Archivo de la categoría: hybrid cloud

Cloudyn, Financing, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis

Cloudyn gets $11 million to take cloud monitoring global

Cloud monitoring service Cloudyn has raised $11 million to fund global expansion, brand raising and service integration from a Series B round of financing.

The latest cash injection comes 15 months after it was awarded for $4 million as investors noted how it had grown to monitor 8% of all Amazon Web Services. With cloud computing operators now generating $321billion a year, according to 451 Research, the monitoring of both infrastructure and platform services (IaaS and PaaS) is becoming increasingly critical.

The popularity of hybrid clouds, which straddle both public and private premises, has added complexity to the management task, creating a need for specialist monitors such as Isreal-based start up Cloudyn. A study conducted by 451 Research predicts that many companies plan to spend up to 50% of their cloud budget on these services.

Since 2014, when Cloudyn received $4 million in funding, the company says it has focused on winning clients among Fortune 1000 enterprises and managed service providers. Cloudyn has tripled its revenue for three consecutive years while doubling its head count. It currently monitors 200,000 virtual machines and 12,000 concurrent applications.

The new round of venture funding was led by Carmel Ventures and included contributions from previous investors Titanium Investments and RDSeed. Ronen Nir, General Partner at Carmel, will join Cloudyn’s board of directors.

There’s growing need for enterprises to perfect their resource allocation, boost performance and cut reducing cloud spend, according to Ronen Nir, the cloud specialist at Carmel Ventures. “Cloudyn’s technology provides meaningful and actionable data which has both operational and financial metrics,” said Nir.

“The funding will allow us to build on this momentum and increase our market share in North America and global markets,” said Sharon Wagner, CEO of Cloudyn.

Enterprise IT, HPE, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Synergy

HPE launches Synergy to help balance hybrid clouds

HPE street logoHewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has launched a new service aimed at helping hybrid cloud users strike the right work-cloud balance.

As companies adopt hybrid clouds, they will become increasingly aware that these half private half public clouds do not provide an instant one size fits all solution and HPE Synergy, it says, will give hybrids the fluidity to adjust.

HPE Synergy will work with existing systems from established brand such as Arista, CapGemini, Chef, Docker, Microsoft, Nvidia and VMware, said HPE in a statement. It will be available to customers and channel partners in around April 2016.

The new HPE Synergy service is an intelligent system with a simplified application programming interface (API). This combination of artificial intelligence and a portal will apparently create liquidity in the computing resources of the public and private cloud, meaning that conditions can be constantly monitored and adjustments constantly calculated. The upshot, according to HPE, is a system that can load balance between its public and private capacities and create the right blend for each set of circumstances.

Synergy creates resource pools comprising computing, storage and fabric networking capacity. These can be calculated for each case, according to its needs and the available resources. This capacity management is achieved through a system that can legislate for physical, virtual and containerised workloads.

According to HPE, Synergy’s software-defined intelligence self-discovers and self-assembles the perfect configuration and infrastructure possible (given the resources available) needed for repeatable frictionless updates. Meanwhile, the single unified API offers the chance to programme and control the bare-metal infrastructure as a service interface. The HPE OneView user interface acts as a window on the entire range of different types of storage that an enterprise might have.

The rationale is that everyone is going to hybrid computing, so it makes sense to help them move their resources across the border between private and public cloud as easily as possible, according to HPE general manager Antonio Neri.

“Hybrids of traditional IT and private clouds will dominate the market over the next five years,” said Neri. Clients will want the speed and agility of the cloud and the reliability and security of their own data centres. “With HPE Synergy, IT can deliver infrastructure as code and give businesses a cloud experience in their data centre,” said Neri.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis

EMC announces new protection for data as cloud hybrids become the norm

Storage vendor EMC has created a new product range to protect data as it moves in and out of the various parts of a hybrid cloud.

On Tuesday it announced news products and services designed to integrate primary storage and data protection systems across private and public clouds. The aim is to combine the flexibility of public cloud services with the control and security of a private cloud infrastructure.

The new offerings carry out one of three functions, characterised as tiering data across diverse storage infrastructures, protecting data in transit to and from the Cloud and protecting data once its static in the cloud.

EMC says that by integrating its VMAX systems through new improvements to its FAST.X tiering systems it can make it cheaper for customers to prioritise their storage according to the expense of the medium. The new additions to the management system have now automated the tiering of public clouds and cater for both EMC and non-EMC storage systems.

The new levels of protection for data, as it travels in and out of the cloud, is provided by

CloudBoost 2.0. This, claims EMC, will work with EMC’s Data Protection Suite and Data Domain so that private cloud users can move data safely to the cheaper media in the public cloud for long-term data retention.

Once resident in the public cloud, data can be better protected now as a result of new Spanning product features, which can cater for different regional conditions across the European Union. Spanning Backup for Salesforce now offers better SaaS data restoration options so it’s easier restore lost or deleted data. Spanning’s new European data destination option will also aid compliance with European data sovereignty laws and regulations. Meanwhile, the Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) offering for private clouds now has better capacity management, secure multi-tenancy and a dense shelf configuration that EMC says will ‘dramatically’ cut the cost of ownership.

Meanwhile, EMC also announced a new generation of its NetWorker data protection software.  NetWorker 9 has a new universal policy engine to automate and simplify data protection regardless of where the data resides.

“Tiering is critical to business in our own data centres,” said Arrian Mehis, general manager of VMware Cloud practice at Rackspace, “and in the data centres of our customers.”

ENDS

Avere, Azure, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Avere-Microsoft joint effort enables Azure hybrids

server rackEnterprise storage vendor Avere Systems is to work with Microsoft so that its Virtual FXT Edge filers can be used with Microsoft Azure.

The hardware maker, which specialises in creating storage devices that caters for hybrid cloud set ups, says the two vendors are collaborating to make it easier and cheaper to get the qualities of the cloud from IT infrastructure that is situated ‘on premise’.

The system aims to simplify the task of creating a system for providing computing power, memory and storage on demand for enterprise IT staff who are not specialists in running cloud services. The Avere technology is designed to make data that is held on network attached storage (NAS) more readily accessible to Azure, so that users don’t experience any latency.

The rationale is that many companies want the liquidity of cloud computing but are not allowed to move their data off the company premises, according to Avere. Its solution was to invent a ‘virtual NAS’ system that is easy for an enterprise IT department employee to install and manage. Meanwhile the system is sophisticated enough to provide multi-protocol file access (including NFS and SMB) and clusters, making it powerful enough to deliver high availability, scalable performance and capacity.

As hybrid cloud systems become the de facto standard for enterprises, it’s important that they are easy enough for IT department employees to manage, according to Nicole Herskowitz, Microsoft Azure’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft Azure.

By adapting the system to work smoothly with Azure, enterprise IT department managers can deploy thousands of Azure HPC instances on-demand to crunch data with low latency and no data migration. This means businesses can tap into hyper-converged infrastructure of Azure with ease, without breaking the bank, Avere claims.

“At Avere, we’ve been dedicated to shattering the myth that organizations can’t have enterprise NAS performance in the public cloud,” said Rebecca Thompson, VP Marketing of Avere Systems, “with Microsoft we’re helping enterprises harness the computing power of Microsoft Azure, which is used by 57% of Fortune 500 companies for big data applications.”

Helion, HP, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Second coming of HP Helion OpenStack will concentrate on hybrids

HP has unveiled its latest incarnation of HP Helion OpenStack with a demonstration of Version 2.0 at the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Tokyo.

After it recently announced the imminent closure of its OpenStack driven public cloud offering, the vendor is thought to be concentrating its efforts to help enterprise clients cope with the challenge of straddling private and hybrid cloud environments. This, according to analyst IDC, is the biggest market in the industry with $118 billion of business being generated in 2015.

HP said it has marshalled all the resources withdrawn from the public cloud and sent them to fight on the Hybrid cloud front. The numbers will help the vendor establish confidence among its enterprise customers, according to Bill Hilf, the general manager of HP’s cloud division. “Customers want to put OpenStack technology into production with the confidence that they are backed by the experience and support of a trusted end-to-end technology partner,” said Hilf.

From a technical perspective, the HP platform will be easier to use, said Hilf. In the new version of Helion, created out of the OpenStack Kilo stable, laying on new infrastructure will be a lot easier for system builders and CIOs, he said. The cost of ownership will be lowered, and projects will advance quicker, thanks to a much more user-friendly administrator interface. The problems of integrating different clouds into one hybrid will be easier to confront now, Hilf told the OpenStack Summit audience, because HP is instilling an internal policy of strict adherence to OpenStack application programme interface (API) standards in a bid to speed up cross-cloud compatibility.

HP also claimed that Helion OpenStack 2.0 will allow customers to create and manage software defined networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-datacentre environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform. This, it claims, removes the boundaries of traditional networking and unlocks the full automation and liquidity needed for running a proper hybrid cloud.

Azure, Dell, Enterprise IT, hybrid cloud, Microsoft, News & Analysis

Dell and Microsoft unveil joint hybrid cloud offering

Dell office logoDell has expanded its cloud portfolio with a new hybrid cloud offering with technology jointly developed with Microsoft. The new system is designed to break down the barriers to cloud adoption and offer a simpler but more secure payment system.

According to Dell’s own research, nine out of ten IT decision makers say a hybrid cloud strategy is important to achieve a Future-Ready Enterprise. The recently unveiled Dell Global Technology Adoption Index revealed that 55% of organisations around the world will use more than one type of cloud. The study also identified cost and security as the biggest barriers to adopting the cloud, with complexity being the biggest blockage associated with hybrid cloud.

The new Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft promises customers an on-premise private cloud with consistent Azure public cloud access in less than three hours. Clients are promised minimised downtime with non-disruptive, fully automated system updates that don’t impose themselves on users when not needed. It also offers workload templates to simplify service provision and governance models. The management of multiple clouds will be simplified by an out-of-the-box integration with Dell Cloud Manager (DCM) and Windows Azure Pack (WAP), Dell says.

The Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft is built around the CPS Standard, which combines optimised Dell modular infrastructure with pre-configured Microsoft CPS software. This will include Microsoft’s software stack and Azure Services for back-up, site recovery and operational insights.

Meanwhile the Dell Cloud Flex Pay programme gives customers a new flexible option to buy Dell’s Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft without making a long-term commitment. Cloud Flex Pay will eliminate the risks of being locked into paying for services that aren’t used fully says Dell.

“Customers tell us their cloud journey is too complex, the cost-risk is too high and control isn’t transparent,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell. “With our new Cloud Flex Pay program, cost-risk is all but eliminated.”

acquisition, Datacentre, Dell, EMC, hybrid cloud, M&A, News & Analysis, VMware

Dells finds $67 billion to acquire EMC and create cloud giant

Dell office logoAs extensively leaked PC and server outfit Dell today announced it will be acquiring storage giant EMC for $67 billion to create a leading player in the datacentre and cloud industries.

Dell is privately held by founder Michael Dell and VCs MSD Partners and Silver Lake. The combined company will remain private, while VMWare, which is majority owned by EMC will remain separate and publicly traded. This deal is the biggest tech M&A deal of all time and the resulting company will be one of the world’s largest privately held ones. Dell only cost $25 billion to take private, so it’s asking for a big contribution from its equity partners.

As with any massive M&A scale and efficiencies will be major strategic benefits, but the two companies were also keen to stress how much they complement each other, with Dell strongest in the SMB and public sector markets while EMC’s strongest area is blue-chip corporates. In terms of product portfolio the narrative inevitably refers frequently to end-to-end solutions and that sort of thing.

“The combination of Dell and EMC creates an enterprise solutions powerhouse bringing our customers industry leading innovation across their entire technology environment,” said Michael Dell. “Our new company will be exceptionally well-positioned for growth in the most strategic areas of next generation IT including digital transformation, software-defined data center, converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, mobile and security.

“Our investments in R&D and innovation along with our privately-controlled structure will give us unmatched scale, strength and flexibility, deepening our relationships with customers of all sizes. I am incredibly excited to partner with the EMC, VMware, Pivotal, VCE, RSA and Virtustream teams and am personally committed to the success of our new company, our customers and partners.”
“I’m tremendously proud of everything we’ve built at EMC – from humble beginnings as a Boston-based startup to a global, world-class technology company with an unyielding dedication to our customers,” said Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC. “But the waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era. I truly believe that the combination of EMC and Dell will prove to be a winning combination for our customers, employees, partners and shareholders.”
It’s not difficult to spot the customary synergies in this deal. When Dell went private it was primarily to allow a complete strategic overhaul away from the voracious quarterly demands of Wall Street. Fundamentally it wanted to move out of the highly commoditised PC market on which it was founded in the 80s, and into core enterprise IT sectors such as servers.

EMC has been in the enterprise data storage game for even longer, is been threatened by pure play cloud providers and needs to move with the times. Just as with Dell, EMC seems to be betting that removing the rabid short-termism that comes with being a public company will allow it the space to do that and, assuming MSD and Silver Lake remain patient the new company should be able to innovate and compete well in the cloud, virtualization and IoT worlds.

“We are excited and honoured to invest in the outstanding businesses built by Joe Tucci and his world-class management team,” said Egon Durban, managing partner of Silver Lake. “We believe the strategic integration of EMC and Dell will generate unparalleled depth and breadth across servers, storage, virtualization and the next era of converged infrastructure, creating a global technology platform poised for sustained long term growth and innovation in the years to come. We are doubling down and increasing our investment in this differentiated market leader for the next paradigm of enterprise computing.”

The plan is for Michael Dell to run the whole company and Tucci to move on when the deal is done. A deal this size will take a while to get approval and complete, so nothing concrete will happen for a few months yet. But when it does, the cloud market will hopefully be more competitive than ever.

HP, HP Helion, hybrid cloud, White Papers

Developing a winning hybrid cloud strategy

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The 2015 BCN Annual Industry Survey revealed two thirds of enterprises plan to implement multiple cloud services over the next 18 months, but adopting a hybrid cloud strategy can be far from straightforward. As a result there is often a gap between intention and strategic readiness that can lead to considerable strain on the IT resources of a company.

This Business Cloud News Whitepaper, in association with HP investigates the factors both driving and inhibiting hybrid cloud deployment, looks at how resources will be managed across platforms and explores the right mix of skills to manage applications, platforms, networks and systems in a hybrid environment.

These are some of the key issues that need to be tackled by CIOs if they are to take a central role in preparing their IT organisations for a hybrid world.

Download the report now to find out what tools, technologies, and skills are required for a successful hybrid cloud strategy.

Fill in this short form to download the Whitepaper – Fields labelled with * are mandatory. By downloading this whitepaper, BCN may pass your details to the sponsor and use your information in future to provide you with targeted BCN promotions. You can opt out of these at any time.








Cleversafe, hybrid cloud, IBM, News & Analysis, Storage, Storage as a Service

IBM acquires storage vendor Cleversafe in hybrid cloud play

IBMEnterprise IT giant IBM has announced it will be acquiring object-based storage software and appliances vendor Cleversafe to boost its storage and hybrid cloud offering.

IBM will integrate the Cleversafe portfolio into its IBM Cloud business unit. The growth in the amount of unstructured data companies are looking to process, coupled with the need to find a balance between on-premise and cloud storage deployments, has created the demand for more storage options and greater flexibility, according to IBM.

“Today a massive digital transformation is underway as organizations increasingly turn to cloud computing for innovative ways to manage more complex business operations and increasing volumes of data in a secure and effective way,” said Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud. “Cleversafe, a pioneer in object storage, will add to our efforts to help clients overcome these challenges by extending and strengthening our cloud storage strategy, as well as our portfolio.”

“IBM is an innovator and leader in cloud and storage and we’re excited about the opportunities that lay ahead once this transaction closes,” said John Morris, President and CEO of Cleversafe. “Together with IBM we can extend our object storage leadership position to address the broadest set of workloads for clients with the most expansive set of object-based solutions.”

The terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but Cleversafe employs 210 people so the size of the acquisition is likely to be in the tens of million dollars.

Incidentally IBM has also announced a new mobile cloud security solution aimed at enterprise, which is a combination of products from both companies.

“More employees are using mobile devices to be more productive. At the same time, data and apps are moving to the cloud. The changes are exciting, but security needs to be top-of-mind,” said Steve McGaw, CMO of AT&T Business Solutions. “Trusted collaborators like IBM are helping us better address changing business models. Together we’re giving options to deliver highly secure mobile access to cloud apps and data.”

Cloud Storage, hybrid cloud, Storage, Storage and Information Management

The Storage (R)Evolution or The Storage Superstorm?

The storage market is changing, and it isn’t changing slowly. While traditional storage vendors still dominate the revenue and units sold market share, IDC concludes that direct sales to hyperscale (cloud scale, rack scale) service providers are dominating sales of storage. Hyperscale is the ability of an architecture to scale appropriately as increased demand is added to the system; hyperscale datacenters are the type run by Facebook, Amazon, and Google. 

Quote to remember:

“…cloud-based storage, integrated systems, software-defined storage, and flash-optimized storage systems <are selling> at the expense of traditional external arrays.”

In my opinion, this is like the leading edge of a thunderstorm supercell or a “Sandy” Superstorm – the changes that are behind this trend will be tornadoes of upheaval in the datacenter technology business. As cloud services implementations accelerate and software defined storage services proliferate, the impact will be felt not only in the storage market, but also in the server and networking markets. These changes will be reflected in how solutions providers, consulting firms, and VAR/DVARs will help the commercial market solve their technology and business challenges.

EMC is still number one by a very large margin, although down 4% year over year. HP is up nearly 9%; IBM and NetApp are way down. EMC overall (with NAS) has 32.4% revenue share; NetApp number 2 with 12.3%. Even with the apparent domination of the storage vendor market, it is obvious to EMC, their investors, and storage analysts everywhere (including yours truly) that the handwriting on the wall says they must adapt or become irrelevant. The list of great technology firms that didn’t adapt is long, even in New England alone. Digital Equipment Corporation is just one example.

Is EMC next? Not if the leadership team has anything to say about it. The recent announcements by VMware (EMC majority owned) at VMworld 2015 show not only the renewed emphasis on hybrid cloud services but also the intensive focus on software defined storage initiatives enabling the storage stack to be centrally managed within the vSphere Hypervisor. VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering are focused on enabling third party data services, such as replication, as part of vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, the framework for software-defined storage services in vSphere.

EMC is clearly doubling down on the move to Hybrid Clouds with their Federation EMC Hybrid Cloud, as well as all the VMware vCloud Air initiatives. GreenPages is exploring and advising their customers on ways to develop a hybrid cloud strategy, and this includes engaging the EMC FEHC team as well as the VMware vCloud Air­ solution. EMC isn’t the only traditional disk array vendor to explore a cloud strategy, but it seems to be much further along than the others.

Software Defined Storage is the technology to keep an eye on. DataCore and FalconStor software dominated this space before it was even called SDS by default – there were no other SDS solutions out there. EMC came back in a big way with ViPR, arguably the most advanced “true” software defined storage solution in the market place now. Some of the other software-only vendors surging in this space, where software manages advanced data services across different arrays, like provisioning, deduplication, tiering, replication and snapshots, include Nexenta, Hedvig and others. Vendor SDS is a valid share of the market and is enabled by storage virtualization solutions by IBM, NetApp and others. Once “virtualized,” the vendor software enables cross platform data services. Other software-enabled platforms for advanced storage solutions include Coho Data and Pivot3. Hyperconverged solutions such as VSAN, SimpliVity or Nutanix offer more options to new datacenter solutions that don’t include a traditional storage array. “Tier 2” storage platforms such as Nexsan can benefit from this surge because, while the hardware platforms are solid and well-built, those companies haven’t invested as much or as long in the add-on software services that NetApp (for example) has. With advanced SDS solutions in place, this tier of storage can step up with a more “commodity” priced solution for advanced storage solutions.

In addition to the Hybrid Cloud diversification strategy, EMC and other traditional storage manufacturers are keeping a wary eye on the non-traditional vendors such as Nimble Storage, which is offering innovative and easy-to-use alternatives to the core EMC market. There are also a myriad of startups developing new storage services such as Coho, Rubrik, Nexenta, CleverSafe and others. The All Flash Array market is exploding with advanced solutions made possible by the growing maturity of the flash technology and the proliferation of new software designed to leverage the uniqueness of flash storage. Pure Storage grabbed early market share, followed by XtremIO (EMC), but SolidFire, Nexenta, Coho and Kaminario have developed competitive solutions that range from service provider oriented products to software defined storage services leveraging commodity flash storage.

 

What does this coming superstorm of change mean to you, your company, and your data center strategy? It means that when you are developing a strategic plan for your storage refreshes or datacenter refreshes, you have more options than ever to reduce total cost of ownership, add advanced data services such as disaster recovery or integrated backups, and replace parts (or the whole) of your datacenter storage, server and networking stacks. Contact us today to continue this discussion and see where it leads you. 

 

 

 

 

 

By Randy Weis, Principal Architect