UK Web Host UK2 Offers Free Web Analytics, SEO Tools with Cloud Hosting

UK web hosting provider UK2.NET announced earlier this week it is offering free web analytics and SEO tools to any customer purchasing either one of its Business or Business Cloud hosting packages.

The move is aimed at improving business’ SEO and educating companies on understanding how their customers interact with their website.

By offering these free value-added tools, which UK2 says are valued at $79 a year, the company is able to differentiate their hosting services from their competitors.

Stats 2 is a UK2-developed web analytics tool that helps users monitor their Internet traffic and records crucial data such as bounce rate, time spent on pages and click-through rate.

Using this information, businesses can develop a better understanding of how their customers behave and tailor their sites to ensure a higher conversion rate.

Additionally, seeing what customers spend time looking at can also help a business’ product development by showing what sort of products customers are looking for.

SEO Tools is a bundle of 77 professional tools that help users to analyze and monitor a site’s search engine optimization, as well as suggest improvements, monitor the site’s rankings, and keep tabs on its link profile.

UK2 is also waiving its usual one-off charge for Facebook integration, enabling businesses to link their website to social media for free, allowing greater customer outreach and interaction.

“We’re seeing that often our business customers are looking for more than just a hosting package,” says Martin Baker, managing director of UK2, “they want tools that are going to help them grow their online business in real, practical ways. By including these tools for free in our business hosting packages, we hope that UK2 customers will find themselves better equipped to understand their customers and develop their websites accordingly.”

Earlier this year, UK2.NET was hit by a major DDoS attack.

Talk back: Are you currently offering your customers free SEO or web analytics tools with your cloud hosting packages? Do you think that this is something that will benefit your customers? Let us know in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/uk-web-host-uk2-offers-free-web-analytics-seo-tools-with-cloud-hosting

Dell Executive Confirms Australian Data Center Close to Completion

IT solutions provider Dell Australia confirmed in a quarterly business briefing Friday that its planned Australian data center won’t be a “long time away”, according to a report by Computer World.

Australia continues to be highly active in data center builds in recent months, with data center builds by Rackspace, Amazon, and iseek Communications springing up in the past year.

Dell first revealed back in March of 2011 its plans for a massive global data center buildout spanning 10 countries, starting with a new data center in Australia.

The data center buildout initiative would support the demands for its cloud computing services.

Then in August 2011, New Zealand managing director Joe Kremer said that the company was currently investigating sites for the data center, although he would not specify what state of the data center location.

He also confirmed that Dell was hiring staff for a cloud services team, and that the company would use the data center to provide colocation, web hosting, and cloud-based on-demand storage services.

Dell has launched data center capabilities in Massachusetts, US and Slough, UK, with construction on the Australian data center nearing completion, said Kremer.

The data center will offer Dell’s own hardware as well as giving those customers the option to relocate their non-Dell hardware.

Dell will offer the same service levels to both kinds of customers so long as they are within the capabilities of rival hardware, said Kremer.

Last week, Dell launched Cloud Dedicated Services, its new and expanded cloud services that enable customers to select solutions that will help drive business results.

Talk back: Are you currently offering data center services in Australia? Are you seeing demand for services there? Let us know in the comments.

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2. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/dell-executive-confirms-australian-data-center-close-to-completion

Box CEO Aaron Levie Talks About His Love/Hate Relationship With Microsoft

Aaron Levie grew up in Microsoft's backyard.

Today, Box's young CEO faces a strange problem with Microsoft. Redmond is Box's biggest competitor AND one its most important partners.

Box's mainstay is a secure file-sharing and collaboration product. One of Microsoft's key products is SharePoint, which is, yes, a file-sharing and collaboration product that's a key part of Microsoft's Office suite.

SharePoint software can run on site or on the cloud, while Box is cloud-only. But many times, Box and Microsoft compete head-to-head for enterprise deals.

Yet Microsoft's Windows and Windows Phone teams are buddies with Box, the maker of an app that's important for their platforms.

In a recent interview with BI, Levie talked about his relationship with Microsoft and if it worries him.

You say you've been winning a lot of enterprise customers because they can now build custom apps on Box. They choose Box instead of, say, Office 365, Microsoft's cloud version of Office?

A lot of this is impossible with Office 365—not really impossible, but we are farther ahead of the curve. I invite you to go through Apple's iOS app store and find all the apps that integrate with Office 365. It's not going to be a long list. There's probably 75 to 100 apps today that integrate with Box.

One of the reasons Microsoft bought Yammer was to teach it about the freemium model. Can a classic enterprise company learn how to do viral/freemium?

Yes. Absolutely. Mostly because I think anything's possible. But there are a lot of caveats. A company starts to form a certain kind of DNA, a certain way of operating. You begin to develop processes and you begin to develop values as an organization that mean you're going to be really good at one kind of sales model, or development model and not so good at another. That's just the nature of building competencies.

Microsoft and a lot of enterprise software companies have built a competency in large sales forces, large channel relationships, very significant and strong relationships with CIOs, but not with the end user and not with the sort of bottoms-up approach to how enterprise software is delivered today.

Yammer has a chance to inject more of that DNA into Microsoft. A lot of this will come down to the motivation of both parties.

We have a hybrid model. The reason we have 12 million users is that we a freemium service and people spread it within an organization. Then we have an inside sales force.

What if Yammer really teaches them how to do create free, viral enterprise apps? Does Microsoft concern you?

Totally. Microsoft is our No. 1 competitor. At the same time, its also a significant partner. That's the interesting thing about how the ecosystem is changing. You end up competing in one product area and you end up partnering with another.  It's difficult to balance that.  We work with the Windows Phone team and the Windows 8 team, but we obviously don't work with the SharePoint team.

You grew up in Washington State, right?

Yes. Seattle. I was right underneath Microsoft the whole time.

Did you ever want to work for Microsoft?

No.

Don't miss: One Of The Valley's Most Successful College Dropouts Isn't A Fan Of Other People Dropping Out Of College

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/box-ceo-aaron-levie-microsoft-relationship-2012-8

The Next Hot Tech IPO Is Just About To Happen: Workday Finally Files

In a season of hot enterprise IPOs, one of the most anticipated IPOs is finally rolling: Workday.

Workday makes cloud software that helps enterprise do human resources functions. Its founders have a storied history with their arch-rival, Oracle.

Workday filed for a $400 million offering, though that's only a placeholder amount.

The S1 document filed with the Security and Exchange Commission also doesn't disclose how many shares it will sell or at what price or the founders plans to sell shares.

It did reveal the founders' stakes. David Duffield has been granted 4.3 million shares in options at a price of $1.30 each. Aneel Bhusri has been granted 1.9 million shares at an option price of 65 cents a piece.

Workday was founded in 2005 by billionaire  shortly after Larry Ellison snapped up his company, PeopleSoft, in the nastiest hostile takeover in tech history.

It's raised $175 in venture funds including investments from Michael Dell and Amazon's Jeff Bezos and it was expected to go public this summer as early as June.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/workday-files-ipo-2012-8

GSA Switches Over to Cloud Email Services for Federal Government

The US General Services Administration announced on Thursday that it is now offering cloud based email services, making it easier for government agencies to move to the cloud.

The move to cloud based email services supports the Obama Administration’s mandates and initiatives to bring cloud services into the federal government and reduce federal data centers, which ultimately saves taxpayer dollars.

The government’s move to the cloud will lower the cost of email by up to 50 percent annually and saves $1 million for every 7,500 email boxes.

As part of this massive cloud initiative, the Federal government is also currently in the midst of consolidating its data centers as it works towards the goal of closing at least 1,200 data centers by 2015.

The GSA has rewarded a total of 17 companies through 20 blanket purchase agreements that are valued at $2.5 billion to provide federal, state, local and tribal governments with access to cloud based email services.

The cloud companies that were rewarded the contracts are Accenture Federal Services, Autonomic Resources, CGI Federal, Ciracom, Computer Sciences, Dell Federal Systems, DLT Solutions, General Dynamics Information Technology, Harris IT Services, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Onix Networking, Science Applications International, Smartronix, SRA International, Technosource, and Unisys.

“GSA has added another excellent option for agencies looking to rapidly move their email to the cloud to save time, resources and taxpayer dollars,” said Mary Davie, acting commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service. “Our innovative cloud solutions are another example of how GSA offers the best value, low cost services that help agencies serve the American people.”

The agreement allows agencies to purchase a range of cloud email services, including email as a service (billed per mailbox), Office automation, electronic records management, migration services, and integration services, with security requirements at the FISMA moderate-impact level (and FISMA high-impact level for the Secret Enclave delivery model).

They will deliver these services via four cloud models, including government community cloud, private cloud, secret enclave cloud, and public cloud.

Last year, GSA was the first federal agency to move to a cloud based email system, saving $2 million dollars to date. Over the next five years, GSA will see another 50 percent savings with an estimated $15 million reduction in IT costs.

In June, the GSA officially launched its FedRAMP program to standardize security assessments of cloud products and services across the government.

Talk back: How do you feel about the government’s decision to switch over to cloud email services? What other areas do you think that government agencies could move its data over to the cloud? Let us know in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/gsa-switches-over-to-cloud-email-services-for-federal-government

TextDrive Separates from Joyent to Continue Lifetime Web Hosting Deal

Cloud services provider Joyent has reversed its decision to discontinue its TextDrive lifetime shared hosting service on Thursday.

In a note to customers, TextDrive founder Dean Allen says TextDrive will be relaunched as a separate hosting company on November 1. TextDrive will be staffed, and funded by him, according to the note.

Joyent announced its decision to discontinue its lifetime hosting deal two weeks ago, and was met with a lot of criticism from customers who believed the deal to be indefinite.

“Honestly, we did a very rational, non-emotional look at that business and decided to exit that effectively,” Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman said in a phone interview with the WHIR last week. “The response has been more than I thought it would be in that people are still very passionate about it, they’re still not going away and so, I’ve been working the last few days around likely reneging on our reneging.”

“It’s one of these things where in all seriousness you sort of look and you say well one option is to go ahead and just  essentially end of life this line of business, the other option is we put in some extra effort and capital and we get it standing back up on its feet the right way so it is a self-sustaining business,” Hoffman says. “Then we figure out how to have that run in a way where everyone gets what they want. The truth is is we took the easy route out first, and the feedback from everyone was basically, this is bullshit.”

In 2005, Joyent was operating under the name TextDrive, and launched lifetime access to web hosting for an initial fee of $499. The initial fee was used as an investment into help kickstart the web hosting company.

TextDrive was initially supposed to be discontinued on October 31, 2012, but it looks like the transition to the new company will happen immediately on November 1 without interruption to customers’ service. More details of the migration can be found on Joyent’s website.

Talk back: Have you ever reversed a decision after negative input from customers? What do you think of TextDrive being spun off as a separate company? Let us know in a comment.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/textdrive-separates-from-joyent-to-continue-lifetime-web-hosting-deal

NetHosting Improves Security, Performance with Updated Cloud Hosting Solutions

Cloud hosting provider NetHosting announced on Thursday it has updated its cloud virtual hosting solution to improve overall security and performance.

The web host has updated the hardware and software components of the cloud virtual hosting plans, as well as the cPanel administration tools.

Constantly updating hardware without risking unnecessary customer downtime can be a critical challenge for web hosts. To resolve this issue, NetHosting Dedicated Experts gradually migrated customer virtual servers to newer and more powerful hardware over the past four to six months, which will result in less downtime and less lag for cloud virtual hosting customers.

NetHosting technicians have also finished installing CloudLinux on all cloud virtual hosting servers, which prevents shared server tenants from abusing or monopolizing server resources from other shared server tenants.

The installation of CloudLinux also improves security for customers. In the event that one account on a shared server gets infiltrated by a hacker, CloudLinux can isolate that instance and prevent a virus or hacking to spread to other accounts.

NetHosting is now offering Installatron for all of its virtual hosting customers, enabling then to more easily install and manage applications on their shared server instance.

“Every single customer is important to NetHosting, no matter if they have one cloud server with us or dozens of dedicated servers,” said NetHosting CEO Lane Livingston. “We saw an opportunity to cost effectively improve the hosting experience for our Cloud Virtual Hosting customers and we jumped on the chance to give them the best service we can.”

NetHosting provides a range of cloud hosting and storage solutions, as well as dedicated, managed, and virtual hosting services.

Talk back: Have you recently upgraded the hardware and software of your cloud hosting solutions? Did you run into any issues with migration? Let us know in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/nethosting-improves-security-performance-with-updated-cloud-hosting-solutions

Google Cloud Platform provides service and tech partners

Migration or new implementation initiatives in the cloud can prove to be a daunting task, even for the biggest of enterprises. There are a lot of unknowns on top of many of the same old problems experienced with on-premise data center projects. In a knee-jerk reaction to all this, Google has recently introduced a partnership program with integration and service-oriented consultants for their Google Cloud Platform line of products. If you aren’t all that familiar with the Google Cloud Platform as of yet, you might want to read my posts on the Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google BigQuery, and/or the Google Prediction API, prior to continuing.

The Google Cloud Platform partner program provides partners with the tools, training, and resources needed to successfully address application development and system administration concerns. In return, service and technology partners extend the functionality of Google Cloud Platform products to client needs.

There are two basic types of Google Cloud Platform partners. Service partners, who generally provide consulting and implementation services, and technology partners, who provide actual bundled applications that either help users to migrate to the Google Cloud Platform, or in some way integrate with it. On the service partner end, one can employ the knowledge necessary to develop applications or initiate a migration and/or implementation plan. Perhaps more diversely, in terms of engaging with a technology partner, one can find robust management tools, import data from a wide range of cloud and on-premise data sources, and take advantage of archiving, backup and recovery, and primary storage solutions, just to name a few uses.

Although the Google Cloud Platform program, not to mention the Google Cloud Platform itself, is still in its infancy, organizations might find that the employment of partners/vendors can help leverage all that the Platform’s products can offer.  Furthermore, considering that the Google Cloud Storage and Google App Engine products have existed for some time (Cloud Storage has been around since the winter, and the App Engine for years now) many technology partners have already gotten a jump start on rounding out their services. Additionally, Google’s entry into the big data market, BigQuery, has garnered a lot of attention, as partners look to provide reporting and visualization applications-a service Google has come very late into the game with.

Disappointingly, the service partners that are listed under Google Cloud Platforms Partner page are all a bit vague as to what they exactly offer. For the most part, they all identify what the Google Cloud Platform is under their websites and press releases, but aside for the App Engine and their touted experience with other Google services like Google Apps, all fail to mention how clients might directly benefit from the employment of their services, or even provide cases for its proposed use. Obviously, organizations are going to be reluctant to hire any partner without a clear cut demonstration of how they’d approach deliverables, regardless of the service provided — something Google needs to be wary of as Google Cloud Platform adoption rates increase.

Below, you can find a table of partners that I find of interest, based upon the given partner’s reputation and/or the particular resource/service they provide.

Partner	Google Cloud Platform Product(s)	Partner Type	Partner Technology/Service
StorSimple	Cloud Storage	Technology	Provides VMware appliance for storage, archival, data protection and disaster recovery solutions
MapR Technologies	Compute Engine	Technology	MapR provisions their Hadoop distribution, or big data analytics platform, on the Compute Engine
Puppet Labs	Compute Engine	Technology	Runs their Puppet Enterprise infrastructure automation software on the GCE; inclu des automation of tasks like configuration, release and patch management
OrangeScape	App Engine	Technology	Develop business applications on OrangeScape’s integrated development environment platform, and deploy them to the GAE
QlikTech	BigQuery	Technology	Use the BigQuery integrated QlikView Business Discovery Platform to build dashboards and explore data in memory
Appirio	App Engine; *	Service	Has long standing history with Google Apps and Google Apps Marketplace, and looking toward further leveraging GAE, amongst other Cloud Platform products, to fill the gap
Cloud Sherpas	App Engine; *	Service	Was Google Enterprise Partner of the Year in 2011-predominately for their mobile and social apps
Sheepdog	App Engine; *	Service	Solely invested in providing Google Apps, and now, Google Cloud Platform services

*Most likely make use of other Google Cloud Platform products-with a focus on application development or application support services.

Source : http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/google-cloud-platform-provides-service-and-tech-partners/5767

51% Of People Think Stormy Weather Affects 'Cloud Computing'

If there's a buzzword that's more soporific/confusing than "cloud computing" we're not sure what it is.

A survey from Citrix confirms that we're not the only ones who feel this way.

It surveyed 1,000 people about cloud computing and found that 51 percent think bad weather affects cloud computing. Another 95 percent don't think they ever use cloud computing, even though they're actually doing a lot in the cloud.

And here's the full release:

Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey

Ninety-five percent of those claiming they never use the cloud actually do so via online banking and shopping, social networking, and storing photos and music.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. » 8/28/2012 » While “the cloud” may be the tech buzzword of the year, many Americans remain foggy about what the cloud really is and how it works. A new national survey by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Citrix, showed that most respondents believe the cloud is related to weather, while some referred to pillows, drugs and toilet paper. Those in the know claim working from home in their “birthday suit” is the cloud’s greatest advantage. The good news is that even those that don’t know exactly what the cloud is recognize its economic benefits and think the cloud is a catalyst for small business growth.

The survey of more than 1,000 American adults was conducted in August 2012 by Wakefield Research and shows that while the cloud is widely used, it is still misunderstood. For example, 51 percent of respondents, including a majority of Millennials, believe stormy weather can interfere with cloud computing. Nearly one third see the cloud as a thing of the future, yet 97 percent are actually using cloud services today via online shopping, banking, social networking and file sharing. Despite this confusion, three in five (59 percent) believe the “workplace of the future” will exist entirely in the cloud, which indicates people feel it’s time to figure out the cloud or risk being left behind in their professional lives.

These survey responses show there is a significant disconnect between what Americans know, what they pretend to know, and what they actually do when it comes to cloud computing. Among the key findings:

• People feign knowledge about the cloud:One in five Americans (22 percent) admit that they’ve pretended to know what the cloud is or how it works. Some of the false claims take place during work hours, with one third of these respondents faking an understanding of the cloud in the office and another 14 percent doing so during a job interview. Interestingly, an additional 17 percent have pretended to know what the cloud was during a first date. Younger Americans are most likely to pretend to know what the cloud is and how it works (36 percent ages 18-29, 18% ages 30 and older), as are Americans in the West (28 percent West, 22 percent U.S.)

   

• You’re not alone:While many admit they don’t understand the cloud, 56 percent of respondents say they think other people refer to cloud computing in conversation when they really don’t know what they are talking about.

   

• What is it, anyway?:When asked what “the cloud” is, a majority responded it’s either an actual cloud (specifically a “fluffy white thing”), the sky or something related to the weather (29 percent). Only 16 percent said they think of a computer network to store, access and share data from Internet-connected devices. Some of the other verbatim responses include:Toilet paper, pillow, smoke, outerspace, cyberspace, mysterious network, unreliable, security, sadness, relaxed, overused, oh goody a hacker’s dream, storage, movies, money, memory, back-up, joy, innovation, drugs, heaven and a place to meet.

   

• Many use it, few understand it:A majority of Americans (54 percent) claim to never use cloud computing. However, 95 percent of this group actually does use the cloud. Specifically, 65 percent bank online, 63 percent shop online, 58 percent use social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, 45 percent have played online games, 29 percent store photos online, 22 percent store music or videos online, and 19 percent use online file-sharing. All of these services are cloud based. Even when people don’t think they’re using the cloud, they really are.

   

• Can the cloud save the economy?:Even though many Americans don’t know exactly what the cloud does, they see its silver lining. Most Americans (68 percent) recognize the economic benefits after learning more about the cloud. The most recognized benefits are that the cloud helps consumers by lowering costs (35 percent), spurs small business growth (32 percent) and boosts customer engagement for businesses (35 percent). Millennials are most likely to believe that the cloud generates jobs (26 percent Millennials, 19 percent Boomers).

   

• Softer advantages, like working from home in the buff:People offered additional, unexpected benefits of the cloud, including the ability to access work information from home in their “birthday suit” (40 percent); tanning on the beach and accessing computer files at the same time (33 percent); keeping embarrassing videos off of their personal hard drive (25 percent); and sharing information with people they’d rather not interact with in person (35 percent).

   

• Concerns include cost, security, privacy: Despite these advantages, Americans still have reasons why they limit their use of cloud computing or avoid it entirely. Among those who hardly ever or never use the cloud, the top three deterrents are cost (34 percent), security concerns (32 percent) and privacy concerns (31 percent).

“This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing,” said Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix. “While significant market changes like this take time, the transition from the PC era to the cloud era is happening at a remarkable pace. The most important takeaway from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favorably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives.”

Methodological Notes:
The Citrix Cloud Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 1,006 nationally representative American adults ages 18 and older, between Aug. 2-7, 2012, using an email invitation and an online survey. Quotas have been set to ensure reliable and accurate representation of the U.S. adult population 18 and older.

Results of any sample are subject to sampling variation. The magnitude of the variation is measurable and is affected by the number of interviews and the level of the percentages expressing the results. For the interviews conducted in this particular study, the chances are 95 in 100 that a survey result does not vary, plus or minus, by more than 3.1 percentage points from the result that would be obtained if interviews had been conducted with all persons in the universe represented by the sample.
Complete survey results and graphics are available.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-affects-cloud-computing-2012-8

Cloud Security Firm Zscaler Raises $38 Million in Funding

Cloud security provider Zscaler announced on Thursday it has secured $38 million in funding from strategic investors, including Lightspeed Ventures. Prior to this new external investment the company had been funded entirely by internal means.

Security concerns within the cloud have prevented many companies from moving their data to the cloud. In a couple of separate WHIR Q&A features posted earlier this month, StillSecure president and CEO Rajat Bhargava and CloudPassage chief evangelist Andrew Hay discussed the specific security threats facing the public cloud, some best practices for addressing those threats.

While most security products protect corporate servers from incoming threats which stem from the Internet, most companies have done little to inspect user-initiated traffic and protect their users.

Zscaler offers a new spin on security products by placing the focus on the user instead of the server, protecting companies from the new generation of security threats.

In the press release, Zscaler said it plans to use the new investment to “further accelerate its go-to-market strategy with expanded sales and marketing, and further develop its cloud security offering with a high emphasis on mobility.”

“To date, we have resisted outside investment despite inquiries from top-tier investors. Our new strategic partners share our vision and are committed to helping Zscaler build a long-lasting business,” said Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry. “Many web security vendors are putting appliances in the cloud and calling it cloud security. Zscaler is the only company that has the right architecture to securely enable the mobile, cloud and social media applications that often bypass traditional security altogether.”

Zscaler has grown rapidly in a short period of time, and currently protects over 8 million users in 160 countries with the world’s largest security cloud.

The Zscaler Global Security Cloud enables IT organizations to replace many different point security products with a single, web-based solution, while eliminating the need to reroute traffic to a central location or proliferate costly appliances in multiple locations.

Zscaler is also a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance, and operates the Zscaler ThreatLabZ research labs, which leverage billions of daily web transactions from millions of users around the album to identify and alert customers of threats as they occur.

Talk back: Are you currently offering security a beyond-network service to customers? Are you considering using Zscaler? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Cloud Brokerage Ingram Micro to Sell Netmagic Cloud Services
2. The Open Group Publishes Standards for SOA and Cloud Computing

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/cloud-security-firm-zscaler-raises-38-million-in-funding

VMware’s OpenStack Membership Delayed Briefly by Board Meeting Time Constraints

The OpenStack Board of Directors meeting on Tuesday evening had a packed agenda, including voting on VMware‘s application to become a Gold member of OpenStack.

According to a report by Network World, the board “didn’t get around to considering VMware’s application” in the meeting, so it may have to wait until October 19 when the board is set to reconvene.

The meeting ran about seven hours, according to GigaOM, so the group didn’t have time to review the applications from Intel, NEC or VMware. On Monday it was reported that the three companies would apply for Gold membership.

Aside from reviewing the Gold membership applications, the OpenStack board meeting covered some financial items such as the draft budget, salaries of officers and other administrative tasks like electing a chairman, and appointing officers. Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source for SUSE is chairman, while Lew Tucker, Cisco VP and CTO of cloud is vice chairman. On Wednesday, Linux vendor SUSE launched its first commercially supported private cloud solution based on OpenStack.

Network World says VMware is expected to be a significant contributor in the areas of virtual networking and the integration of OpenStack with VMware’s Cloud Foundry PaaS tool.

VMware acquired OpenStack contributor and software-defined networking provider Nicira for $1.26 billion in July, and VMware has changed its tune on OpenStack significantly since the acquisition. It was only a few months ago when VMware referred to OpenStack as an “ugly sister” in a blog post. 

Cloud and web hosts like Rackspace and DreamHost use the network virtualization platform from Nicira to accelerate service delivery in data center environments based on OpenStack.

There is some debate about how VMware will participate in OpenStack beyond virtual networking. Some wonder whether VMware will work to further integrate its ESX hypervisor into the OpenStack project, a move that would allow VMware users to access non-VMware clouds, Network World says.

If VMware’s application is approved, it will pay $66,666.67 annually to be a Gold member.

Talk back: Do you think OpenStack will approve VMware’s application in the next meeting? Do you have any ideas as to how VMware will contribute to OpenStack? Let us know in a comment.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/vmwares-openstack-membership-delayed-briefly-by-board-meeting-time-constraints

Zscaler gets £24m VC fund for increased cloud security

Zscaler, the SaaS cloud security company, has for the first time received venture capital investment to the tune of £24 million ($38m), mainly from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

The San Jose startup was traditionally funded internally, but according to Zscaler the money will be used to “further accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and further develop its cloud security offering with a high emphasis on mobility”.

In other words: it’s not because Zscaler needs the cash, more upgrading what it already has.

And according to CEO Jay Chaudhry, it represents a shift in company policy.

“To date, we have resisted outside investment despite inquiries from top-tier investors,” he said, adding: “Our new strategic partners share our vision and are committed to helping Zscaler build a long-lasting business”.

Zscaler’s security solution revolves around a unified SCG (Secure Cloud Gateway) and famously requires no hardware or software to enforce multiple security policies. As Ravi Mhatre, MD of Lightspeed Ventures noted: “Many web security vendors are putting appliances in the cloud and calling it cloud security”.

Given its security credentials, Zscaler is a founder member of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), who recently launched the Big Data Working Group.

Chaired by representatives from Fujitsu – who jointly announced the group with the CSA – eBay and Verizon Wireless, the group will address solutions to current big data challenges.

Plenty of cloud organisations have succumbed to venture capital (VC) money of late. CloudPassage hit £8.8m ($14m) in April from a round of VC funding, while Bit9 made £21.7m ($34.5m) from funding last month.

Zscaler has built up an impressive number of customers – 2600 customers in over 100 countries – as well as a base of clients in its four year history, including Telefonica and Lay-z-boy.

Is this a prevalent trend of cloud security companies taking venture capital funds in order to expand?

Source : cloudcomputing-news[dot]net

Telecom Bharti Airtel Offers Indian SMBs Microsoft Office 365

Telecommunications provider Bharti Airtel will offer Microsoft Office 365 to small and medium-sized businesses in India, according to several reports on Tuesday.

This partnership comes a week after US telecommunications provider Sprint launched hosted Microsoft Office 365, enabled by Parallels Automation.

According to MediaNama, Airtel plans to bundle its Microsoft 365 suite with its DSL and Internet Leased Lines for business. The price of the packages is not disclosed on its website, but it appears that there are specific plans targeted at freelancers as well as small business owners.

The small business sector in India is a target for many web hosts and cloud providers. Most of Go Daddy’s 120,000 customers based in India are entrepreneurs and small business owners. In November 2011, HostGator partnered with Google to offer websites to SMB owners through the Google “Get Your Business Online” program.

Recently, Airtel partnered with HP to offer cloud services for SMBs. Last year, Airtel partnered with Savvis to offer managed hosting and cloud hosting.

“We are delighted to partner with Microsoft to address the growing ICT needs of the SMB segment. The partnership will allow us to become a virtual CIO for our SMB customers,”  Sanjay Kapoor, CEO, India & South Asia, Bharti Airtel said in a statement. “According to industry estimates there is a growing affinity towards technology adoption in this segment and their IT spending is surging at a rate of 15 percent per year. SMB segment has shown a high adoption of Cloud computing especially SaaS – which contributes more than 50 percent to the overall cloud market. With our superior network experience and Microsoft’s dependable technology suite we will be able to offer cost effective and secure cloud services in a high growth SaaS market.”

Under this agreement, customers will be able to create a public facing website with a domain name, access the latest releases from Office 365, anti-virus solutions and access to documents and emails anywhere.

“We are pleased that Bharti Airtel will offer our world-class cloud productivity solution to SMBs in India,” Bhaskar Pramanik, Chairman, Microsoft India said in a statement. “Agility, focus and cost are the key reasons why businesses are moving to a cloud and hence Microsoft’s partnership will allow Bharti Airtel’s customers to continue to stay ahead of the curve through solutions that truly fit their needs. The agreement will enable SMBs to take advantage of a secure cloud computing environment at an opex model based pricing.”

In May, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure startup incubator program in India. In addition to mentorship and resources, startups will be able to work in the Microsoft Bangladore office to develop their business.

Talk back: Do you have many customers in India? What kinds of services do you offer these customers? Let us know in a comment.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/telecom-bharti-airtel-offers-indian-smbs-microsoft-office-365

Linux Vendor SUSE Releases OpenStack-Based Enterprise Private Cloud

Linux vendor SUSE announced on Wednesday at CloudOpen 2012 that it has launched its first commercially supported private cloud solution based on OpenStack.

SUSE Cloud is an automated cloud management platform that allows enterprises to deploy and manage an IaaS private cloud. It integrates with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager so enterprises can deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across private and public clouds.

SUSE Cloud supports all components of the OpenStack Essex release, while future versions of SUSE Cloud will continue to track the six-month cycle of OpenStack upstream releases, according to the press release.

This launch comes a week after Piston Cloud released Airframe, a “slimmed-down version” of its cloud management platform and OpenStack distribution, Piston Enterprise OpenStack.

As OpenStack picks up momentum, several companies have launched free OpenStack distributions, including Linux vendor Red Hat earlier this month. Red Hat says it has increased its OpenStack participation and contributions “over time.” In April 2012, Red Hat was named the third overall contributor to OpenStack, and announced its intention to become a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation.

Linux distribution Ubuntu also supports OpenStack Essex, and plans to support it for the next four upcoming releases of Openstack.

In an interview with PC Advisor, Peter Chadwick, senior product manager of cloud at SUSE, admits that OpenStack is a “crowded space” but it will capitilize on its 20-year track record with the open source community. He says SUSE is more heterogeneous than Red Hat because it fully supports both Xen and KVM hypervisors.

“Over the past twenty years, we’ve accumulated the strength, capabilities and resources to build a solid foundation our customers can rely on in order to succeed in the next twenty years and beyond in three strategic areas: enterprise Linux, cloud, and integrated systems,” Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager, SUSE said in a statement. “SUSE Cloud is driven by our customers’ desire and need to increase business agility and reduce costs through a cloud solution. We are delivering on our cloud strategy by combining the advantages of an open cloud platform with our history of world-class support and our reputation for working with a broad, diverse ecosystem of partners.”

SUSE Cloud also integrates Dell’s Crowbar software framework that simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of the cloud infrastructure. The WHIR spoke to Joseph B. George, director of cloud and big data solutions at Dell, about its work with OpenStack in May.

Talk back: Do you think OpenStack is becoming “too crowded”? How will SUSE separate itself from Red Hat? Let us know in a comment.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/linux-vendor-suse-releases-openstack-based-enterprise-private-cloud

Citrix survey: Is the cloud confusing?

A survey from Wakefield Research for virtualisation experts Citrix has shown that, for consumers, many Americans are unaware of what ‘the cloud’ entails.

32% of respondents stated that cloud was “a thing of the future”, while 95% of those surveyed who thought they weren’t using the cloud actually were, for such simple tasks as online banking and social networking.

The research, which garnered responses from over 1000 American nationals, found some surprising and eye-opening results. Highlights included:

• 40% of respondents stated an advantage of the cloud was being able to access work information in their “birthday suit”
• A quarter of those surveyed said the cloud was great for keeping embarrassing videos off the hard drive
• A third of interviewees said they faked knowledge of the cloud at work, with 14% pretending to know for a job interview and 17% winging it on a first date

Thankfully, Americans did see other benefits from cloud computing other than the freedom of working in the nude.

Economic benefits were frequently cited, with the most recognised benefits being lowering costs, being a catalyst for SME growth, and improving consumer engagement for businesses.

Conversely however, 35% of those who responded claimed a benefit of the cloud was being able to communicate with people they’d rather not interact with in person.

Cost was the main deterrent from using the cloud, with 34% of those interviewed citing this as the main reason they’re not using cloud services.

Security (32%) and privacy concerns (31%) were second and third respectively, with lack of knowledge on the cloud and already owning software which does the job also cited.

Yet there evidently appeared to be some misunderstandings among consumers.

Kim DeCarlis, Citrix VP of corporate marketing, said: “This survey clearly shows that the cloud phenomenon is taking root in our mainstream culture, yet there is still a wide gap between the perceptions and realities of cloud computing”.

However, DeCarlis added: “The most important take away from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favourably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud, they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives”.

Does this lack of consumer knowledge about cloud computing worry you? Or is it a case of wait and see for more tangible benefits to those who don’t work in IT?

Source : cloudcomputing-news[dot]net

Flexiant Study Challenges Private Cloud Adoption, Pushes Public Cloud

European cloud orchestration software Flexiant announced on Tuesday it has published a whitepaper titled “Seven Business Reasons Why Moving Private Clouds to a Service Provider is a ‘No Brainer.”

The move comes a month after the HostingCon 2012 session where Flexiant founder and SVP of product Tony Lucas discussed how service providers can find their niche in the cloud.

In the paper, Flexiant CTO Alex Bligh makes the argument that the popular belief of the private cloud having multiple advantages over public cloud in the areas of data security, location and jurisdiction guarantees, is simply flawed.

He says the private cloud actually enables organizations to avoid compensating a service provider for their profit margin, along with the cost of having another party involved.

Flexiant’s whitepaper further investigates what economic and organizational business aspects drives the adoption of various cloud technologies.

The paper also looks at how the emergence of new cloud technology in IT purchasing budgets and how they directly influence service providers. The whitepaper also educates service providers on the advantages and disadvantages of public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.

Ultimately, Flexiant makes a strong case for the business advantages of a public cloud solution.

Those interested in reading the whitepaper can download a copy on Flexiant’s website.

Earlier this year, Flexiant raised an investment of $1.5 million and named John Pocock as chairman and George Knox as CEO.

Talk back: Are you currently offering a public cloud server platform with varying levels of performance? Is this something your clients are asking for? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/flexiant-study-challenges-private-cloud-adoption-pushes-public-cloud

Bullet-proof your web service with the right monitoring setup

My enterprise web service must be monitored all day, every day, for its whole life. A service must be monitored to satisfy one of my 12 principles of operational readiness.

If you get monitoring right, you will be able to prove how wonderful your service level is, track down errors before customers notice, fix incidents faster, and have a full set of measurements for system performance.

Expectations

There are usually clear expectations of an enterprise service shared by everyone involved. During the design and build phases of a project, expectations come from an initial list of business requirements, from a growing familiarity gained during the project and from nailing down a formal SLA (Service Level Agreement). During the operational lifetime, expectations are adjusted as applications are updated and adapted to provide a better customer service.

• End-user experience. What is the user seeing? Are a client’s transactions keeping customers happy?
• Behind the scenes. What is happening behind the scenes? How are the components of the application doing? Do I have enough resources to keep the application running?

What’s happening client-side?

A monitoring application uses synthetic users to check the front end of a service. Synthetic users continually run transactions and collect data. The monitoring application records the time taken for these users to send a request to a web service and receive a response. The monitoring application can check these response times are within SLA and can graph these times for management reports.

The monitoring application can run a simple check on the home page to make sure no-one has defaced it. The app can run a complex transaction that works all the components of an application.

Monitoring an application from a remote client site is great for figuring out what kind of user experience they are having. If a customer wants to argue that the performance is garbage, the account manager can use measurements that come out of this kind of monitoring to head off arguments. Remote monitoring can also expose service weaknesses. Do I need a CDN to speed up the service for faraway users? Is a problem reported by one user caused by their ISP, or my cloud service?

Unfortunately, suppliers can’t install monitoring applications at many customer offices, so they use the services of a company with a widespread network presence. At the bargain end of the monitoring services market, I used the free tier of Monitor.us in an earlier post. At the premium end, Compuware run services all over the world.

What’s happening server-side?

A monitoring application uses all sorts of OS metrics to check the back-end of a service. Every cloud-based application is built from thousands of virtually moving parts.

I want monitoring to check the layers of hardware, networking, OS and applications. These must all be monitored. Cloud services are multi-tenant - my application’s performance is affected by how busy the other tenants are.

I want to check all the application components. The application itself is probably distributed across a few tiers - perhaps a front tier that the client sees, most of the business logic in the middle, and data sources at the back. These must all be monitored. I want to know if any component starts to suffer, such as the database creaking under the strain of a busier site, or a program update introducing inefficient code. I installed cacti to check the OS when I was working on service reliability.

All the remote services that an application connects to must also be monitored. No enterprise service is an island. Monitoring is required for all the back-end integration. I can’t stop someone else’s service occasionally going slow, but I can collect measurements I can throw at the owners of those services.

What’s happening over time?

The measurements collected form trends that can expose some problems and head off others.

• The usage profile will change over time. If the service is attracting more customers over time, owners will be pleased. If it is slowing down over time, owners will not be pleased.
• Trends can be used to predict what will happen. If increasing amounts of system resources are being used over time, someone needs to know that the bill is going to get bigger.

Comprehensive monitoring

The performance of an application needs to be measured, and so does everything that can affect its performance, including the platform it is running on, the network connecting the application to the customer, and any other systems it relies on. Monitoring a cloud-based web service is not just a matter of regularly pinging it from your in-house monitoring application.

Creating comprehensive client-side monitoring is tricky. It’s easy to install an open source application like Nagios on your in-house system yourself, but to get a decent spread of remote monitoring locations you have to use a geographically distributed service like Monitis or Gomez.

Creating comprehensive server-side monitoring is tricky, especially for enterprises with components spread across many geographical locations. You can add server-side monitoring yourself by stringing together some excellent and free open source monitoring applications, or you can rent the instant services of a company like LogicMonitor, New Relic or BMC.

If anyone expects anything of a service, then those expectations must be described in a way where success or failure can be measured. A service must be monitored from the outside, (where the clients are) and from the inside (all the server nuts and bolts). Monitoring continues for the life of the service.

Source : http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/bullet-proof-your-web-service-with-the-right-monitoring-setup/5764

Amazon's Has A Whopping 600 Job Openings For Its Cloud

Amazon's Web Services is clearly the biggest, baddest cloud computing option available. But the company doesn't disclose much about it, like how much revenue AWS generates.

It likely brings in $1 billion a year in revenue, Quentin Hardy at the New York Times reports. That's not huge for Amazon, which brought in $50 billion last year. But given that AWS is the same cloud that Amazon uses for its own IT needs, that's impressive all the same. Most companies view their IT departments as sheer overhead.

And we can expect this to grow by leaps and bounds in the next few years, as startups and enterprises alike use the cloud, particularly Amazon. Amazon is facing a lot of competition, from the likes of Google, HP, Rackspace, Microsoft and others. But there will be plenty of growth in the cloud computing market to go around.

AWS is run by Andrew Jassy, a long-time Amazon employee who has been working with Amazon's cloud almost since its inception. He started at AWS in 2006 with about three dozen employees. Amazon won't say how many employees work for AWS. But it has more than 600 job openings.

And it plans on expanding into four more regions in addition to the seven it has now: three in the U.S. (Virginia, Oregon and California) and four other countries, Japan, Ireland, Singapore and Brazil.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-600-job-openings-2012-8

VMware Is Gunning For A New $12 Billion Market

VMware has a strange sort of problem: It's been so successful in pushing its technological revolution that it risks making itself obsolete.

But VMware is not about to let that happen, says VMware executive Jerry Chen.

VMware does about $4 billion a year in revenue. Most of that comes from its flagship product, server virtualization software, which lets data centers run more efficiently.

This has helped spur the cloud-computing phenomenon that's transforming the enterprise IT market.

Because servers can run loads more software, it has become supercheap for hosting companies to rent them out on a per-hour basis. That's the cloud. But as enterprises move more apps to cloud, they no longer care about server virtualization—someone else is doing that for them.

So VMware is going after the next big thing: the application platform infrastructure market, which Chen, vice president of cloud and application services for VMware, calls a "huge opportunity." He thinks the market could be between $8 billion and $12 billion.

Think of it in layers.There's an actual app that enterprise workers use—say, a mobile app. It runs on one layer, the app platform. That layer sits on top of servers, operating systems, virtualization hypervisors—the deeper infrastructure. VMware's tech will let that layer of app software move from cloud to cloud—even clouds that don't use VMware's software, like Microsoft Azure.

Enterprises used VMware's software to run things like Oracle and SAP on fewer physical servers, making them more economical. But now enterprises are building out new types of apps—mobile apps, big data apps like Hadoop, and so on. That's what VMware's cloud app platform is all about, says Chen.

So, as VMware loses potential customers because of the cloud, it gains a new market of people looking for an easier way to move their apps around to different clouds.

And that business could be three times the size of what VMware does today.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-new-market-2012-8

VMware Launches New Cloud Infrastructure and Management Services

In perhaps the biggest of a series of announcements made at its VMworld 2012 conference, cloud infrastructure software provider VMware announced on Monday it has launched a comprehensive solution of cloud infrastructure and management products, expertise and ecosystem support to “help customers drive greater efficiency and improve operational agility.”

The company says that VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 is the first solution to deliver the software-defined data center by integrating VMware’s virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management offerings into a single product to simplify the adoption of cloud computing technologies.

The VMware vCloud Suite simplifies and automates operations while ensuring application service levels for even the most resource-intensive business critical applications.

“Today at VMworld, VMware and its partners are taking a bold step toward simplifying IT, offering customers everything they need to build, operate and manage their cloud environments,” said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO. “The VMware vCloud Suite delivers the software-defined datacenter – the architecture for implementing cloud computing.”

The VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 enables customers to build, operate and manage cloud infrastructure, enabling them to virtualization, software-defined datacenter services, policy-based provisioning, disaster recovery, and application and operations management.

VMware vSphere 5.1 is the foundation of the VMware vCloud Suite, providing more than 100 enhancements and new features to deliver the highest service levels for all applications.

This includes workloads and low-latency, I/O-sensitive applications, more powerful VMs, more innovations to help customers avoid unplanned downtime and more robust networking capabilities.

VMware vSphere 5.1 will support VMs with up to 64 virtual CPUs, along with enhanced VMware vMotion to enable live migration of VMs without the need for shared storage.

VMware vSphere 5.1 features new VMware vSphere Data Protection for simplified, reliable VM back-up and recovery, VMware vSphere Replication for cost-effective disaster protection, and VMware vShield Endpoint for more efficient VM security.

The suite also includes key enhancements to the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch, new Network Health Check, Configuration Backup and Restore, Roll-Back and Recovery capabilities, VMware vSphere 5.1 Distributed Switch to simplify deployment, ongoing management and troubleshooting of virtual networks, and support for single-root I/O virtualization.

VMware vCloud Director 5.1 is a set of software-defined data center services which apply the virtualization principles of abstraction, pooling and automation to the domains of storage, networking, security and availability.

The solution orchestrates the provisioning of these services to deliver complete virtual data centers that can be ready for consumption in minutes.

VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 enable customer s to create virtual networks and services that are independent from the physical network hardware.

vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.1 simplifies disaster recovery planning and ensures predictable recovery through automated testing and plan execution, as well as supports data center migrations and disaster avoidance.

It integrates with VMware vSphere Replication and a range of replication technologies from VMware’s partners, enabling customers to benefit from disaster recovery without having to invest in failover infrastructure.

The VMware vCloud Suite includes vFabric Application Director, vCenter Operations Management Suite and vCloud Connector to speed application provisioning, move workloads between clouds, and bring intelligent automation to capacity planning, performance and compliance management.

The new VMware vCloud Suite will be delivered by the more than 55,000 VMware partners, solution providers, service providers and systems integrators, along with major global hardware manufacturers.

VMware is also offering new Cloud Ops IPs and advisory, transformation and education services, where VMware will use its experience to help hundreds of clients worldwide to build, run and optimize public and private cloud environments.

The VMware vCloud Suite will be licensed per processer with no core, vRAM or number of VM limits. The suite includes an entire set of cloud infrastructure and management capabilities, including virtualization, software-defined data center services, policy-based provisioning, disaster recovery, application management and operations management.

Set for release September 11, the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 will be offered in Standard, Advanced and Enterprise editions.

The suite will include VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCloud Connector, VMware vCloud Networking and Security, VMware vFabric Application Director, VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

VMware has also enhanced its offerings for SMBs, significantly extending the capabilities of VMware vSphere Essentials Plus and introducing VMware vSphere 5.1 Standard with Operations Management.

VMware also announced Monday it has applied to become a Gold member of the OpenStack Foundation, and extended its strategic partnership with Riverbed where it will launch a performance management solution for software-defined networks.

Talk back: Are you planning on offering the VMware vCloud Suite 5.1 to customers? Is this something that will benefit your customers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/vmware-launches-new-cloud-infrastructure-and-management-services

VMware and Riverbed to Launch Performance Management for Software-Defined Networks

Riverbed Technology announced on Monday at VMworld 2012 that it has extended its strategic partnership with VMware, and will launch a performance management solution for software-defined networks.

This news comes a month after VMware acquired software defined networking provider Nicira for $1.26 billion.

Riverbed and VMware are developing a new VXLAN-aware Internet Protocol Flow Information Export format to support network and application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting. The planned solution will ensure performance of VMware-based SDNs and VDCs, VMware says.

“By creating virtual networks on demand, which can span physical boundaries, enterprises can optimize computing and storage capacity for mission-critical applications. With virtual overlay networks, traffic is encapsulated in tunnels across the physical network, which creates blind spots for the understanding and troubleshooting of performance issues,” the press release says.

In addition, Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition will be further integrated with VMware vCloud Director to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of WAN optimization-as-a-service for the VDC.

“Our partnership with Riverbed was founded on the goal to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud and enable businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. Rigid networking and security architectures based on purpose-built hardware and fragmented management interfaces pose a barrier to achieving the promise of the software-defined data center,” Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO, networking and security, at VMware said in a statement. “This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs.”

Planned enhancements of the Riverbed Cascade products will provide network operations teams with the ability to control and understand VXLAN virtual overlay network performance, monitor and troubleshoot VDCs and the physical network, and provide VDC owners isolated views into their VDC performance.

“SDNs will bring to enterprises, service providers, and systems integrators the next evolution of the virtualized IT environment, with benefits that include the ability to create complete virtual data centers in minutes and deliver quickly hybrid cloud solutions,”  Eric Wolford, executive vice president at Riverbed said in a statement. “Our partnership with VMware will help deliver on the promise of SDNs by providing the needed management and performance solutions to operate and deliver IT services at the infrastructure level.”

A recent study by NTT Communications finds that 40 percent of enterprise IT decision makers are familiar with virtualized network services, but most are still thinking about virtualization as technology for servers, not networks.

Talk back: What do you think of Riverbed’s planned products? Are you at VMworld? Let us know in a comment.

No related posts.

Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/vmware-and-riverbed-to-launch-performance-management-for-software-defined-networks

Unisys Boosts Cloud Protection with Secure Private Cloud Solution 2.2

Cloud infrastructure services provider Unisys announced on Monday it has released version 2.2 of the Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, which features automated cloud management capabilities with improved protection to help customers secure critical business information in a cloud environment.

The move comes nine months after the release of version 2.0 of Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution.

Unisys Secure Private Cloud 2.2 integrates a virtualized version of Unisys Stealth Solution for Network cybersecurity software to automate and simplify implementation of security while provisioning virtual resources in the cloud.

As a result, the platform enables cutomers to automatically create an integrated security infrastructure for each virtual machine provisioned through the Secure Private Cloud Solution.

“Clients say they want three things from cloud computing: simplified operations, lower usage costs and uncompromising security,” said Rod Sapp, vice president of data center transformation and outsourcing products and technology at Unisys. “With Secure Private Cloud release 2.2, we’re providing a solution that delivers those attributes ‘out of the box.’ Clients can reduce cloud provisioning significantly and realize operational and cost-avoidance savings, with confidence that vital information assets are protected.”

Aside from improved security, Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution 2.2 enables organizations to increase the number of communities sharing the same cloud for increased efficiency in infrastructure utilization and improved economies of scale.

Unisys Secure Private Cloud is compatible with clients’ existing cloud and network infrastructure, which makes for a more seamless transition and helps reduce any associated costs.

Clients have the option of deploying the Secure Private Cloud Solution as a special-purpose cloud or integrating it into a hybrid enterprise environment where they can leverage their long-term investments in mission-critical IT resources.

In a separate announcement Unisys said it will sell the Secure Private Cloud Solution to channel resellers through its recently announced software channel initiative.

The improved security capability of Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution release 2.2 makes applications and data that have been deployed to user-provisioned virtual machines invisible on the network, as well as protects those assets from being compromised by unauthorized external or internal sources.

Groups of related users associated with specific virtual machines can share the same cloud, with one group’s information protected from unauthorized use by members of another.

Individuals with appropriate roles can be members of more than one community and, with appropriate permissions, can view the information used by multiple communities.

Additionally, the Secure Private Cloud Solution has been certified as “Vblock Ready” and is available for VCE Vblock Systems.

This means that it can integrate Cisco networking and server, EMC storage and VMware cloud infrastructure technologies into a single intelligent converged infrastructure system.

The platform features a dashboard that enables administrators to manage all cloud resources, while the usage monitoring and chargeback capability tracks and reports on use of both physical and virtual cloud resources and allocates the charge back to the relevant business group.

Unisys also provides comprehensive advisory services, along with planning, design and implementation services that can help those customers seeking a cloud solution.

Unisys Enterprise Systems Management services enabl customers to monitor and correlate events across all segments of the managed infrastructure, orchestrating pre-emptive and remedial action against potential IT faults.

Talk back: Are you currently offering a secure private cloud solution to your customers? Is this something that will benefit your customers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Source : http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/unisys-boosts-cloud-protection-with-secure-private-cloud-solution-2-2

VMware Kills Off A Pricing Scheme Customers Hated

Customers should love new VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger's first big move.

He's killing off an unpopular pricing scheme that had really ticked off customers.

Called "vRAM," it was a complex way of figuring out how much VMware would charge for its software licenses. It was introduced a year ago, when VMware launched the latest version of its flagship product, vSphere 5. The company started  calculating pricing based on how much memory each server used with VMware software instead of more conventional pricing measures, like counting the number of server CPUs.

Suddenly customers were being charged a lot more money for VMware software running on the same machines.

The company surveyed 13,000 customers, Gelsinger said during his keynote speech today at the company's VMworld customer conference in San Francisco.

The top feedback they gave—"very loudly"—was "change your pricing," he said.

"'vRAM' is a four-letter dirty word. We are striking this word [out]," he said to loud cheers from attendees.

VMware is the market leader in what it does, a technology called "server virtualization." It's not the only game in town, though. Customers can use low-cost technology available from Microsoft, Red Hat, Citrix, and others. Microsoft specifically called vRAM a "vTax."

So VMware will go back to its original pricing schemes and try to increase per-customer revenue by selling them bundles of software for doing cloud computing.

This was a smart move. Customers are already interested in VMware's cloud products, which allows them to get more use out of their servers and data centers. If they opt for other server-virtualization products, VMware loses a shot at selling them additional software.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-vram-pricing-2012-8

VMware's Paul Maritz Just Turned The Company Over To New CEO Pat Gelsinger

During the opening keynote at the VMware's customer conference in San Francisco, the outgoing CEO, Paul Maritz, officially turned the company over to the new chief executive, Pat Gelsinger.

When the company announced this move last month, it came as a shock. But it may turn out to be a positive for VMware and EMC, the enterprise-hardware company which owns a controlling stake in it. 

Maritz is moving over to EMC s chief strategist. Gelsinger, who was EMC's president and COO, took on the CEO role at VMware. Many viewed this as setting up Maritz as heir apparent at EMC.

Meanwhile, Gelsinger's move could be viewed as a promotion, too, since he's now running a publicly traded company. Gelsinger was responsible for much of EMC and VMware's success, managing critical partnerships such as the one with Cisco.

"Pat is a passionate guy," said Maritz. "No one will accuse him of being laid-back."

Attendees cheered as Maritz took a seat offstage to watch the keynote. Maritz, who came from Microsoft, grew VMware from a young public company that was under attack by his former employer into one of the most important enterprise vendors in the world.

Some 60% of Intel servers are now using virtualized servers, a technology that VMware helped popularize, according to market researchers. Of those, 80% use VMware. It has 400,000 customers—large, medium-sized, and small.

In other words, VMware has won its market under Maritz. Gelsinger's job will be to find the next big growth area.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/vmware-ceo-handover-paul-maritz-pat-gelsinger-2012-8