conditions.

Accelerite, a subsidiary of Persistent Systems, has recently acquired cloud and virtualisation product lines from HP, Intel and Openwave. Citrix will work with Accelerite to build on CloudPlatform integrations with XenServer, NetScaler and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

The Apache-based CloudPlatform is used to create and run public and private cloud infrastructure services. CloudPortal Business Manager automates provisioning, billing, metering and user management. Its strength is that it allows service providers to deliver a range of cloud services while integrating with existing business, operations and IT systems, according to Nara Rajagopalan, CEO of Accelerite,

The new additions give Accelerite a more complete portfolio and it can now fill the gap in end-to-end life cycle management for public and private clouds, it said. Despite the increasing adoption of container technology in the cloud industry many enterprises cannot deploy and manage them. CloudPlatform’s simplicity and large customer base provide a means of addressing this emerging shortfall as the industry evolves into hyper-convergence, Rajagopalan said in a statement.

“Citrix will work closely with Accelerite to build on CloudPlatform integrations with our key offerings that enable the secure delivery of apps and data,” said Steve Wilson, the VP of Core Infrastructure at Citrix.

Citrix will continue to work with both the OpenStack and CloudStack open source communities to optimise its NetScaler, XenServer and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

Meanwhile, at the Citrix Summit 2016 in Las Vegas Citrix announced that new releases of XenApp and XenDesktop are available for download. The new 7.7 XenDesktop release is a product of collaboration between Citrix and Microsoft and it promises new cloud provisioning and collaboration options. The new versions will improve the flexibility of the FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) across multiple geographical locations, Citrix claims.

Among the promised improvements are a fully native Skype for Business user experience within a virtual app or desktop, as well as high-quality voice and video. The new versions will make it easier to set up virtual desktops in Microsoft Azure by using the Machine Creation Services (MCS) feature of XenApp and XenDesktop. Citrix Provisioning Services will also now supports the on-premises provisioning of Windows 10 virtual desktops, it claims.

hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Xangati

New Xangati platform gets automated storm remediation

cloud storm rainCalifornia based network performance manager Xangati has launched a new automated system for boosting hybrid cloud output.

The Xangati Virtual Appliance (XVA) system has an automatic mechanism for storm remediation for virtualised and VDI infrastructures. It can also support Microsoft Hyper-V environments natively. By integrating with ServiceNow the XVA system can also share trouble tickets and storm alerts with the ServiceNow ITSM (IT Service Management) portal.

As hybrid clouds become increasingly popular companies are discovering that performance can be slowed down by a variety of cloud components and it is proving difficult to identify the root causes, the vendor said. XVA will help them to pinpoint whether the trouble is being caused by created storage, CPU, memory or boot storms. The new Xangati XVA will allow virtualisation system administrators to address CPU and memory performance issues by automatically balancing workloads across vCenter hosts, it said.

The system provides real time key performance data, capacity planning and cost optimisation. Xangati’s Efficiency Index measures the extent to which available CPU, memory, storage and network interface capacity is being used.

The new functions will allow service providers to see how well their systems are running, give them a quicker resolution and improve their chances of meeting service level agreements, said Atchison Frazer, VP of marketing at Xangati. Other features within the offering include support for NetApp Storage Systems, XenApp and Splunk.

“Xangati is moving towards an automated response to off complex degrading conditions,” said Frazer. Xangati is a virtual appliance that runs on VMware vSphere. The word Xangati is derived from the Sanskrit word Sangathi, which translates as “coming together to know more about ourselves.”