DataCore Software, a leader in software-defined storage and desktop
virtualization software solutions, has announced that it is now shipping
DataCore VDS 2.1 software to make it simple and cost-effective to
deploy persistent ‘stateful’ virtual desktops. The latest release now
supports Windows Server 2012 and Server 2012 R2 platforms, includes an
updated 25 virtual desktop entry-level offering with Hot Standby VDI
server protection built in, and adds a number of significant
enhancements to improve the ease and use of the virtual desktop server
software platform. The release also supports Single sign-on (SSO)
access and Active Directory (AD); plus new wizards, templates and tools
to achieve a higher degree of integration with Microsoft VDI and their
remote desktop and delivery services. The new DataCore VDS 2.1 software
release is now available to customers via authorized European solution
providers who are trained and qualified to deliver simple to use,
high-performance and cost-effective VDI.
"DataCore VDS
overcomes the major cost, complexity and performance roadblocks slowing
VDI adoption especially at small to mid-size companies. Unlike highly
complex VDI solutions that are cost-effective only for very large 1000
or more desktop projects, DataCore VDS 2.1 removes the many painful
implementation obstacles while significantly lowering the cost per
virtual desktop instance,” says Christian Hagen, vice president of
DataCore EMEA. “DataCore finally makes it practical and affordable for
small, medium and large enterprises to start small and scale their
virtual desktop infrastructures without compromising on performance.”
DataCore VDS delivers a ‘true’ desktop user experience
Small
and medium businesses want to adopt desktop virtualization for the same
reasons large enterprises do – to reduce desktop management costs,
improve productivity and increase business agility, but they can't
afford enterprise-class solutions since they cost a fortune and are
overkill for smaller environments.
DataCore VDS makes it
economically feasible to deploy and operate persistent 'stateful'
virtual desktop environments at a lower cost and higher performance than
alternatives.
DataCore VDS serves complete virtual desktops
which are ‘stateful’ (or persistent), they deliver a similar user
experience as if a user were located directly on a physical desktop or
laptop PC. With ‘stateful’ virtual desktops, an end-user is assigned a
virtual machine for their own use to browse, to do downloads and to run
their personal applications. Turn the virtual desktop off and then back
on and it retains the ‘State’ of what you were doing just like when you
close and open a laptop, it functions like your own private desktop,
it’s just virtual.
DataCore VDS delivers powerful virtual desktops for less than the cost of a PC refresh
DataCore
VDS is the easy and affordable virtual desktop solution designed for 25
desktop and large-scale environments. It deploys on off-the-shelf x86
servers, accommodates all the popular disk and Flash storage offerings
and includes the tools Windows® administrators need to rapidly deliver
centrally-managed virtual desktops to any user for less than the cost of
new PCs.
The DataCore VDS highly efficient architecture
eliminates up to 75 percent of VDI costs without compromising
performance and most importantly the user experience.
Product Availability
DataCore
VDS 2.1 solutions are now shipping and available exclusively in Europe
through DataCore’s established network of trained and authorized EMEA
based solution providers.
Pricing for DataCore VDS software
licenses start at around 2500 EURO; enabling complete centrally managed
VDI systems to be deployed at prices much less than the cost per user of
new PCs.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
You're Already Running Hybrid Cloud – Whether You Know It or Not
A Contributed Article by Vic Nyman, BlueStripe Software, Co-Founder
Too many times, buzzword reality doesn't match the hype. In IT, too many buzzword-driven technologies are never implemented - destined to invade our vocabulary but never make it to the raised floor. Fortunately, not only have Hybrid Cloud applications made it to the Data Center, they are changing the way IT Operations gets things done. In fact, Hybrid Cloud-based applications influence is so broad that your Operations team is probably running Hybrid Cloud apps already, even if they don't know it. There are several reasons Hybrid Cloud is starting to make a difference in IT Operations shops large and small.
First, a Hybrid Cloud environment can deliver the best of both worlds:
The hardest part of operating an application in a Hybrid Cloud environment isn't setting it up, or even connecting it to the back-end systems - its managing service performance, especially when problems occur. Having application components both on premise and in the cloud wreaks havoc on conventional monitoring tools. Cloud management tools don't see inside the Data Center and Data Center tools can't see into the Cloud.
The key is End-to-end Transaction Monitoring.
IT Operations teams must turn to Transaction Monitoring solutions that do more than simply monitor response times. To deal with the complexity of a Hybrid Cloud application, the monitoring tools must be able to trace transactions in the cloud and in the data center, while (this is the hard part) connecting them together for an end-to-end transaction view.
To help Operations teams understand these dependencies, application and transaction topology mapping is critical for both monitoring and problem solving. Finally, the tools must be able to adjust its maps and dependency knowledge in real-time because Cloud systems are so dynamic.
To learn more, you might enjoy a presentation by Forrester Cloud Expert David Bartoletti at http://bluestripe.com/hybrid-cloud-webinar.
Too many times, buzzword reality doesn't match the hype. In IT, too many buzzword-driven technologies are never implemented - destined to invade our vocabulary but never make it to the raised floor. Fortunately, not only have Hybrid Cloud applications made it to the Data Center, they are changing the way IT Operations gets things done. In fact, Hybrid Cloud-based applications influence is so broad that your Operations team is probably running Hybrid Cloud apps already, even if they don't know it. There are several reasons Hybrid Cloud is starting to make a difference in IT Operations shops large and small.
First, a Hybrid Cloud environment can deliver the best of both worlds:
- The flexibility of on-demand systems in a Public Cloud allowing scalable user access
- The security and control achieved by running back-end systems on premises in the data center
The hardest part of operating an application in a Hybrid Cloud environment isn't setting it up, or even connecting it to the back-end systems - its managing service performance, especially when problems occur. Having application components both on premise and in the cloud wreaks havoc on conventional monitoring tools. Cloud management tools don't see inside the Data Center and Data Center tools can't see into the Cloud.
The key is End-to-end Transaction Monitoring.
IT Operations teams must turn to Transaction Monitoring solutions that do more than simply monitor response times. To deal with the complexity of a Hybrid Cloud application, the monitoring tools must be able to trace transactions in the cloud and in the data center, while (this is the hard part) connecting them together for an end-to-end transaction view.
To help Operations teams understand these dependencies, application and transaction topology mapping is critical for both monitoring and problem solving. Finally, the tools must be able to adjust its maps and dependency knowledge in real-time because Cloud systems are so dynamic.
To learn more, you might enjoy a presentation by Forrester Cloud Expert David Bartoletti at http://bluestripe.com/hybrid-cloud-webinar.
APAC Organizations Choose Zerto Virtual Replication
To protect virtualized mission-critical business applications,
enterprises around the world are turning to hypervisor-based disaster
recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) solutions. The combination of
ease of use and the ability for end-users to protect workloads of all
sizes in the public, private or hybrid cloud enable Zerto customers
Seoul Daily News, EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc. and Comvita to
cost-effectively automate data replication and recovery, and bring
critical business operations back online following a data loss or
disaster. In order to meet the rapidly growing demand for effective
BC/DR in the region, Zerto recently opened an office located in Sydney,
Australia.
Zerto Virtual Replication replicates data at the hypervisor, rather than in physical storage, extending the benefits of datacenter virtualization to disaster recovery. Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication is the only complete BC/ DR solution as it delivers robust replication with fully automated orchestration such as simple failover, failback and DR testing. It is an easy to implement software-only solution that delivers the granularity required in today’s complex IT infrastructures, with the ability to protect at the VM-level.
“The adoption of Zerto Virtual Replication by these companies demonstrates that – regardless of physical location, cultural considerations or languages spoken – disaster recovery is a top priority for any enterprise, particularly those that cannot tolerate datacenter downtime,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto, Inc. “Zerto delivers on the promise of virtualization by extending the cost savings, flexibility and agility of virtualization to BC/DR.”
Seoul Daily News Delivers for Its Readership
As the oldest daily newspaper in Seoul, Korea, the Seoul Daily News is the primary source of information for more than 780,000 readers every day. The backbone of its IT infrastructure is Microsoft SQL Server, which enables the organization to deliver accurate news throughout the region. The Seoul Daily News turned to Zerto to protect its database, as well as its credibility. ZVR enables the organization to failover and quickly recover in the event of a natural disaster or power outage, as well as implement fast recovery from any hacking incident that could occur. ZVR helped Seoul Daily Newspaper meet its strict service levels – including a recovery point objective (RPO) of 20 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 60 minutes. Now, the organization is protected from any disaster, natural or otherwise.
“We have been doing live and test failovers with Zerto Virtual Replication within our environment and the results have exceeded our expectations,” said Bonyang Goo, Deputy Director, Seoul Daily News. “I am a very strong advocate for the solution as I work with it on a daily basis and find it to be not only a robust BC/DR solution, but also a very simple one. We evaluated many BC/DR products that have good features, however they did not meet all of the needs of our environment.”
Virtualized BC/DR Becomes the New Standard for EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc.
EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc., of Korea operates a large and modern fleet of vehicle carriers, with many of the world’s largest car brands as its customers. EUKOR relies on its IT infrastructure to manage its route network, minimize transit times, reduce costs and maintain high quality cargo-handling for its customers. While headquartered in Korea, EUKOR has operations and offices in 10 other countries, and maintaining aggressive IT service level agreements (SLAs) ensures that EUKOR continues to deliver superior customer service. The company virtualized its environment with the goal of improving its BC/DR processes, and though it had a high availability (HA) configuration, it lacked a true DR solution. After testing Zerto in a trial environment, the IT team was impressed with the power and simplicity of Zerto, and more importantly, Zerto Virtual Replication delivered an RPO and RTO that far exceeded the company’s requirements.
“Whenever we test, Zerto helps us rapidly recover the point that we choose. It is as excellent as it is simple. The efficiency and performance of Zerto is superior to its competitors,” said MR. Up Jung, deputy general manager, EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc. “With Zerto, we took another step towards our goals to become a leading company in the shipping industry.”
Comvita Protects its Private Cloud Investment
Comvita is a natural health and beauty products company with a strong focus on developing innovative products backed by scientific research. Based in New Zealand, Comvita exports its products to more than 18 countries through a network of wholesale and third-party outlets and online. The company has offices in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the United Kingdom. It implemented a private cloud configuration to maintain complete control over its IT capabilities while keeping a close eye on costs. Comvita was investigating a new approach to BC/DR and knew it did not want to install a storage area network (SAN) at a secondary site to provide array-based replication with its primary datacenter. The IT team saw that Zerto Virtual Replication was both easy-to-use and hardware agnostic. Zerto Virtual Replication not only delivered an RPO and RTO within Comvita’s requirements, it also made both application and DR testing extremely simple.
“We were very happy to find a solution that did not require a duplicate array on the target site. Like everyone else in IT, we are trying to do more with less, and Zerto Virtual Replication delivered the features we were looking for at the right price,” said Andrew Read, ICT manager, Comvita.
Zerto Virtual Replication replicates data at the hypervisor, rather than in physical storage, extending the benefits of datacenter virtualization to disaster recovery. Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication is the only complete BC/ DR solution as it delivers robust replication with fully automated orchestration such as simple failover, failback and DR testing. It is an easy to implement software-only solution that delivers the granularity required in today’s complex IT infrastructures, with the ability to protect at the VM-level.
“The adoption of Zerto Virtual Replication by these companies demonstrates that – regardless of physical location, cultural considerations or languages spoken – disaster recovery is a top priority for any enterprise, particularly those that cannot tolerate datacenter downtime,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto, Inc. “Zerto delivers on the promise of virtualization by extending the cost savings, flexibility and agility of virtualization to BC/DR.”
Seoul Daily News Delivers for Its Readership
As the oldest daily newspaper in Seoul, Korea, the Seoul Daily News is the primary source of information for more than 780,000 readers every day. The backbone of its IT infrastructure is Microsoft SQL Server, which enables the organization to deliver accurate news throughout the region. The Seoul Daily News turned to Zerto to protect its database, as well as its credibility. ZVR enables the organization to failover and quickly recover in the event of a natural disaster or power outage, as well as implement fast recovery from any hacking incident that could occur. ZVR helped Seoul Daily Newspaper meet its strict service levels – including a recovery point objective (RPO) of 20 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 60 minutes. Now, the organization is protected from any disaster, natural or otherwise.
“We have been doing live and test failovers with Zerto Virtual Replication within our environment and the results have exceeded our expectations,” said Bonyang Goo, Deputy Director, Seoul Daily News. “I am a very strong advocate for the solution as I work with it on a daily basis and find it to be not only a robust BC/DR solution, but also a very simple one. We evaluated many BC/DR products that have good features, however they did not meet all of the needs of our environment.”
Virtualized BC/DR Becomes the New Standard for EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc.
EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc., of Korea operates a large and modern fleet of vehicle carriers, with many of the world’s largest car brands as its customers. EUKOR relies on its IT infrastructure to manage its route network, minimize transit times, reduce costs and maintain high quality cargo-handling for its customers. While headquartered in Korea, EUKOR has operations and offices in 10 other countries, and maintaining aggressive IT service level agreements (SLAs) ensures that EUKOR continues to deliver superior customer service. The company virtualized its environment with the goal of improving its BC/DR processes, and though it had a high availability (HA) configuration, it lacked a true DR solution. After testing Zerto in a trial environment, the IT team was impressed with the power and simplicity of Zerto, and more importantly, Zerto Virtual Replication delivered an RPO and RTO that far exceeded the company’s requirements.
“Whenever we test, Zerto helps us rapidly recover the point that we choose. It is as excellent as it is simple. The efficiency and performance of Zerto is superior to its competitors,” said MR. Up Jung, deputy general manager, EUKOR Car Carriers, Inc. “With Zerto, we took another step towards our goals to become a leading company in the shipping industry.”
Comvita Protects its Private Cloud Investment
Comvita is a natural health and beauty products company with a strong focus on developing innovative products backed by scientific research. Based in New Zealand, Comvita exports its products to more than 18 countries through a network of wholesale and third-party outlets and online. The company has offices in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the United Kingdom. It implemented a private cloud configuration to maintain complete control over its IT capabilities while keeping a close eye on costs. Comvita was investigating a new approach to BC/DR and knew it did not want to install a storage area network (SAN) at a secondary site to provide array-based replication with its primary datacenter. The IT team saw that Zerto Virtual Replication was both easy-to-use and hardware agnostic. Zerto Virtual Replication not only delivered an RPO and RTO within Comvita’s requirements, it also made both application and DR testing extremely simple.
“We were very happy to find a solution that did not require a duplicate array on the target site. Like everyone else in IT, we are trying to do more with less, and Zerto Virtual Replication delivered the features we were looking for at the right price,” said Andrew Read, ICT manager, Comvita.
Red Hat Announces Certification for Containerized Applications, Extends Customer Confidence and Trust to the Cloud
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced the extension of its application
certification program to include containerized applications. The Red Hat
Container Certification ensures that application containers built
using Red Hat Enterprise Linux will operate seamlessly across
certified container hosts. Designed with the needs of independent
software vendors (ISVs), service providers and their enterprise
customers in mind, the certification extends the confidence
customers have with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which currently
supports thousands of certified applications, to certified
containers running on certified container hosts. The pending
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat’s OpenShift
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering will both be certified
container hosts, with Docker as a primary supported container format.
Linux Containers
Linux Containers have emerged as a key open source application packaging and delivery technology, combining lightweight application isolation with the flexibility of image-based deployment methods. Developers have rapidly embraced Linux Containers because they simplify and accelerate application deployment, while many PaaS platforms are built around Linux container technology, including OpenShift by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux implements Linux Containers using core technologies such as Control Groups (cGroups), Resource Management, SELinux, and network namespaces, enabling secure multi-tenancy and reducing the potential for security exploits.
Building on the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, application containers are deployed as software packages that include the application and all of its required runtime components. Benefits include:
The Red Hat Container Certification is the latest addition to Red Hat’s industry-leading certification portfolio that includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification is also part of a larger set of Red Hat technology initiatives which in turn support thousands of third party technology partners within Red Hat’s global ecosystem
To support this newly announced container certification, Red Hat is also announcing the container certification Partner Early Access Program (PEAP). The PEAP will run through late spring and provide the ability for ecosystem partners to participate in early testing, integration and feedback of the tools and resources required for containerization prior to the official launch of the certification and partner program, currently planned for mid-2014. Beginning today, companies interested in being part of the PEAP can learn more by visiting https://engage.redhat.com/content/enterprise-early-access-se-201402101640.
“Twelve years ago, Red Hat shook up the enterprise status quo with the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a safe, consistent Linux platform for the ISV ecosystem. Today, the trust that ISVs place in Red Hat Enterprise Linux can extend to containerized applications with the Red Hat Container Certification, ensuring that containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work as intended across certified hosts, delivering expanded application flexibility, lowered costs and simplified maintenance, all backed by the support and expertise expected from Red Hat.”-- Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat
"As the de facto standard in open source container technology, we are pleased to see Red Hat embracing the container movement as a means of application efficiency and consistency across computing footprints. By offering a container certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Docker, Red Hat is providing the industry’s only standardized, stable platform for commercial container workloads, providing a safe, reliable way to deliver the enterprise applications of the future.” -- Ben Golub, CEO, Docker
“Consistent with its mission of high value and affordability, Red Hat continues this trend through a supported platform that enables consistent enterprise-grade application deployment. We’re excited to work with Red Hat to provide customers a seamless database environment that is consistent from development to deployment, regardless of where it resides within the open hybrid cloud.” -- Matt Asay, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, MongoDB
Linux Containers
Linux Containers have emerged as a key open source application packaging and delivery technology, combining lightweight application isolation with the flexibility of image-based deployment methods. Developers have rapidly embraced Linux Containers because they simplify and accelerate application deployment, while many PaaS platforms are built around Linux container technology, including OpenShift by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux implements Linux Containers using core technologies such as Control Groups (cGroups), Resource Management, SELinux, and network namespaces, enabling secure multi-tenancy and reducing the potential for security exploits.
Building on the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, application containers are deployed as software packages that include the application and all of its required runtime components. Benefits include:
- Instant portability, deploy the certified application container across any certified container host
- Minimal footprint, avoid the overhead of virtual machine images which include a complete operating system
- Simplified maintenance, reduce the effort and risk by patching applications along with all of their dependencies
- Lowered development costs, develop, test and certify applications against a single runtime environment
The Red Hat Container Certification is the latest addition to Red Hat’s industry-leading certification portfolio that includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification is also part of a larger set of Red Hat technology initiatives which in turn support thousands of third party technology partners within Red Hat’s global ecosystem
To support this newly announced container certification, Red Hat is also announcing the container certification Partner Early Access Program (PEAP). The PEAP will run through late spring and provide the ability for ecosystem partners to participate in early testing, integration and feedback of the tools and resources required for containerization prior to the official launch of the certification and partner program, currently planned for mid-2014. Beginning today, companies interested in being part of the PEAP can learn more by visiting https://engage.redhat.com/content/enterprise-early-access-se-201402101640.
“Twelve years ago, Red Hat shook up the enterprise status quo with the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a safe, consistent Linux platform for the ISV ecosystem. Today, the trust that ISVs place in Red Hat Enterprise Linux can extend to containerized applications with the Red Hat Container Certification, ensuring that containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will work as intended across certified hosts, delivering expanded application flexibility, lowered costs and simplified maintenance, all backed by the support and expertise expected from Red Hat.”-- Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat
"As the de facto standard in open source container technology, we are pleased to see Red Hat embracing the container movement as a means of application efficiency and consistency across computing footprints. By offering a container certification on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Docker, Red Hat is providing the industry’s only standardized, stable platform for commercial container workloads, providing a safe, reliable way to deliver the enterprise applications of the future.” -- Ben Golub, CEO, Docker
“Consistent with its mission of high value and affordability, Red Hat continues this trend through a supported platform that enables consistent enterprise-grade application deployment. We’re excited to work with Red Hat to provide customers a seamless database environment that is consistent from development to deployment, regardless of where it resides within the open hybrid cloud.” -- Matt Asay, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, MongoDB
Check Point Collaborates With VMware to Provide Network Security for the Private Cloud
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.,
the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, today announced that the
company is collaborating with VMware to automate and simplify the
provisioning and deployment of network security in private clouds. Check
Point will make its security protection solutions interoperable with
VMware infrastructure.
As today’s data center moves quickly down the path of virtualization, it is important for security to keep pace with virtual environments. Virtualization has greatly increased the speed at which applications can be deployed, and delivers the added benefits of agility and mobility to meet changing business requirements. Network security for virtualized environments must match this speed and agility through automated security management and provisioning, while enabling seamless support for existing security operational processes and policy.
Check Point Virtual Edition (VE) is a unique security solution that provides comprehensive protections and rapid deployment of security services in virtualized environments. By closely aligning Check Point’s security with VMware vSphere® 5.5, organizations will benefit from a fully automated security solution for a VMware virtualized environment. Virtual machines will be safeguarded through the breadth of Check Point’s multi-layered security protections without changing network topology. Additionally, the interoperability of Check Point solutions and VMware vCloud® Suite will enable simplified and automatic virtual application protections.
“As enterprises deploy their network infrastructure in the cloud, having security services be provisioned quickly for these virtual environments is of utmost importance,” said Gabi Reish, vice president of product management at Check Point Software Technologies. “The collaboration with VMware enables strong protection for network security through the evolution of our customers’ virtual environments.”
Available in Q1 2014, the new Check Point VE is just one part of Check Point’s larger cloud and virtualization security strategy, which will bring further interoperability with VMware solutions.
“VMware is delivering virtualization solutions across compute, networking, storage and management designed to help customers accelerate the path to the software-defined data center,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president, networking and security at VMware. “The new release of Check Point Virtual Edition, when combined with the latest release of vSphere or our new VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, will offer our customers a simple solution to secure, manage and automate their virtualization and cloud environments..”
Features of the Check Point VE include:
For more information on Check Point VE and the collaboration with VMware, visit: http://www.checkpoint.com/products/security-gateway-virtual-edition/
As today’s data center moves quickly down the path of virtualization, it is important for security to keep pace with virtual environments. Virtualization has greatly increased the speed at which applications can be deployed, and delivers the added benefits of agility and mobility to meet changing business requirements. Network security for virtualized environments must match this speed and agility through automated security management and provisioning, while enabling seamless support for existing security operational processes and policy.
Check Point Virtual Edition (VE) is a unique security solution that provides comprehensive protections and rapid deployment of security services in virtualized environments. By closely aligning Check Point’s security with VMware vSphere® 5.5, organizations will benefit from a fully automated security solution for a VMware virtualized environment. Virtual machines will be safeguarded through the breadth of Check Point’s multi-layered security protections without changing network topology. Additionally, the interoperability of Check Point solutions and VMware vCloud® Suite will enable simplified and automatic virtual application protections.
“As enterprises deploy their network infrastructure in the cloud, having security services be provisioned quickly for these virtual environments is of utmost importance,” said Gabi Reish, vice president of product management at Check Point Software Technologies. “The collaboration with VMware enables strong protection for network security through the evolution of our customers’ virtual environments.”
Available in Q1 2014, the new Check Point VE is just one part of Check Point’s larger cloud and virtualization security strategy, which will bring further interoperability with VMware solutions.
“VMware is delivering virtualization solutions across compute, networking, storage and management designed to help customers accelerate the path to the software-defined data center,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president, networking and security at VMware. “The new release of Check Point Virtual Edition, when combined with the latest release of vSphere or our new VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, will offer our customers a simple solution to secure, manage and automate their virtualization and cloud environments..”
Features of the Check Point VE include:
- Interoperability with VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5, vCenter Server™, vCloud Suite and VMware NSX™ network virtualization
- Centralized security management for all Check Point virtual and physical security gateways
- Inspection of Inter-VM traffic without changing network topology
- Automated deployment and provisioning of Check Point’s VE gateways
- Automated protection of new virtual machines
- Use of VMware objects in Check Point policy rules
- Constant protection of VMs, regardless of IP address changes
- VM migration without breaking application connectivity
For more information on Check Point VE and the collaboration with VMware, visit: http://www.checkpoint.com/products/security-gateway-virtual-edition/
Thursday, March 6, 2014
CloudByte Software Upgrade Improves User Visibility Into Storage Metrics, Offers New Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers
CloudByte, the first company to provide dynamically selectable
storage performance on industry-standard hardware, announced today
a new release of its award-winning storage software, ElastiStor
1.3. The CloudByte software provides improved end-user visibility
into storage metrics and the ability to view the real-time status
of the CloudByte environment. It integrates with major
virtualization vendors and cloud stack environments and expands
certification of more hardware platforms.
“Without metrics that matter providing visibility insight into your storage environment usage and activity, you are flying blind,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisor, StorageIO. “By providing visibility and situational awareness, CloudByte helps their customers safely navigate and leverage their storage infrastructure in different conditions to avoid becoming a cloud performance, availability or economic barrier.”
Detailed storage reports and metrics that improve end-user visibility can be accessed from the CloudByte ElastiCenter console or conveniently from a mobile device, similar to the functionality of Amazon Cloud Watch. Another visibility feature is the standardization of a key performance measure – IOPS – across hardware platforms for improved billing consistency.
Integration enhancements include a new REST API set that can be used by service providers to seamlessly provide Virtual Machine-level IOPS provisioning and management directly from VMware vCenter. VM snapshots and clones can also be driven from vCenter. A new plug-in provides application-consistent snapshots for Microsoft SQL Server environments.
Environment support for this release includes:
“This release is in direct response to our service provider customers’ requests for functionality that directly allows them to increase market share,” said Felix Xavier, CloudByte CTO and founder. “Better end-user visibility, better integration, and broader environment support increase our customers’ ability to capture new enterprises and share of wallet of existing enterprises.”
For current customers, CloudByte ElastiStor 1.3 is immediately available from the CloudByte support website. A version that includes a free perpetual license for four terabytes of storage capacity can be downloaded from the Free Trial page.
“Without metrics that matter providing visibility insight into your storage environment usage and activity, you are flying blind,” said Greg Schulz, founder and senior advisor, StorageIO. “By providing visibility and situational awareness, CloudByte helps their customers safely navigate and leverage their storage infrastructure in different conditions to avoid becoming a cloud performance, availability or economic barrier.”
Detailed storage reports and metrics that improve end-user visibility can be accessed from the CloudByte ElastiCenter console or conveniently from a mobile device, similar to the functionality of Amazon Cloud Watch. Another visibility feature is the standardization of a key performance measure – IOPS – across hardware platforms for improved billing consistency.
Integration enhancements include a new REST API set that can be used by service providers to seamlessly provide Virtual Machine-level IOPS provisioning and management directly from VMware vCenter. VM snapshots and clones can also be driven from vCenter. A new plug-in provides application-consistent snapshots for Microsoft SQL Server environments.
Environment support for this release includes:
- OpenStack Cinder plugin support for the OpenStack Grizzly release
- A CloudByte IOPS management plugin for the CloudStack 4.3 release
- VMware block and file certifications
- CloudByte-certified hardware platforms : Dell PowerEdge Rx20 server series; HP ProLiant DL Rack Servers, Generation 8; and DataON Cluster-in-a-Box series
“This release is in direct response to our service provider customers’ requests for functionality that directly allows them to increase market share,” said Felix Xavier, CloudByte CTO and founder. “Better end-user visibility, better integration, and broader environment support increase our customers’ ability to capture new enterprises and share of wallet of existing enterprises.”
For current customers, CloudByte ElastiStor 1.3 is immediately available from the CloudByte support website. A version that includes a free perpetual license for four terabytes of storage capacity can be downloaded from the Free Trial page.
DataCore Unveils Industry's First Software-Defined Storage Benefits Calculator
DataCore, a leader in software-defined storage, today launched the
industry’s first software-defined storage benefits calculator, as a
part of its revamped website. By providing a few details about an
organization’s storage environment, the benefits calculator
instantly provides a personalized savings report, which details
the benefits of using DataCore for storage virtualization,
covering six categories:
DataCore partnered with Alinean – the leading ROI and TCO experts – to develop the software-defined storage benefits calculator. The calculator estimates savings based on: industry estimates for costs associated with downtime (planned and unplanned); the reduction of downtime customers experience after introducing DataCore; industry averages for the cost of storage and the staff to manage it; the improvement in the utilization of once stranded capacity is pooled, provisioned, cached and auto-tiered using DataCore; and the extended functional coverage that DataCore’s software-defined storage platform brings through infrastructure-wide services.
In addition to the benefits calculator, the DataCore website now features hundreds of real-world customer case studies from different industries and a number of new video testimonials demonstrating the real life benefits that customers are experiencing as a result of using DataCore. The most recent video testimonial highlights how Englewood Hospital reduced downtime, increased performance, improved IT responsiveness and decreased storage-related spending. The site also features a two minute video that exposes the secret that hardware vendors have been keeping from their customers for years – how software-defined storage will change the IT industry forever.
For more information and to view the revamped website please visit, www.datacore.com.
- Financial savings over five years
- Reduce downtime in hours
- Centralize management
- Pool tiered resources
- Reclaim free space (TBs)
- Extend functional coverage
DataCore partnered with Alinean – the leading ROI and TCO experts – to develop the software-defined storage benefits calculator. The calculator estimates savings based on: industry estimates for costs associated with downtime (planned and unplanned); the reduction of downtime customers experience after introducing DataCore; industry averages for the cost of storage and the staff to manage it; the improvement in the utilization of once stranded capacity is pooled, provisioned, cached and auto-tiered using DataCore; and the extended functional coverage that DataCore’s software-defined storage platform brings through infrastructure-wide services.
In addition to the benefits calculator, the DataCore website now features hundreds of real-world customer case studies from different industries and a number of new video testimonials demonstrating the real life benefits that customers are experiencing as a result of using DataCore. The most recent video testimonial highlights how Englewood Hospital reduced downtime, increased performance, improved IT responsiveness and decreased storage-related spending. The site also features a two minute video that exposes the secret that hardware vendors have been keeping from their customers for years – how software-defined storage will change the IT industry forever.
For more information and to view the revamped website please visit, www.datacore.com.
Nutanix Patent Ups the Ante in Software-Defined Storage Wars
Nutanix, the leading provider of next-generation datacenter
infrastructure solutions, today announced that it has been granted a
patent (US 8,601,473) from the United States Patent and Trademark
Office recognizing the company’s fundamental storage architecture
for virtualized datacenters, which not only obsoletes 20 year-old
storage area network (SAN) technology, but also challenges the
entire industry to design a next-generation storage architecture
with comparable performance and scalability. The patent provides
clarity as to how software-defined storage solutions are optimally
designed and implemented, while at the same time bringing the
technology into mainstream enterprises around the world.
Leveraging these documented inventions, Nutanix brings simplification to enterprise data centers by delivering scale-out storage services via software running on off-the-shelf x86 servers. Datacenter managers are now freed from rigid storage constructs and burdensome administrative tasks that have frustrated virtualization teams and slowed important business initiatives. Nutanix customers benefit from advanced web-scale technologies without sacrificing project velocity, data management or the freedom to choose the right hypervisor for their organization.
This patent demonstrates the company’s commitment to advancing the state of the art in data center technology and to simplifying how enterprise IT infrastructures are designed, built and managed. Specifically, it details how a system of distributed nodes (servers) provides high-performance shared storage to virtual machines (VMs) by utilizing a “Controller VM” that runs on each node. The Controller VMs aggregate the local storage resources across all servers, including direct-attached flash, and delivers a shared pool of data storage that is functionally equivalent to a SAN or NAS array – but with greater scalability and higher performance. The architecture natively delivers enterprise-class storage capabilities, such as snapshots, clones, compression and deduplication, to run any production workload.
“Nutanix has pioneered a radically simpler and more scalable storage architecture for all virtualized environments,” said Dr. Willy Zwaenepoel, professor and former dean at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. “This patent recognizes their technical vision and leadership while raising the stakes on other companies in the web-scale market.”
The Nutanix architecture also provides a unified data fabric for building hybrid clouds. Enterprise IT managers can leverage public cloud resources on-demand, while retaining the control and security of their private cloud infrastructure. This flexibility is made possible by a 100 percent software-driven architecture and implemented independent of any specific virtualization technology or vendor.
In addition to publicly disclosing important intellectual property, the patent also details Nutanix’s vision for how data centers will evolve in the cloud era. It is this powerful vision, captured nearly three years ago, which has driven the company’s leadership in the fast-growing web-scale and converged infrastructure markets. Highlights include:
Leveraging these documented inventions, Nutanix brings simplification to enterprise data centers by delivering scale-out storage services via software running on off-the-shelf x86 servers. Datacenter managers are now freed from rigid storage constructs and burdensome administrative tasks that have frustrated virtualization teams and slowed important business initiatives. Nutanix customers benefit from advanced web-scale technologies without sacrificing project velocity, data management or the freedom to choose the right hypervisor for their organization.
This patent demonstrates the company’s commitment to advancing the state of the art in data center technology and to simplifying how enterprise IT infrastructures are designed, built and managed. Specifically, it details how a system of distributed nodes (servers) provides high-performance shared storage to virtual machines (VMs) by utilizing a “Controller VM” that runs on each node. The Controller VMs aggregate the local storage resources across all servers, including direct-attached flash, and delivers a shared pool of data storage that is functionally equivalent to a SAN or NAS array – but with greater scalability and higher performance. The architecture natively delivers enterprise-class storage capabilities, such as snapshots, clones, compression and deduplication, to run any production workload.
“Nutanix has pioneered a radically simpler and more scalable storage architecture for all virtualized environments,” said Dr. Willy Zwaenepoel, professor and former dean at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. “This patent recognizes their technical vision and leadership while raising the stakes on other companies in the web-scale market.”
The Nutanix architecture also provides a unified data fabric for building hybrid clouds. Enterprise IT managers can leverage public cloud resources on-demand, while retaining the control and security of their private cloud infrastructure. This flexibility is made possible by a 100 percent software-driven architecture and implemented independent of any specific virtualization technology or vendor.
In addition to publicly disclosing important intellectual property, the patent also details Nutanix’s vision for how data centers will evolve in the cloud era. It is this powerful vision, captured nearly three years ago, which has driven the company’s leadership in the fast-growing web-scale and converged infrastructure markets. Highlights include:
- The modern data center must “…virtualize all storage hardware as one global resource pool that is high in reliability, availability and performance…” to eliminate islands of storage that are difficult to manage, and nearly impossible to scale.
- Unlike traditional network-based storage, the Nutanix architecture “…permits local storage that is within or directly attached to the server and/or appliance to be managed as part of the storage pool.” This enables enterprises to fully leverage server-attached flash technology, and avoid the end-to-end latency incurred when flash is added to centralized, network-based storage systems.
- Datacenter scalability will be driven by a “…massively-parallel storage architecture that scales as and when hypervisor hosts are added…” Such massive scalability can only be achieved if the storage infrastructure can be scaled independent of any hypervisor constraints.
- When storage resources are virtualized, they should be able to “…used in conjunction with any hypervisor from any virtualization vendor.”
Cloudinary Expands One-Stop Shop for Cloud-Based Image Management; Announces New Image Processing Add-Ons
Cloudinary,
the leading cloud-based image management platform, today
announced new and fully integrated image processing add-ons,
leveraging technologies by Imagga, ReKognition,
URL2PNG, Aspose, WebPurify and others. Used by
nearly 20,000 developers from more than 100 countries,
Cloudinary's new add-on offerings enable automatic image
moderation, image categorization, smarter image cropping, improved image
compression, advanced face attributes detection, website
screenshot generation and more through a single click
integration—building on the company's comprehensive online
solution for one-stop shop image management.
“Today's websites are very image rich and require an increased focus on user experience and accessibility on a wide range of devices,” said Paul Burns, president, Neovise. “Managing the image pipeline that supports this trend – from an image's initial upload to its final delivery and viewing – is challenging, time consuming and costly, both from a product, R&D and IT perspective. We are seeing many organizations investing considerable efforts into building and supporting in-house solutions to manage their image pipeline.”
Cloudinary's cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, with its rich API, delivers complete end-to-end image management, including image uploads, cloud-based storage, online administration, on-the-fly manipulation and optimized delivery, enabling developers to focus on building innovative applications, instead of supporting and managing image integration in-house. The newly available image processing add-ons can be used via simple API calls without requiring separate manual integration with each external service, delivering a seamless image rich Web and mobile experience.
The Cloudinary Experience
Designed by developers for developers, Cloudinary offers a comprehensive, highly customizable, scalable and affordable approach to image management. Cloudinary's benefits include:
General Availability and Pricing
Cloudinary's add-on features are available today. Cloudinary offers a fully featured free plan, in addition to paid plans that start at $39 per month and go up to enterprise plans that support millions of daily images.
“Today's websites are very image rich and require an increased focus on user experience and accessibility on a wide range of devices,” said Paul Burns, president, Neovise. “Managing the image pipeline that supports this trend – from an image's initial upload to its final delivery and viewing – is challenging, time consuming and costly, both from a product, R&D and IT perspective. We are seeing many organizations investing considerable efforts into building and supporting in-house solutions to manage their image pipeline.”
Cloudinary's cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, with its rich API, delivers complete end-to-end image management, including image uploads, cloud-based storage, online administration, on-the-fly manipulation and optimized delivery, enabling developers to focus on building innovative applications, instead of supporting and managing image integration in-house. The newly available image processing add-ons can be used via simple API calls without requiring separate manual integration with each external service, delivering a seamless image rich Web and mobile experience.
The Cloudinary Experience
Designed by developers for developers, Cloudinary offers a comprehensive, highly customizable, scalable and affordable approach to image management. Cloudinary's benefits include:
- One-Stop Shop: Designed to simplify the entire image management pipeline, Cloudinary offers a one-stop shop for developers. By including new add-on capabilities, Cloudinary is expanding on its image management vision and easing the hassle developers often face in creating a media rich Web and mobile user interface.
- Rich Image Manipulations: Cloudinary follows a single-source imaging concept, in which a single uploaded original image can be manipulated on-the-fly to best fit different graphic designs and devices, including smartphones, tablets and desktop browsers.
- Straightforward Integration: Cloudinary offers integration libraries for most Web development platforms and SDKs for iPhone and Android, as well as modern PaaS solutions, making it easy to get started managing images in the cloud.
- Dynamic Scale: Cloudinary offers plans for companies of all sizes, and currently is used by a variety of companies – both large and small – across numerous verticals.
General Availability and Pricing
Cloudinary's add-on features are available today. Cloudinary offers a fully featured free plan, in addition to paid plans that start at $39 per month and go up to enterprise plans that support millions of daily images.
SolarWinds Makes Powerful Network Monitoring Accessible to Masses
SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT
management software, today announced further enhancements to SolarWinds
Network Performance Monitor (NPM) that offer the robust network
performance monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities available in
'Big Four' enterprise software, but at an affordable,
unique-to-industry price. The latest SolarWinds NPM demonstrates a
continued commitment to simplifying network management in the datacenter
amidst increasingly complex network challenges.
"SolarWinds focuses on developing products that solve the everyday needs of all IT Professionals -- most of whom don't have deep pockets or time to spare installing or configuring software," said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. "And as technology advances and networks grow increasingly complex, SolarWinds must preserve our long-standing tradition of providing the powerful capabilities of enterprise-level software you might see in expensive 'Big Four' software, but without the need for professional services and at a price that nearly any organization can afford."
In keeping with the tradition of delivering advanced functionality at a market-differentiating price, SolarWinds NPM has added new baseline threshold calculating functionality, providing the deep visibility and advanced analytics not previously available to network administrators at such a price. Other features SolarWinds NPM was previously first to introduce to the market for a low cost include enterprise-level wireless support for LAN controllers and thin access points, monitoring for major routing protocols including OSPF and BGP, and a high-availability Failover Engine, all of which have differentiated SolarWinds NPM as a uniquely powerful, yet affordable, network monitoring solution.
New SolarWinds NPM Features
"thwack is second to none," said Ashley Cotter, applications engineer for Timico who evaluated an early version of SolarWinds NPM's latest features. "I voted for the new baseline threshold alerting and it's now included in the software. I can ask SolarWinds senior developers technical questions on a peer level and I know I'm actively impacting SolarWinds product development, and that's just not something I've seen anywhere else."
Pricing and Availability SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor pricing starts at $2,675 and includes the first year of maintenance. For more information, including a downloadable, free 30-day evaluation, visit the SolarWinds website or call 866.530.8100.
"SolarWinds focuses on developing products that solve the everyday needs of all IT Professionals -- most of whom don't have deep pockets or time to spare installing or configuring software," said Chris LaPoint, VP Product Management, SolarWinds. "And as technology advances and networks grow increasingly complex, SolarWinds must preserve our long-standing tradition of providing the powerful capabilities of enterprise-level software you might see in expensive 'Big Four' software, but without the need for professional services and at a price that nearly any organization can afford."
In keeping with the tradition of delivering advanced functionality at a market-differentiating price, SolarWinds NPM has added new baseline threshold calculating functionality, providing the deep visibility and advanced analytics not previously available to network administrators at such a price. Other features SolarWinds NPM was previously first to introduce to the market for a low cost include enterprise-level wireless support for LAN controllers and thin access points, monitoring for major routing protocols including OSPF and BGP, and a high-availability Failover Engine, all of which have differentiated SolarWinds NPM as a uniquely powerful, yet affordable, network monitoring solution.
New SolarWinds NPM Features
- Dynamic baseline threshold calculation defines critical network device thresholds based on historical network performance data, enabling users to configure alerts simply and accurately. It automatically gathers baseline data for specified time intervals (weekly or daily) to determine normal operating parameters and calculates thresholds with relevant alerts - good, warning, critical, or down - which allow IT Pros to quickly assess whether a device is up and performing poorly or is about to fail.
- Custom NOC views provide the ability to easily configure and display real-time fault, performance, and availability dashboards tailored to the needs of a network operations center (NOC) of any size.
- Dynamic customizable network mapping enables IT Pros to drag and drop network devices into network maps and automatically view real-time and color-coded link utilization for fully customized and detailed insight into network health beyond up-down status. The Network Weather Map's dynamic link utilization helps IT Pros identify when the network is approaching critical thresholds so they can prevent network errors and downtime.
- Enhancements to the universal device poller feature allow users to easily add a CPU and memory utilization chart in the SolarWinds NPM dashboard for additional uncommon devices, and includes those new device statistics in monitoring and reporting.
- Support for additional routing protocols and added support for Ruckus and Motorola wireless controllers and devices enable broader network monitoring for IT Pros.
"thwack is second to none," said Ashley Cotter, applications engineer for Timico who evaluated an early version of SolarWinds NPM's latest features. "I voted for the new baseline threshold alerting and it's now included in the software. I can ask SolarWinds senior developers technical questions on a peer level and I know I'm actively impacting SolarWinds product development, and that's just not something I've seen anywhere else."
Pricing and Availability SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor pricing starts at $2,675 and includes the first year of maintenance. For more information, including a downloadable, free 30-day evaluation, visit the SolarWinds website or call 866.530.8100.
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