Dell drives initiatives public and hybrid cloud adoption with vCloud trial, global expansion

To make it easy for customers to test and adopt secure, enterprise-class hybrid cloud solutions, Dell PART1     PART2     PART3        PART4
announced this week that it is expanding availability of its Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services into Canada and Europe, and offering an introductory trial offer. The offer, which is currently available in the U.S. and Canada for $999, provides organizations of all sizes and industries a way to experience Dell’s hybrid and public cloud offerings, including full security, support and deployment from Dell Services.
While public clouds can offer on-demand computing capacity, more agility and lower entry-level costs than private clouds, some organizations may be hesitant to move to a public cloud due to concerns about security. A recent study by Dell, Intel and TechTarget found that adoption of hybrid and private clouds is outpacing public cloud adoption.
Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services addresses security concerns by offering some of the industry’s most robust security services, including active monitoring from SecureWorks, data encryption services from Trend Micro, and multiple layers of virtual and physical security in Dell data centers. All of these are now included in the current trial offer.
Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosted in a secure Dell data center. It can provide the software, hardware and services to become an extension of a company’s data center environment, allowing VMware customers to transition existing VMware virtualized workloads to the cloud and manage them using their existing VMware cloud infrastructure. In addition, it is built using a common management platform based on open, industry cloud standards. The use of the same VMware cloud infrastructure for connectivity across private and public cloud creates a compatible “virtual datacenter,” enabling application portability across clouds.
“I don’t want to be in the data center business. I want to leverage a service provider like Dell to help me easily scale my business. The Dell Cloud enables us to offer our customers top-notch services, and if issues should arise, Dell will handle them quickly knowing that we cannot afford downtime,” Oz Yosef, CEO, Gratifón S.A., a telecommunications company in Panama. “It was easy to set up my applications in the Dell Cloud, I was up and running in less than a day. If any questions came up, the Dell Services people just walked me through them. It was very easy and user friendly. I didn’t feel like I was taking this on by myself.”
Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is backed by Dell ProSupport, which provides 24x7x365 expert phone support to help customers minimize downtime or interruption.
With the Dell Cloud, pooling of servers, networks and storage can increase agility, thus helping to reduce the time and budget needed to stand up and maintain traditional physical environments. On-demand capacity allows customers to respond to new business opportunities, seasonal or cyclical trends, and other fluctuations that affect the need for capacity.
“Our goal is to help make the journey to the cloud easy, secure and accessible for customers of all sizes,” said Ricky Santos, vice president, cloud solutions for Dell. “The Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service gives customers control and flexibility to manage and extend IT resources for private, public or hybrid cloud without having to retrain IT staff. Our Dell Services experts can help guide them as they experiment and implement a solution that fits within their IT environments.”
Dell believes that cloud isn’t a technology, it’s a corporate strategy — and that true business agility comes from an integrated, hybrid approach that links applications, data and infrastructure seamlessly wherever they are. Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services is one part of Dell’s secure enterprise-class cloud portfolio focused on delivering real business value. Dell’s pragmatic approach helps customers leverage their current IT investments to build and operate an on-premise private cloud infrastructure, and access secure multi-tenant or community clouds.
The introductory offer is available in U.S. and Canada through July 31, 2012 for $999. When the trial is over, customers can continue to use VMware vCloud offerings that provide single or multi-tenant environments and either compute-by-the-hour or compute-by-the-month rates of consumption.

Facebook moves to consolidate IPO lawsuits

IDG News Service - Facebook has petitioned the U.S. courts to consolidate more than 30 lawsuits filed in

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connection with its ill-handled initial public offering.
The company argued in a court brief that the lawsuits filed against Facebook, some of its directors, the underwriters for its IPO and the Nasdaq stock market should be heard together in the federal court in the Southern New York district.
The cases rely on a "common nucleus of facts concerning the IPO and the decline in the price of Facebook shares," the company said in its brief, filed Thursday. Consolidating the cases will avoid duplication of discovery and possible inconsistent rulings, its lawyers wrote.
The lawsuits fall broadly into two categories. Those against Facebook and its underwriters allege Facebook shared information about the health of its business with analysts at the underwriters, including Morgan Stanley, who then shared the information verbally with large institutional investors, without disclosing it to the wider investing public.
That put smaller investors at a disadvantage and was a violation of federal securities laws, the lawsuits allege.
The second category of lawsuits, against the Nasdaq, stem from the technical problems that caused Facebook shares to start trading roughly a half-an-hour late on the morning of May 18, resulting in confusion among some investors about whether they had successfully traded shares and at what price.
Facebook's brief provides clues about how it might defend itself against the charges that it violated securities laws. The company said it is "customary" for underwriting firms to develop "forward-looking guidance" in close conversation with the companies they represent.
The lawsuits ignore that "what Facebook and the Underwriter Defendants allegedly did both followed customary practices and did not violate any rules," the brief states. The theory that it was "improper for analysts to discuss their forecasts with 'preferred' investors" is "unprecedented," Facebook's lawyers argued.
With respect to the Nasdaq's technical problems, Facebook doesn't dispute that they may have caused its stock price to sink on the opening day of trading. It notes that press reports at the time suggested the problems spurred "a cascade of selling" that made it appear as if investors were "turning against Facebook" and caused some hedge funds to "sell their entire positions because of the confusion."
Facebook filed its motion with the United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation in Washington, D.C.

Xyratex debuts ClusterStor 6000 system to provide improved data storage

Xyratex Ltd., provider of data storage technology, announced Thursday the ClusterStor 6000, the High
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Performance Computing (HPC) fast data storage solution delivering two times the Lustre file system performance over competing designs. With an enterprise level resiliency architecture, ClusterStor 6000 provides high levels in integrated solution reliability, availability and serviceability. ClusterStor 6000 will be available exclusively through Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the third quarter of this year.
ClusterStor 6000 delivers a new standard in file system performance, scalability and efficiency. Its unique architecture brings together what were previously discrete server, network and storage platforms with their own separate software layers, into a single integrated modular scale out storage building block. This approach enables the system to scale both performance and capacity while aggressively reducing space, power and administrative overhead.
ClusterStor 6000 Scalable Storage Unit (SSU) is the easy to use building block that enables rapid deployment, scale and productivity. The SSU is five rack units high and delivers up to six gigabytes/sec of sustained read and write file system performance. ClusterStor 6000 offers support for installations with linear performance scalability from 6 gigabytes per second to one terabyte per second file system processing capability, as well as linear data storage capacity from terabytes to tens of petabytes.
"The ClusterStor product family of scale-out HPC data storage solutions features a tightly integrated distributed computing architecture. Xyratex has integrated Lustre into storage appliances designed to operate as turnkey solutions, contrasted with the traditional piecemeal, less-productive HPC storage solutions. The integration of heterogeneous traditional nodes into high performance, dense platforms results in a reduced footprint and the foundation for lower cooling and infrastructure costs," said Steve Conway, Research Vice President, High Performance Computing, IDC. "Xyratex is involved in some of the largest and most challenging storage deployments in the world, at least one of which aims to become the first high-density platform to scale to 1 TB/second sustained file system performance."
ClusterStor 6000 is designed for users who want to build efficient petascale computing solutions for high performance computing applications in areas such as scientific research, simulation, climate modeling, and energy exploration.
"We've been using ClusterStor 3000 as part of our GENCI/PRACE funded(1) 'Exascale I/O prototype' for the last 3-6 months and are pleased with the Lustre performance numbers being achieved as well as the ease of installation and management," said Jacques-Charles Lafoucriere, Chief of Services, CEA. "Our next phase of the project is a simple upgrade to the ClusterStor 6000 OSS with the next generation Intel E5 processors where we fully expect a significant increase in Lustre system level improvements."
ClusterStor 6000 deployment is a snap, as it only requires physical installation and simple setup steps. Instead of spending weeks gathering separate hardware and software, resolving interoperability issues and testing to get a Lustre environment into production, users can be productive with ClusterStor in hours. ClusterStor includes pre-installation of all internal software components, configuration of the integrated system, intensive system reliability testing and ships ready to go to work.
ClusterStor Manager is a comprehensive system management application that is part of ClusterStor's distributed management framework and is responsible for pulling everything together as a singly managed system. ClusterStor Manager consolidates management of the entire storage infrastructure, RAID data protection layer, operating system, and the Lustre file system into a single, easy-to-use, administrator interface. From initial installation, creation of file systems, ongoing monitoring and management, to expansion and software upgrades, ClusterStor Manager brings the entire storage cluster solution to a single pane of glass. This provides unprecedented system visibility to the Lustre system administrator.
"The ClusterStor 6000 is a truly next generation storage system developed to address the pervasive need for massively scalable storage systems within the HPC and broader Big Data market," said Ken Claffey, Xyratex senior director of the ClusterStor Business Line. "ClusterStor provides two levels of integration. The first combines file systems and RAID data protection onto our embedded server modules and the second consolidates these capabilities into our high density storage platform as a Scalable Storage Unit. These levels of integration enable linear scalability delivering 1TB/sec file system performance with 30% less power, and floor space of competitive systems. With the performance needed in many new applications, the legacy approach to HPC data storage doesn't work."

VMware announces open source project to enable Apache Hadoop to run on private and public clouds

VMware Inc., provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced Wednesday a new open source
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project, Serengeti, to enable enterprises to deploy, manage and scale Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments. In addition, VMware is working with the Apache Hadoop community to contribute extensions that will make key components “virtualization-aware” to support elastic scaling and further improve Hadoop performance in virtual environments.
"Apache Hadoop has the potential to transform business by allowing enterprises to harness very large amounts of data for competitive advantage," said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware. "It represents one dimension of a sweeping change that is taking place in applications, and enterprises are looking for ways to incorporate these new technologies into their portfolios. VMware is working with the Apache Hadoop community to allow enterprise IT to deploy and manage Hadoop easily in their virtual and cloud environments.”
Apache Hadoop is emerging as the de facto standard for big data processing, however, deployment and operational complexity, the need for dedicated hardware, and concerns about security and service level assurance prevent many enterprises from leveraging the power of Hadoop. By decoupling Apache Hadoop nodes from the underlying physical infrastructure, VMware can bring the benefits of cloud infrastructure – rapid deployment, high-availability, optimal resource utilization, elasticity, and secure multi-tenancy – to Hadoop.
Available for free download under the Apache 2.0 license, Serengeti is a “one-click” deployment toolkit that allows enterprises to leverage the VMware vSphere platform to deploy a highly available Apache Hadoop cluster in minutes, including common Hadoop components like Apache Pig and Apache Hive. By using Serengeti to run Hadoop on VMware vSphere, enterprises can easily leverage the high-availability, fault tolerance and live migration capabilities of the world’s most trusted, widely deployed virtualization platform to enable the availability and manageability of Hadoop clusters.
“Hadoop must become friendly with the technologies and practices of enterprise IT if it is to become a first-class citizen within enterprise IT infrastructure. The resource-intensive nature of large Big Data clusters make virtualization an important piece that Hadoop must accommodate,” said Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at OVUM. “VMware’s involvement with the Apache Hadoop project and its new Serengeti Apache project are critical moves that could provide enterprises the flexibility that they will need when it comes to prototyping and deploying Hadoop.”
VMware is working with various Apache Hadoop distribution vendors, including Cloudera, Greenplum, Hortonworks, IBM and MapR to support a range of distributions.
To further simplify and speed enterprise use of Apache Hadoop, VMware is working with the Apache Hadoop community to contribute changes to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Hadoop MapReduce projects to make them “virtualization-aware,” so that data and compute jobs can be optimally distributed across a virtual infrastructure. These changes will enable enterprises to achieve a more elastic, secure and high available Hadoop cluster.
VMware is also announcing updates to Spring for Apache Hadoop, an open source project first launched in February this year to make it easy for enterprise developers to build distributed processing solutions with Apache Hadoop. These updates allow Spring developers to easily build enterprise applications that integrate with the HBase database, the Cascading library, and Hadoop security. Spring for Apache Hadoop is free to downloadand available now under the open source Apache 2.0 license.
Together, these projects and contributions are designed to help accelerate Hadoop adoption and enable enterprises to leverage big data analytics applications, such as Cetas, to obtain real-time, intelligent insight into large quantities of data.

Sterling Data Storage joins with IT service providers to offer online data backup service

Sterling Data Storage announced this week that the company is partnering with IT Service Providers and MSPs in the United States and Canada to deliver automated online data backup and recovery service to small and medium sized businesses.
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The Sterling Data Storage online backup software is available to IT Service Providers as a white labeled application that is branded with the logo and company colors of the IT Service Provider as a way to build the brand of the IT Service Provider. The IT Service Provider brand is shown on the clients device when the online backup software application is opened.
Sterling Data Storage, a provider in online backup and data recovery, is seeking IT service partners that understand the value of protecting their client's electronic information and files. Interested parties can request a free demonstration of the backup software and receive wholesale pricing information at Online Data Storage. .
The Sterling data backup software is simple to implement and is scalable for any size IT Service Provider. The program can be installed on a client's server, desktop or laptop computer and will automatically backup the device as long as it is connected to the internet. Unlike other online backup solutions, Sterling Data Storage scans for any changes in the files stored on the device and will perform an incremental backup of the changed files. This minimizes the backup application runtime and internet bandwidth consumption.
Client data is remotely stored in a double encrypted data vault that meets the requirements for HIPPA, SOX and State Bar compliance. Daily, the online data backup software will send a report, branded with the IT Service Provider marks, detailing the number of files that were backed up by the Sterling data vault.
By securely storing data with Sterling Data Storage, IT Service Providers have a powerful tool in ensuring business continuity and security for their clients. In case of data loss on a clients local computer, the IT Service Provider can restore the data in a matter of minutes over the internet.
"Our online data backup product was designed with IT Service Providers and MSPs in mind. They play a vital role in the education of small and medium sized businesses on the importance of remotely backing up and securing their data. We enable the IT Service Provider and MSP partner to deliver an enterprise grade data backup solution without the upfront capital cost of software development and storage infrastructure" says Jim Morand, CEO of Sterling Data Storage. "There no licensing fees or long term contracts and the IT Service Provider pays a wholesale price only for the data their clients use", continues Morand.
IT Service Providers and MSPs who are looking for ways to increase client retention and value should certainly have a remote data storage solution in their offering.

Cisco and EMC offer premier infrastructure solution running SAP HANA for big data

Cisco and EMC announced certification of Cisco UCS blades with EMC VNX5300 unified storage systems to run the SAP HANA platform. Together, the Cisco and EMC technologies can substantially reduce business risk and ensure that customers receive the scalability, high availability, disaster tolerance and
continuous access required for their mission-critical SAP HANA information.
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Validated through in-depth testing and analysis conducted by SAP AG, EMC, and Cisco, the certified solution enables customers to transform their business by harnessing the power of information to make real-time business decisions. By helping organizations act on information as it happens, SAP HANA helps customers increase the speed of their existing processes and allows for access to large amounts of data in shorter periods of time.
Cisco and EMC are working to address strong customer demand for SAP HANA infrastructure. Cisco and EMC's joint go-to-market activities include sales collaboration, channel partner enablement, collaborative technical services and support, integrated professional services, and marketing. The integrated solution is now in limited availability globally.
Designed from the ground up with a "clean slate" approach, Cisco UCS is an integrated system, designed to optimize compute, networking, storage access, virtualization and management. UCS tapped into a powerful market demand for a new approach to computing, enabling IT organizations to unleash new business models with its innovative, integrated architecture. Customers are able to reduce the time to deploy new applications, improve business agility and reduce costs. UCS is a fabric computing platform that combines industry-standard, x86-architecture servers with networking and storage access into an integrated system.
In an extensive survey of end users conducted by industry analyst firm IDC, EMC was named the top storage choice for SAP solutions and other mission critical environments. The survey ranks storage vendors based on how end users are deploying their technology with enterprise applications. Results of the survey show that more customers choose EMC storage than any other storage for their SAP environments. EMC, as an information infrastructure provider for SAP solutions, provides customers running SAP HANA with the availability, protection, and automation needed to further enable real-time analytics to gain competitive advantage.
Designed to deliver proven Five-9's availability, VNX storage delivers end-to-end data integrity, multiple RAID options, and proactive global sparing and diagnostics. Advanced software suites provide local and remote data protection, application protection, security and compliance. The VNX series delivers leadership performance, efficiency, and simplicity for demanding virtual application environments. VNX optimizes application performance that span the set of enterprise applications, as well as the SAP HANA platform. EMC's Unisphere software provides a simple and intuitive interface for provisioning, monitoring and managing the VNX family.
"EMC, SAP and Cisco are continuing their close collaboration by integrating best-of-breed technologies and delivering an industry-leading solution in scalability, availability and performance for SAP HANA customers,” said Prasad Rampalli, senior vice president, EMC Global Solutions Group. “Today we are launching an "application-aware" SAP HANA infrastructure which addresses mission critical requirements for IT to accelerate their adoption of SAP HANA in Enterprise. We are excited to be a key part of this inflection point in the industry with "in-memory" computing on EMC Cisco infrastructure establishing a new normal for time-to-information and making real-time business decisions."
"As data volumes in the enterprise continue to grow exponentially, the need for businesses to react to business events more quickly through real-time analysis and reporting of operational data is becoming a strategic imperative,” said David Yen, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Business Group, Cisco. “SAP's HANA solution combined with EMC unified storage and Cisco's easy to manage, highly-scalable UCS architecture delivers a highly innovative and agile infrastructure to meet the demanding performance needs of real-time analytics."
"Through this latest announcement, we are entering the next phase in our strategic collaborations with EMC and Cisco,” said Stefan Sigg, senior vice president, In-Memory Platform, SAP. “By teaming with key partners in our ecosystem, we can deliver the power of our disruptive innovations to customers, providing access to the best-of-breed technologies needed to harness the power of their information to create business value for their end users."

Global disk storage system market posts strong results in first quarter of 2012, IDC reports

Worldwide external disk storage systems factory revenues posted year-over-year growth of 7.1 percent, totalling to about $6.0 billion, in the first quarter of 2012, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. For the quarter, the total disk storage systems market posted just under $8.0 billion in revenues, representing 6.8 percent growth from the prior year's first quarter. Total disk storage systems capacity shipped reached 6,037 petabytes, growing 20.8 percent year over year.
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"Despite concerns surrounding the hard disk drive shortage, the external disk storage systems market posted a strong first quarter with revenues up a solid 7.1 percent year over year," said Liz Conner, senior research analyst, Storage Systems. "Entry level systems (ASV of less than $25,000) were hit hardest owing to their reliance on SATA and near-line SAS drives, which experienced price increases due to the Thailand floods. However, strong overall growth in emerging regions and the slowdown in price per gigabyte ($/GB) erosion helped the market post year-over-year growth."
EMC maintained its lead in the external disk storage systems market with 29.0 percent revenue share in the first quarter, followed by NetApp in second with 14.1 percent market share. IBM is in third with 11.4 percent. HP and Hitachi ended the quarter in a statistical tie for fourth place with 10.2 percent and 9.4 percent market shares, respectively.
The total open networked disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open / iSCSI SAN) grew 8.5 percent year over year in the first quarter to $5.1 billion in revenues. EMC continues to maintain top position in the total open networked storage market with 32.2 percent revenue share, followed by NetApp with a 16.4 percent revenue share.
In the Open SAN market, which grew 13.0 percent year over year, EMC was the leading vendor with 28.3 percent revenue share, followed by IBM in second and HP in third with 13.8 percent and 12.3 percent shares, respectively.
The NAS market declined 1.9 percent year over year, led by EMC with 42.6 percent revenue share and followed by NetApp with 36.4 percent share. The iSCSI SAN market continues to show strong momentum, posting 17.6 percent revenue growth compared to the prior year's quarter. Dell led the market with 33.0 percent revenue share, followed by EMC in second and NetApp in third with 18.9 percent and 13.7 percent market shares, respectively.
"The high-end storage segment (ASP $250,000+) remained flat year over year and declined 13.0% sequentially in the first quarter of 2012," said Amita Potnis, senior research analyst, Storage Systems. "The high-end segment grew significantly in 2010 and 2011 owing to the loosened storage budgets after the economic crisis of 2009. IDC believes that the softened growth in the high-end segment this quarter is reflective of what will be a long-term trend."
In the total worldwide disk storage systems market, EMC finished in the top position followed by HP with market shares of 21.7 percent and 18.2 percent respectively.

DLT Solutions, Eucalyptus join to accelerate government’s cloud adoption

DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller in government information technology (IT) software and services, and

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Eucalyptus Systems, a vendor of on-premise cloud computing platforms, announced this week a partnership that will enable public sector organizations to create their own on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platforms. Through this partnership government agencies will be able to deploy private and hybrid clouds by leveraging their existing IT infrastructure.

Eucalyptus delivers an enterprise-class, open source IaaS cloud platform for government agencies that require feature-rich and highly available private and hybrid clouds. It uses existing infrastructure to create a scalable, secure web services layer that abstracts compute, network and storage to offer IaaS. Eucalyptus takes advantage of modern infrastructure virtualization software to create elastic pools that can be dynamically scaled up or down depending on application workloads.
Eucalyptus web services are designed for hybrid clouds using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API. The benefits are highly efficient scalability, increased trust and control for IT as a Service.
“The cloud is becoming increasingly important for Government’s data center operations and consolidation initiatives. Developing key partnerships with leading cloud computing companies like Eucalyptus is critical for creating greater flexibility and scalability for our customer’s cloud deployments,” said Brian Strosser, SVP strategy and business development at DLT Solutions. “It is critical for us to provide our customers with the ability to leverage cloud computing behind their own firewalls.”
“The demand for on-premise cloud deployments in the federal market has increased exponentially in the past twelve months,” explained Said Ziouani, executive vice president of worldwide sales at Eucalyptus. “DLT Solutions’ deep expertise and history in dealing with large, sophisticated IT infrastructures will help us meet the needs of today’s government agencies. This partnership further validates the technical superiority of Eucalyptus’ software and continuing leadership in the private cloud sector.”

Egenera debuts IT management software products for data centers

Egenera, provider of infrastructure management and automation, announced addition of PAN Cloud
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Director and PAN Domain Manager to its line of software products. PAN Cloud Director provides self-service cloud management, while PAN Domain Manager delivers scalability and support of mixed hardware environments. In addition to these new products, Egenera has also added new disaster recovery functionality and integrations with VMware Orchestrator to its PAN Manager software.
PAN Cloud Director is a new self-service management portal that is a cloud lifecycle automation product to support the consumption of applications running either in a native OS or virtual environment. The software provides increased flexibility and makes it simpler for service providers and businesses to manage and provision cloud services. The product gives users the ability to match IT services and configurations with resources that best fit the application requirements and end user budgets.
The product provides IT administrators with an easy to use interface for designing, tracking and billing for services. Using a role based structure, administrators and users can leverage PAN Cloud Director to configure all aspects of a service, including pricing, margin, service levels and capacity. In line with Egenera’s commitment to openness, PAN Cloud Director supports all major hypervisors in addition to native servers.
PAN Cloud Director is fully integrated with PAN Manager so that organizations can bring reliability to cloud-based applications through PAN Manager’s high availability and disaster recovery automation functionality. In this way, PAN Cloud Director is aimed at data center administrators who need to provide end users with enterprise class cloud services that can be requested and consumed.
“Many IT organizations are seeking to implement Infrastructure as a Service to speed the provisioning process and to reduce the cost of service delivery,” said Donna Scott, VP and distinguished analyst, Gartner Research. “Key evaluation criteria includes provisioning of both physical and virtual infrastructures, and avoiding lock-in to any one infrastructure vendor by enabling management across multi-vendor hardware. Moreover, increasingly customers seek to deploy mission critical applications as cloud services which require a focus on resiliency and disaster recovery.”
In conjunction with PAN Cloud Director, Egenera also introduced PAN Domain Manager software. PAN Domain Manger enables organizations to bring increased flexibility, scale and ease of use to their IT environments. With PAN Domain Manager, Egenera continues to innovate in converged infrastructure management. In an industry first, PAN Domain Manager provides greater management flexibility and hardware choice by enabling converged infrastructures to consist of mixed hardware environments. This includes the ability to failover and perform full disaster recovery between blades from different server OEM’s.
In addition, PAN Domain Manager extends PAN Manager support up to 256 servers with 20Gb fabric throughput to each blade and an architecture allowing scaling beyond this in the future. The advanced storage management feature simplifies storage resource allocation through integration with industry and storage vendor technologies.
Egenera also offered some significant enhancements to PAN Manager, making it more efficient and cost effective to automate, manage and protect IT infrastructures. These include new granular many-to-one disaster recovery targeting as well as expanding its integration in the virtualization ecosystem with the availability of a VMware vCenter Orchestrator plug-in enabling access to PAN environments from VMware vDirector and vCloud.
“We are excited for the launch of PAN Cloud Director and PAN Domain Manager which bring greater simplicity, added flexibility and support for a diverse range of technologies to enterprises that are exploring the possibilities of cloud services,” said Scott Geng, senior vice president of engineering at Egenera. “PAN Cloud Director will provide our customers with increased flexibility and customization as they confidently move to the cloud, while the updates to PAN Manager come from consultation with IT administrators, who made it clear what they needed for the environments they manage.”

Terremark and EMC join to accelerate journey to cloud computing

Terremark, a Verizon company, and EMC Corp. announced Wednesday an initiative under which both
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companies will work to identify, build and offer tailored, cloud-based solutions built on Terremark's global service capabilities and EMC's cloud-optimized information infrastructure technologies.
Through this strategic initiative, EMC will provide the advanced technology infrastructure for Terremark's Enterprise Cloud Private Edition offering as well as public and hybrid deployments. Helping drive innovation, the companies will expand the range of options for IT organizations seeking to improve business agility, gain greater efficiency, and control costs as they accelerate their journey to cloud computing.
Additionally, Terremark has achieved Platinum-level in the EMC Velocity Service Provider Partner Program. The Velocity Service Provider Partner Program provides partner management resources and methodologies as well as sales tools and marketing campaign assets to help service providers more quickly and efficiently deploy differentiated cloud offerings built on EMC technology. The EMC Velocity Service Provider Partner Program works with service providers as they invest in EMC solutions with the singular goal of delivering compelling cloud services to the global IT market.
This collaborative initiative will leverage common channels through Terremark and EMC to bring to market a range of cloud-based options for IT organizations seeking to gain business agility and control through cloud computing.
"EMC, Verizon and Terremark have been working in the market for nearly a decade,” said Bill Scannell, executive vice president, Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) EMC. “Today, we're extending our well-established, highly successful alliance and taking our strategic partnership to the next level to help customers more rapidly realize the true benefits of cloud computing. This announcement symbolizes the dramatic customer value that can be derived through joint collaboration and will help customers transform their business operations and ultimately deliver IT as a service."
"We believe EMC to be an excellent strategic partner who offers advanced cloud-optimized infrastructure technology,” said David Small, chief platform officer, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “Together, we can harness the power of our disruptive innovations to help customers increase their business value."

GridIron Systems and Brocade set 1 million IOPS standard for cloud-based application performance

GridIron Systems, a provider of Big Data acceleration, announced Wednesday record performance and
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UTORNET  substantial energy savings for a new reference architecture that combines its OneAppliance FlashCube ultra-high bandwidth solid state storage appliances with Brocade 16 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel storage area networking (SAN) technologies in validated tests running a cloud-enabled MySQL clustered database application.
The new reference architecture overcomes the challenges many organizations face in scaling and enabling concurrent access to databases, while also reducing costs and data center hardware requirements. The architecture, which was validated by Demartek, an independent analyst firm, is an important development for enterprises that depend on MySQL clusters for mission-critical business applications.
In Demartek’s tests, the Brocade-GridIron cloud reference architecture delivered unprecedented performance in excess of 1 million Input/Outputs per second (IOPS) to each of 40 instances of MySQL, concurrently addressing eight mirrored volumes on the GridIron FlashCube appliance. Compared to traditional architectures, the reference architecture achieved a 10:1 improvement in density, as well as a 60 percent reduction in power and cooling costs. Overall, Demartek estimated capital and operating expenditure savings that are at least four times better than conventional architectures.
Large database clusters, such as those running MySQL, are commonly built with local disk storage and expensive system random access memory (RAM) dedicated to each server. This approach restricts the size of the database, as well as the number of users who can access it, and delivers limited performance and data availability. As a result, many database administrators struggle to maintain service level agreements and contain costs, especially in massively parallel processing data warehouse, cloud and large software-as-a-service environments.
“In large-scale MySQL environments it’s not uncommon to see hundreds or even thousands of database servers,” said Dennis Martin, president of Demartek. “The Brocade-GridIron reference architecture opens a new, more efficient architectural approach for serving increasing numbers of users and database queries per cabinet. It’s a compelling alternative that provides significant improvements in performance, cost, manageability, availability and footprint.”
The Brocade-GridIron reference architecture is comprised of twenty six-core servers equipped with dual-port Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapters, connecting to two GridIron FlashCube all-flash storage appliances via two 16Gbps Brocade 6510 switches. The FlashCubes delivered 12 Gigabytes per second concurrent bandwidth and sub-millisecond latencies that improved overall database performance and concurrency. The architecture incorporates redundancy and data replication capabilities to support the highest levels of database availability. The combination of Brocade 16 Gbps adapters and switches provided 6.4Gbps of raw bandwidth to the storage, allowing the GridIron FlashCube appliances to fully support the higher bandwidth and IOPS requirements of the consolidated servers and eliminating the I/O bottleneck typically found in other storage architectures.
“Brocade SAN solutions, coupled with next-generation SSD storage arrays, are setting new standards for performance and reliability for evolving applications,” said Jack Rondoni, senior director of product management, Data Center SAN, at Brocade. “Clustered database architectures are among the many mission-critical applications where Fibre Channel networking solutions provide the resiliency, performance and lower overall costs that enterprises demand to achieve a competitive advantage.”
“Concurrent, high performance access to data is essential in large MySQL clusters,” said Som Sikdar, Chief Technology Officer at GridIron Systems. “GridIron’s OneAppliance solutions are setting a new standard in performance and bandwidth that represents a huge enabling opportunity for clustered databases dealing with the demands of both cloud and Big Data applications.”
GridIron’s OneAppliance solutions leverage the firm’s Set-Ranking analytics to optimize cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) Flash for high performance data-intensive environments. This means that enterprises can enjoy the highest performance levels historically available only from single level cell (SLC) Flash memory without the associated extra expense and capacity limitations.
Demartek’s evaluation report is available online.

Panda Security launches beta version of Panda Global Protection 2013

Panda Security, a cloud security company, announced Tuesday a new and improved version of its beta for
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Panda Global Protection 2013, its comprehensive solution for protecting the information and digital life of home computer users. The new beta, which includes many of the improvements suggested by the Panda Security beta testing community, can be downloaded for free.
The first beta of Panda Global Protection 2013 was tested by users from 129 countries and recorded 23 percent more activations than the 2012 version beta did. The countries with the most activations were Spain, USA, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Peru, India, UK, Argentina and Vietnam.
The updated beta aims to reflect the constant search for continuous improvement in Panda Security's products, as well as market a high-quality solution that has been tested and improved upon with the help of Panda's beta testers. As a result of the feedback from Panda's global community, the company has been able to implement numerous activation, interface, design and usability enhancements from the original beta that was launched in April.
The new version features better malware detection, improvements for several technology modules (TruPrevent, Web proxy and firewall), simpler and faster installation and activation processes, inclusion of new update buttons and the ability to access reports and statistics from the scan screen, better disinfection capabilities on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 (Consumer Preview), and improved on-demand scanning by leveraging all the CPU cores.
Unlike the first version, the new beta release of Panda Global Protection 2013 is available in 21 other languages besides English and Spanish.
All users testing the Panda Global Protection 2013 Beta, both the new and the previous version, will receive a 50 percent discount on the purchase of the final product, and the ten beta testers suggesting helpful improvements will each receive a $200 Amazon.com gift certificate.
Panda Global Protection 2013 is a comprehensive solution in Panda Security's new retail product lineup. The product leverages Panda's Collective Intelligence technology to collect threat intelligence from millions of computer users and deliver automated, instantaneous protection against known and unknown malware.
The new release builds on the core functionality that has positioned Panda Global Protection as the preferred solution among PC users. This includes a highly effective antivirus engine to protect against known and unknown malware; a firewall with Wi-Fi security to block intruders and hackers; Panda USB Vaccine to prevent USB devices from spreading infections; confidential information filters to keep personal data safe; backup and system recovery; and PC performance tuning. The new version includes a password manager: an encrypted password repository that protects users' digital identity and allows them to log into websites with just one click.

Buffalo debuts TeraStation 5000 series of network storage solutions.

Buffalo Technology, a global vendor involved in the design, development and manufacturing of wired and
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wireless networking and network and direct attached storage solutions, announced Tuesday TeraStation 5000 series of high performance network storage solutions. Following last week's announcement of the enterprise-class TeraStation 7000 series, the 5000 series currently consists of the two-drive TeraStation 5200 and the four-drive TeraStation 5400. Equipped with the Intel Atom D2550 dual-core processor, the TeraStation 5000 series provides supercharged performance and offers an array of business class features including iSCSI, replication and failover support and SoleraTec Phoenix RSM, a video surveillance asset management solution.
"By reducing the complexity and cost of traditional IP video surveillance storage and asset management, the TeraStation 5000 series eliminates many of the barriers businesses face when implementing and running IP-based surveillance," said Matt Dargis, senior director of sales at Buffalo Technology. "This launch proves once again our dedication to delivering high performance solutions that serve the needs of our customers and our commitment to the SMB market."
Every day, professionals in the SMB market are challenged to provide high performing, cost effective backup and disaster recovery solutions that can address changing file serving and capacity needs. The TeraStation 5000 series is the next step for Buffalo's line of business class storage servers with an updated user interface that provides simplified management, optimized resource utilization for faster response times, and true disaster recovery protection. The TeraStation 5000 series is a business-class scalable NAS and iSCSI storage for businesses requiring a reliable RAID-based network storage solution. It runs many services simultaneously and the dynamic combination of the dual-core 1.86 GHz processor and 2 GB DDR3 RAM enables the acute ability to focus on concurrent tasks with minimal performance degradation: experience maximum network throughput while a replication job runs in the background, surveillance video is recording from multiple IP-based cameras and remote users are accessing content.
The TeraStation 5000 series is packed with business class features such as surveillance video management, Active Directory support, disk quota support, share level replication, failover support, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, hot-swap hard drives, iSCSI targeting and USB 3.0 accessory support, ideal for larger networks and business-critical applications.
The TeraStation 5000 series offers a video surveillance asset management platform that allows you to record high quality video and store and manage it for easy access and playback. SoleraTec Phoenix RSM provides advanced forensics-based video lifecycle management that helps you manage and protect your video assets with ease. Support for up to 20 RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) IP-based video surveillance cameras allows users to directly capture, manage and store camera feeds, enabling playback of live and stored video. One camera license comes free with additional licenses available for purchase.
The TeraStation 5400 TS5400D features four pre-populated drive bays with capacities up to 12 TB and supports a variety of data protection options including RAID 0/1/5/6/10 and JBOD for a balanced mix of redundancy and performance. TeraStation 5400 will replace the current TeraStation Pro Quad TS-QVL/R6 and will be available in June at an estimated street price of $879.99 for the 4 TB (TS5400D0404), $1,199.99 for the 8 TB (TS5400D0804) and $1,699.99 for the 12 TB (TS5400D1204).
The TeraStation 5200 TS5200D features two pre-populated drive bays with capacities up to 6 TB and support for RAID 0/1/JBOD, making it an ideal solution for small offices that require the performance and reliability of a larger office but without the capacity demand. The TeraStation 5200 will replace the current TeraStation Pro Duo TS-WVL/R1 and will be available in June at an estimated street price of $549.99 for the 2 TB (TS5200D0202), $699.99 for the 4 TB (TS5200D0402) and $849.99 for the 6 TB (TS5200D0602).
Additional TeraStation 5000 series models will be launched following the TeraStation 5200 and TeraStation 5400, including larger bay and capacity and rack mountable configurations. Buffalo's TeraStation 5000 series is backed by a limited three-year warranty and toll-free 24/7 US based technical support. Buffalo products can be purchased through distributors, online resellers and Buffalo's web site.

Chelsio debuts Unified Storage Server 2.1 for data center, cloud installations

Chelsio Communications, a provider of 10Gb Ethernet Unified Wire adapters, ASICs and unified storage
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solutions, announced this week the release of Unified Storage Server (USS) 2.1 software, adding new features that enable more than one million IOPS performance with new levels of reliability and scalability for low cost Ethernet storage in enterprise data centers and cloud computing installations.
Among the new features included in USS 2.1 are high availability (HA), iSCSI scalability, and live migration for storage networks. Together with fully integrated support for Chelsio T4 Unified Wire 10Gb Ethernet adapters, Chelsio is delivering a highly scalable and reliable storage solution with far greater performance and lower costs than comparable Fibre Channel solutions.
For example, hybrid cloud service provider Vivavo is deploying Chelsio USS 2.1 to create a single HA head that scales to 0.5 Petabyte (500 Terabytes) installation with high performance, ease of use and integration. "Chelsio's USS software has proven to be a tremendous asset to enabling high performance, scalability and high reliability for storage clouds," said Francis Au, executive director of Vivavo. "The combination of USS and the T4 adapters is a powerful, scalable solution for our cloud storage applications."
The new features of USS 2.1 include high availability, including dual-node HA and nested RAID support, iSCSI scaling, leveraging multiple distributed iSCSI targets for up to one petabyte of storage capacity, live migration that enables swap out for higher capacity storage disks without disconnecting or affecting clients and applications, lustre over RDMA support for targeted HPC applications, support for a range of RAID and SSD cards, and enhanced support for 4-port 10GbE and 40GbE T4 Adapters to enable fat pipe into storage targets.
Ideal for all data, storage and high performance clustering applications, Chelsio Unified Wire adapters enable a unified fabric over a single wire by simultaneously running all unmodified IP sockets, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand applications over Ethernet at line rate. Designed for deployment in virtualized data centers, cloud service installations and high performance computing environments, these Chelsio adapters bring a new level of performance metrics and functional capabilities to the networking space.
The feature-rich USS software supports iSCSI target, CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, Thin Provisioning volumes, Volume cloning, snapshots, instant restore from snapshots, volume encryption and replication compression. A single-seat USS 2.1 license is US List priced at $5,168.

New EMC VMAX enterprise storage line accelerates changes to hybrid cloud

At EMC World 2012, EMC Corp. announced this week the new EMC VMAX Family, consisting of the VMAX 10K, VMAX 20K and the latest member of the line, the VMAX 40K. The new EMC VMAX line
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is a comprehensive lineup of enterprise storage arrays, built upon the Virtual Matrix Architecture first introduced in April 2009. Complementing the new EMC VMAX Family is a host of new software capabilities that streamline operations and extend the market-proven VMAX to new hosts and applications, while integrating customers' existing storage assets into an integrated and unified pool of storage resources. Combined, the scalable EMC VMAX Family offers efficient enterprise information infrastructure for deploying hybrid clouds.
The EMC VMAX Family is anchored by the new VMAX 40K, a new product that establishes new maximums for performance, capacity and scale in the enterprise storage market. Delivering as much as three times more performance and twice the usable capacity of any other enterprise storage product, the VMAX 40K is optimized to support hyper-consolidation of demanding big data, transaction processing, analytics and cloud computing applications.
Customers are increasingly moving toward a hybrid cloud model that delivers the flexibility and choice to store and serve information within the cloud, while maintaining control over their mission critical applications. The Hybrid Cloud is delivering customers the opportunity to run their businesses smarter and more efficiently. The new EMC VMAX Family, and enhancements to Enginuity, is purpose-built to be the foundation for enterprises of all sizes as they transform their IT environments to take advantage of the Hybrid Cloud.
Leveraging up to 32 2.8GHz Intel Xeon 6-core processors, as much as 2TB of mirrored (1TB usable) and ECC-protected DDR3 DRAM, and twice as much internal fabric bandwidth as the original EMC VMAX, the new VMAX 40K delivers high levels of performance and scale. With more than three times the sustained cache-miss bandwidth and 2X the total IOPS than any competing array, the EMC VMAX 40K is truly in a class of its own. VMAX 40K supports up to 4PB of usable capacity, two times the VMAX 20K's 2PB usable and nearly three times the 1.5PB usable capacity of the VMAX 10K. The new High Density option for the VMAX 40K utilizes 2.5-inch SAS drives to support up to 3.2PBu in a footprint that is a 1/3 smaller and uses 1/3 less power than the equivalent configuration using 3.5-inch drives.
The new 2.5-inch eMLC (Multi-Level Cell) Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD) deliver the performance, reliability and life expectancy of SLC-based EFDs, at a lower price than comparable 3.5-inch SLC EFDs. Available initially only on VMAX 40K high-density configurations, these new eMLC EFDs allow customers to build FAST VP configurations that cost-effectively utilize more flash and more nearline capacity to improve both $/GB and $/IOPS.
The Federated Tiered Storage (FTS) provides active data integrity checking on all data in external arrays to protect against silent data corruption. Such corruption can occur in arrays that do not provide integrity validation of their own. EMC VMAX and EMC VNX families natively implement stringent integrity assurances—functionality that is exclusive to EMC. FAST hinting to remote replica devices ensures proper data layout for optimal performance in the event of a fail-over / fail-back event—functionality that is exclusive to EMC. EMC RecoverPoint for EMC VMAX delivers enterprise-class heterogeneous local and remote replication of EMC VMAX with point-in-time recovery. This provides t he flexibility to replicate to/from heterogeneous storage combined with point-in-time recovery for the entire EMC VMAX Family—as well as EMC VPLEX virtual storage. This functionality is exclusive to EMC.
The new Federated Tiered Storage also enables customers to consolidate and simplify management and operations of their disparate storage assets. By putting heterogeneous storage arrays behind EMC VMAX, customers can now use trusted Symmetrix SRDF and TimeFinder software for business continuity, FAST VP for improved performance, and others to extend the life and value of existing storage arrays in the data center. FAST VP for mainframe count-key data (CKD) volumes, affording the performance, economic and scale benefits of FAST VP to mainframe-based workloads and applications.
The latest version of EMC ProSphere delivers the ability to manage storage, server and network resources through a single pane of glass. ProSphere now reports on host capacity use by FAST policy to enhance reporting in FAST VP environments. ProSphere will also show external capacity imported through FTS providing a single management console for analyzing and reporting on all capacity consumed across the data center including VMAX and external federated capacity.
The new Unisphere for EMC VMAX is an advanced management interface that simplifies and streamlines storage operations and management while providing a common look and experience across the entire EMC VMAX Family as well as EMC VNX Family, EMC VPLEX, and RecoverPoint products. Unisphere for EMC VMAX is easier, faster, and more intuitive, while providing EMC VMAX administrators with comprehensive real-time utilization and performance monitoring. The ProSphere offers integrated support for FAST VP utilization monitoring and policy-based charge-back—functionality that is exclusive to EMC.

Storage System with EMC Atmos

Panzura, a provider of global cloud storage solutions, announced the integration of the company's Global Cloud
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Storage System with EMC Atmos, allowing enterprises and service providers to store, manage and protect globally-distributed, unstructured content at scale. Panzura is now an EMC ISV Atmos Cloud Specialty partner.
EMC Atmos provides essential building blocks to implement a private, public or hybrid cloud storage environment. Deployed with the Panzura Global Cloud Storage System, the integrated solution provides globally-distributed enterprises with cross-site access to all files, integrated file locking, deduplication, encryption, snapshots, access management and massive scalability in capacity. As an EMC ISV Atmos Cloud Specialty partner, Panzura provides support to independent software vendors at all stages of engagement, providing a tight sales response at the field level.
"Finding solutions to help manage today's exponential data growth is a common goal for companies across the enterprise," said Jon Martin, senior director of product management and marketing, EMC Cloud Infrastructure Group. "When used in tandem, Panzura Global Cloud Storage Systems and EMC Atmos can provide customers with a tested, robust combination that provides global file access and management, flexible and near-infinite capacity and scalability, all in a seamless, low-latency solution."
"With the rise of geographically-distributed workforces, there is a distinct need for solutions that improve productivity, and do so economically," said Mark Peters, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The Panzura Global Cloud solution -- integrated with EMC Atmos -- allows for cloud-based active archiving, backup and disaster recovery with military-level encrypted security, enabling seamless collaboration and protection, no matter where or when the files are being accessed."
Panzura Global Cloud Storage System integration with EMC Atmos is now available for immediate purchase, or as a subscription service.

Using Disk Defragmenter To Speed Up Your PC

It is highly recommended that you defragment your disks on regular basis. Over time, as files are created,

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 removed, moved, copied and edited, they become fragmented. Whwn a file is written to disk, it is written to disk,it is wrtitten to clusters. Clusters are tiny parts of drive where information is stored. A file may take several clustors and the clustors might not be contigous. When a file is moved or deleted,often the noncontigous clusters are not removed as well, thereby creating a fragment. The process of defragmenting removes lost clustors and also reorders clusters in a more efficient orders. Defragmenting will improve the perfomance of your computer.

You must have approximately 15 percent free space available to ddefragment a drive.If you don't have adequate disk space, you will need to free up some space before defragmenting. You may also have to defragment several times to achieve the disired results.

Note : It is recommended that you defragment disks every 1-2 months.If a computer's disk perfomance is suffering and no new changes have been made for several months, defragmenting the disk is possible fix.

The two major drawbacks to the disk defragmenter included with windows operating system are that it is not only capable of using a single processor and a defragment cannot be scheduled. Although visual basic can be used to make the windows defragmenter work, it requires additional knowledge of scripting. There are some excellent third party products available with scheduling and multiple processor capabilities. Diskeeper 7.0 by executive software and defrag manager by Winternals are highly aclaimed defragmenting tools. The intresting thing is, when you install diskeeper,it installs the product directoly into the computer managemnt snap-in, and you see it just like you would the basic defragmenter that ships with microsoft.

You can access the disk Defragmenter in three diffrent ways:

1 Click start ! all programs ! accesories ! System tools ! defragmenter.

2 From the computer management snap in, expand the storage node and click disk
defragmenter.

3 From my computer, right click the drive you want to defragment and select properties from the drop down list

Once the defragment open, click the tools button and select Defragment Now.

ownCloud 4 improves ease of use, enhances flexibility for end users

ownCloud, an open source file sync and share project, released Tuesday version 4 of its community edition,

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 adding enhancements that make the project more flexible, secure and innovative.
ownCloud 4 – built through active community support – adds features like file versioning, – which actively saves files, allowing users to “rollback” to previous versions – and a new API -- giving developers an easy, stable and supported way to develop applications on top of ownCloud capabilities.
The latest version, updated from ownCloud 3 released January 30, also enables users to view Open Document Format (ODF used by LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice and others) files – quickly and easily without having to download them – something only ownCloud offers.
Based on the ownCloud open source community project, ownCloud was founded in 2011 to bring greater flexibility, access and security to unstructured data in enterprises. Company headquarters are in Boston, with European headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany.
ownCloud began at a KDE community event in 2010, aiming to bring greater flexibility, access and security to data in the cloud. ownCloud enables universal access to files through the widely implemented WebDAV standard, providing a platform to view and sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks across devices while supporting sharing, viewing and editing via the web interface. Installation has minimal server requirements, does not need special permissions and is quick. ownCloud is extendable via a simple, powerful API for applications.
In addition, ownCloud 4 includes an “experimental” feature for mounting of external file systems – including Dropbox, FTP and Google Drive as well as other popular consumer applications – enabling users to have all their file sync and share tools in a single ownCloud interface.
“Version 3 represented a great technology leap forward. As our community continues to grow, Version 4 has benefited greatly, and the result is the most innovative and flexible sync and share platform to date,” said Frank Karlitschek, founder of ownCloud. “The latest ownCloud offers features businesses and service providers have been asking for, and adds new features and applications that meet the needs of the community and will greatly enhance our upcoming commercial editions.”
With more than 450,000 users, ownCloud offers the ease-of-use of Dropbox with more flexibility and security. ownCloud users can run their own file sync and share services on their own hardware and storage, use popular public hosting and storage offerings, or both.
The company also announced drag and drop file uploading feature that enables end users to upload a file from a browser without installing a client. Simply open a browser, log in and then drag from the desktop into the ownCloud window. It also provides shared calendars and calendar categories to enable end users sync their own calendar, but also share their calendar with others, enabling them to see and schedule appointments while looking at the user's schedule. The new server side encryption increases file security while at rest – not even server admins can look at these encrypted files while they reside on the server.
ownCloud 4 also adds a to-do syncing plug-in, improved contacts and groups, improved file sharing, enhanced the photo gallery, improved system performance, easier installation of third party plug-ins and more.

Oracle debuts new release of Oracle VM to improve data center

Oracle Corp. announced Friday availability of Oracle VM Server for x86 Release 3.1, the latest version of 

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Oracle's server virtualization offering, has been designed to support rapid application deployment and simplify data center management from applications to disk.
The enhanced user interface is designed to significantly simplify ease of use for virtualization administrators and help reduce deployment times. Its new capabilities improve storage availability and backup support and hardware compatibility. Oracle VM's Windows drivers (PV 3.0.1) and virtualization implementation have been validated as part of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Vendor Program (SVVP). Three new pre-built, pre-configured Oracle VM Templates for the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3; Oracle PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1; and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c add to the more than 100 available templates that enable faster application deployment.
The intuitive user interface of Oracle VM 3.1 Manager provides streamlined wizards for easy access to tasks, fast completion of workflows and simple large-scale VM deployments in a Web browser interface. Enhanced storage configuration capabilities allow external NFS access to virtual machine storage for easy backup. Additionally, iSCSI and Fibre Channel-based storage repositories can now be quickly copied or moved from one cluster and to another, including across a wide area network, to facilitate availability and disaster recovery.
Oracle VM is integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, which are both included as part of an Oracle VM subscription. The combination of Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a complete virtualization and cloud solution at a lower in cost than comparable offerings.
"Making it easier to deploy and manage enterprise applications in the data center and cloud is the driver behind Oracle's application-driven approach to virtualization," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Oracle Linux and Virtualization. "Oracle VM 3.1 introduces a number of user interface enhancements designed to improve ease of use for administrators, and storage related features that can increase flexibility when migrating Virtual Machine storage repositories. With this new release, customers should find it significantly easier to manage their applications and virtual environments and at the same time lower their cost."

IBM enhances cloud capabilities with advanced SmartCloud services, new customer adoption

As businesses embrace the transformative power of cloud computing to gain a significant advantage, IBM 
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    Corp. announced this week advancements to its SmartCloud Services and announced new customers and
partners that demonstrate IBM SmartCloud is a leading enterprise cloud platform for business.
IBM has seen rapid adoption of its SmartCloud portfolio as customers and partners move to the cloud. IBM manages massive amounts of data and client transactions in its cloud environments, including 1 million enterprise application users working on the IBM Cloud, more than $100 billion in commerce transactions a year in the cloud, and 4.5 million daily client transactions conducted through the IBM Cloud.
Customers and partners are increasingly choosing IBM SmartCloud services, software and hardware to expand into new markets, enable their mobile workforces and develop enterprise applications more efficiently.
“Companies are starting to understand that cloud is more than just about gaining efficiencies and cost savings, it’s about driving the kind of fundamental innovation that provides lasting marketplace advantage,” said Paul Loftus, general manager, IBM Global Technology Services. “We are helping all kinds of clients manage enterprise applications and processes in the cloud as well as leverage new cloud centric applications while meeting their unique requirements for governance, security and portability.”
TopCoder Inc. is moving its global community of more than 400,000 developers - the largest community of its kind – to IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. These developers help organizations succeed by supporting their entire innovation process—from ideation, software engineering and analytics to implementation, testing and support. TopCoder provides high quality application development, mobile development, user experience and graphic design, and big data project work through this competitive, multi-disciplinary, global community of developers.
Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising, marketing and public relations agency, also turned to IBM to solve its critical business need to upgrade their IT environment. The IBM team is in the process of migrating Ogilvy from its current hosted environment to the SmartCloud for SAP Applications hosted in IBM's green Smarter Data Center in Raleigh North Carolina. The Ogilvy solution includes the latest infrastructure technology, full SAP service and is pre-built, pre-configured, requiring minimal client resources to maintain their entire production SAP landscape. IBM’s SAP Cloud solution also offers Ogilvy the benefits of solution scalability, and the ability to add resources for development projects with a short term commitment.
“Given the attention to cloud-based solutions, it's easy to be overwhelmed with comparisons and multiple options. However, when it comes to critical applications like SAP, we were looking for a mature model that could scale and cater to our unique prerequisites,” said Yuri Aguiar, senior partner and CIO, Ogilvy & Mather. “The SCE+ offering fit this need very well and had the backing of a reliable global partner.”
OTRUM, a provider of interactive TV solutions and content to the hospitality industry, utilizes the Cognos analytics tool from IBM to handle marketing campaigns and highlight repeat behaviour patterns associated with guest interaction and purchasing. This solution leverages Cognos on SmartCloud Enterprise to deliver custom analytics to over 500 hotels. OTRUM has now fully migrated all digital signage clients to the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, a move that eliminates the need for hundreds of physical servers at customer sites. As well as reducing hardware, the cloud increases efficiency by allowing for central management and distribution of data.
Launched as a platform-as-a-service beta program in October 2011, IBM’s SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) is expanding to a full pilot with new customers such as CLD Partners, a provider of IT consulting services with a particular focus on cloud computing.
“We share IBM’s vision for how enterprise customers can achieve huge productivity gains by embracing cloud technologies. SCAS allowed us to utilize world class software in a managed environment that greatly reduced the complexity of the deployment while also providing for future scalability that our customers only pay for when they need it,” said Steve Clune, Founder and CEO of CLD Partners. “Ultimately, traditional infrastructure planning and configuration that would have required weeks was literally reduced to hours. And future flexibility as infrastructure needs change is virtually limitless.”
IBM is helping improve healthcare delivery in Haiti through its collaboration with ‘Colleagues in Care’ Global Healthcare Network. Colleagues in Care is using the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business to virtually connect medical workers and volunteers from around the globe. Using the IBM SmartCloud, the volunteers and those on the front lines taking care of patients are armed with an online medical knowledge system that includes treatment options, clinical pathways, and best practices specific to the situation in Haiti.
The network consists of approximately 200 doctors, nurses, and business professionals coming together virtually from all around the globe including Canada, China, Haiti, France, Ireland, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.