It seems every day, a software supplier or service provider offers new options to use the public cloud for storage and data protection.
The latest came this week, when Veeam Software released a connector that will let users of its backup and recovery software use any of 15 public cloud Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) as backup targets. Among them are Microsoft's Windows Azure, Rackspace's Cloud Files, HP Cloud and Amazon Web Services' S3 storage and Glacier archiving services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/12/20130 comments
Rami Tamir and Benny Schnaider, who helped lead the development and distribution of the open source KVM hypervisor, on Tuesday launched what they hope will be an encore performance.
Their latest venture, Ravello Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company they formed in 2011, has come out of stealth mode. Ravello has developed what it's calling a "cloud application hypervisor." Coinciding with the company's launch, Ravello revealed it has raised a sizeable $26 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/05/20133 comments
IBM has offered SAP consulting, integration and implementation services for decades so it should come as little surprise that it's looking to migrate those customers to the cloud. What's surprising is that an unlikely rival beat Big Blue to the punch -- and I'm not referring to Accenture, Capgemini or Hewlett-Packard.
Amazon Web Services and SAP made a big splash together at re: Invent, AWS's first-ever customer, developer and partner conference held in late November. AWS has certified SAP's key offerings to run in EC2, including the SAP Business Suite, HANA One, Business All-in-One, Business Objects BI solutions, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) and Afaria.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/29/20130 comments
If your shop has groups of Visual Studio developers who use Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) looking to enable more agile development and testing processes, a new cloud-based offering aims to automate the provisioning of these tools.
The new service is not from Microsoft but rather Skytap, a boutique provider of cloud-based infrastructure targeted at developers. The Skytap Automation Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server is designed to dynamically create development and testing environments by automatically provisioning TFS, Visual Studio and Microsoft's Testing Manager workflows using Skytap Cloud.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/29/20130 comments
Amazon Web Services now wants customers to use its EC2 cloud infrastructure to perhaps sequence the human genome and perform other compute-intensive advanced analytics using in-memory databases such as HANA from its partner SAP.
The latest EC2 instance for in-memory computing is aimed at hosting applications that "have a voracious need for compute power, memory, and network bandwidth such as in-memory databases, graph databases, and memory intensive HPC," according to AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/20130 comments
Look for Red Hat to step up its portfolio of cloud management wares now that it has acquired ManageIQ. The company today said it has closed the $104 million deal announced last month during the holidays.
Acquiring the New Jersey-based company will let Red Hat flesh out its CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management tooling. Like BMC, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, RightScale and VMware, among others, Red Hat is looking to offer "single pane of glass management" of public and private cloud infrastructures.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/20130 comments
Hewlett-Packard on Thursday confirmed the departure of the architect of its public cloud effort, Zorawar "Biri" Singh, who was senior vice president and general manager.
Singh's departure was first reported by All Things D. Singh oversaw HP's efforts to build a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that would compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and his former employer IBM.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/18/20137 comments
One of the key inhibitors to using cloud infrastructures for applications that process thousands or even millions of transactions per second is the latency associated with those architectures. Storage, security and the network can all impact cloud performance. Another variable is the database, which is pivotal to modern systems that process real-time data that can range from the processing of financial transactions to feeds that populate social media networks.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/20131 comments
In a move to accelerate its shift to the cloud, enterprise content management supplier Alfresco named Silicon Valley veteran Doug Dennerline as its new CEO, replacing co-founder John Powell.
Dennerline spent much of his career at Cisco, where he ran its WebEx division. Among his other cloud credentials, Dennerline worked for Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as executive VP of sales and most recently as president of SuccessFactors, a software as a service talent management provider that SAP acquired last year for $3.4 million.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/15/20132 comments
The growing use of tablets, smart phones and cloud services is making it more complicated for IT organizations to manage user authentication and authorization to enterprise resources – as if it wasn’t difficult enough.
Consequently, the market for technology that provides secure single sign on is heating up. I delved into growing identity management as a services (IDMaaS) landscape a few months ago (see Going Cloud: Identity Management as a Service). In recent weeks, a number of companies have moved to up the IDMaaS ante including Centrify, Microsoft and Okta. And this week IBM rolled out an upgrade to its Tivoli Security Access Manager, with the launch of ISAM v. 7.0.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/20/20120 comments
Citrix wants to ensure its place in managing employee-owned tablets, PCs and smartphones as well as cloud-based file sharing with the planned acquisition of leading MDM supplier Zenprise.
Citrix announced the agreement on Tuesday, for undisclosed terms. Citrix plans to integrate the Zenprise MobileManager, Zencloud and Zensuite offerings with its own MDM solution CloudGateway and the Me@Work portfolio, which includes the respective GoToMeeting and ShareFile cloud-based conferencing and document storage services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/06/20125 comments
Less than seven years ago, Amazon Web Services disrupted traditional datacenter computing with its cloud-based infrastructure services, allowing enterprise customers to provision compute and storage and pay based on usage without having to make capital outlays for hardware or software. Many who have moved to this model of paying for IT infrastructure as an operational expense have enjoyed considerable reductions in capital expenditures.
Now, Amazon is looking to similarly upend the way organizations deploy data warehouses.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/28/20120 comments