Californian HG Data , announced on March 13, to have raised $2 million in funding led by EPIC Ventures. The investment apparently is going to be used to increase coverage of the company’s cloud-based business intelligence database and expand into the Asia-Pacific region.
Year: 2013
Microsoft starts offering System Center Advisor for free
Microsoft last week announced that it will offer System Center Advisor for free to its customers. System Center Advisor is a cloud service that enables IT Professionals to proactively avoid problems resulting from server configuration issues. It can help you resolve issues faster by providing access to current and historical configuration data for a deployment. Additionally, System Center Advisor reduces downtime by providing suggestions for improvement and notifying users of key updates specific to their configuration.
VMware announces vCloud Hybrid Service
VMware today announced the vCloud Hybrid Service to be available later this year. It also announced a new Hybrid Cloud Services business unit let by Bill Fathers who is appointed Senior Vice President (SVP) and general manager. Fathers, was President of Savvis, a premier managed hosting and colocation provider. vCloud Hybrid Service provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from the cloud providing a common management, orchestration, networking and security model and will be delivered by VMware’s partner ecosystem.
Oracle acquires Nimbula
Today, March 13 2013, Oracle announced that has reached an agreement to acquire Nimbula, a company (formerly Benguela) founded in 2008 by Chris Pinkham and Willem van Biljon, both formerly Amazon executives, who initiated and developed EC2.
Nimbula, that joined OpenStack Community in October 2012, offers a cloud management software called Nimbula Director that now reached version 2.0 with full API compatibility for OpenStack.
In the announcement Oracle defines Nimbula’s product “complementary to Oracle, and is expected to be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings“, we can assume that the goal of the acquisition is to strengthen Oracle’s cloud strategy that has proved to be at least “improvable“.
Paper: VMware vCloud Architecture Toolkit 3.1
VMware has updated its vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) to version 3.1. This update includes updates on topics like vCloud Connector and Chargeback, Operating a Cloud and vShield to Networking and Security including VXLAN.
The vCloud Architecture Toolkit is a set of reference documents which can help to construct a cloud computing and virtualized solution based on VMware technology. It provides detailed descriptions of complete cloud and virtualized solutions, along with comprehensive operational guidelines. The explanations are backed by sample deployments based on hundreds of real-world enterprise and service provider utilizations.
The vCat can be downloaded from VMware after registration on their website.
Veeam extends support to VMware vCloud Director
Today Veeam announced that its Veeam Backup & Replication is extending its support for VMware vCloud Director.
Veeam Backup & Replication will use vCloud Director API to display the managed infrastructures directly in its dashboard, backup all vApp metadata and attributes, restore vApps and VMs directly to vCloud Director and will support the restore of fast-provisioned VMs.
vCloud Director support will be available in Veeam Backup & Replication v7 as a single integrated solution (VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V are now supported), which is expected to be generally available in the third quarter of 2013.
Amazon releases beta of application managemenent solution called OpsWorks
Amazon last year acquired Peritor which provided an application control and automation solution called Scalarium. Today Amazon announced the rebranded solution called OpsWorks available in beta. OpsWorks is an application management solution for the complete lifecycle of complex applications, including resource provisioning, configuration management, deployment, monitoring, and access control. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, AWS OpsWorks enables developers to orchestrate all tasks required to model, deploy, scale, and maintain their applications
Paper: Rackspace Private Cloud Open Reference Architectures for OpenStack
Rackspace, the IT hosting and cloud computing company and co-founder of Openstack has released three private cloud reference architectures powered by OpenStack. Rackspace firmly believes that Open Reference Architectures provide an essential step towards achieving cloud maturity. Besides the reference architecture, Rackspace also developed the Rackspace Private Cloud Certification Toolkit, allowing customers to validate the functionality of an OpenStack private cloud
Tech: VMware vCloud Suite poster
VMware has published a poster of the vCloud Suite, giving a clear overview of the products in the suite and the features of each product.The poster can be downloaded in PDF format from the VMware website, other posters coming from VMware can be found here: http://vmware.com/go/Posters
IBM announced New PureSystems Offerings
On February 5, IBM announced the release of major advances to its PureSystems family.
PureSystems is part of IBM SmartCloud offerings, enterprise’s cloud computing technologies and services that allow to build and scale private and hybrid clouds.