Year: 2013

Cupertino based Xangati, provider of a software that tracks performance storms for virtualization and cloud environments announced to have raised $11M in funding led by HighBar Partners with participation from Citrix. Xangati, which is derived from the Sanskrit word “Sangati” and means community or gathering together with the highest intention of learning, is a company founded in 2006 with the aim to deliver live performance management which detect and correct performance problematic bottlenecks.

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On the first day of the OpenStack Summit, Red Hat Inc. the company responsible for the creation and maintenance of the homonymous GNU/Linux distribution announced the release of its cloud management platform named Red Hat CloudForms 3.0. The product is based on Red Hat’s acquisition of ManageIQ in 2012, and it is supposed to add enterprise-grade cloud management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and improved management capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
CloudForms offers management capabilities for different infrastructure platforms, from VMware vSphere to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon AWS.

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This year the OpenStack Summit is taking place in Hong Kong, starting from November 5 till the 8, the future of the cloud is going to be discussed there and the future of OpenStack as well probably. According to the agenda, the OpenStack Summit is going to offer to the partecipats from feature case studies to hands-on workshops and technical sessions for cloud operators and developers.

Among the partecipants Huawei, Chinese global information and communications technology solutions provider, together with Hitachi and provider of OpenStack in Australia and Aptira, are OpenStack Foundation Gold members.

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Citrix yesterday announced a Tech Preview of a Service Template for System Center Virtual Machine Manager capable of installing Citrix XenDesktop using the service template functionality provided by System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Citrix has developed the template in cooperation with Dell which will release this as part of the Dell DVS Enterprise for Citrix XenDesktop solution expected this quarter.

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Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, formerly known as Extility, enables service providers to build a multi-level reseller model and perfectly fits in the growing market of public cloud services.

With version 4 this highly mature platform introduces this new features:

1. Direct support for the Chef configuration management tool from Opscode, including integration with Flexiant’s Blueprint technology, Bento Boxes, enabling powerful new use cases.
2. General availability for Ceph, a distributed block store storage system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability, ensuring Flexiant now supports all common storage modals.

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Once every two to three weeks Microsoft releases new enhancements to Windows Azure. Today annoucements were:

• Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts
• Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs
• HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud
• Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support
• Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions

• TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services
• Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services
• Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics
• Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define

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Big Data is a trendy topic in this period, Microsoft just announced its Hadoop solution and now global cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, an IBM company acquired last July, together with Cloudera, the analytic data management Apache Hadoop-based company, announced on October 28 the release of a turnkey data centre, multi-server SoftLayer infrastructure big data solution running Cloudera platform. The on-demand solutions are built on bare metal servers manufactored for Cloudera, in order to deliver better performance profiles and designed and deployed through SoftLayer’s solution designer tool.
The objective of the collaboration was to create a product easy to design and deploy with Cloudera applications on-demand and in real-time through SoftLayer’s web-based Solution Design, portal and API. Cloudera provides the management platform based on Apache Hadoop, and SoftLayer provides the infrastructure, this would allow respective customers to have the possibility to have the power and flexibility of Cloudera with the convenience of cloud infrastructure.

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Microsoft big data offering called HDinsight, announced at the end of 2011 and publicly previewed in October 2012, is now general available.

Windows Azure HDInsight as the service is called enables customers to use Apache Hadoop without having to invest in own infrastructure and time to setup the software.

Hadoop is one of the most popular open-source tools to analyse lots of unstructured data from several sources. Big Data, or data mining, is used by many organizations to predict for example behaviour and respond to that.

Netflix, the US company who offers movies and tv-series online analyses the actions and choices of customers to better predict what kind of movies the customer likes. If the system is so intelligent to know the taste of the customer, chances are high the customer will order that suggested movie.

The NSA is a big users of Hadoop. They probably will use the meta data of telephone calls to see what patterns are suspicious.

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Microsoft is developing its Cloud OS vision into real solutions and supported scenario’s. Cloud OS means both on-premise services and cloud services are managed from a single pane of glass and are seamless connected. Cloud OS software components are Windows Server, System Center and Windows Azure. Infrastructure components are Azure datacenters, Service Provider datacenters and customer managed on-premise datacenters.

Microsoft now supports managing Windows Azure Virtual Machines using System Center Configuration Manager SP1 or later and System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection SP1 or later.

In one supported scenario the customer is running the System Center components on-premise while agents are deployed to the Azure Virtual Machines. Another supported scenario is where all servers are running in Windows Azure.

The table below shows the supported features for both scenario’s.

More information in this Microsoft blog.

Yesterday, October 21, Mirantis one of the main OpenStack vendors and founding board member of the OpenStack foundation, announced the release and general availability of Mirantis OpenStack, its new OpenStack distribution that is going to deliver a support for multiple hypervisors, multiple operating systems and a multiple plug-in partner framework, allowing its users to adopt the solution preferred, backing three correlated OpenStack projects, such as Fuel, Savanna and Murano.
Mirantis OpenStack distribution on the Havana is planned to be released after November 11, 2013 from the Mirantis web site. A part from related Openstack projects and third party plug-ins, the distribution also incorporate core OpenStack components, aiming to create a single, open source commercially-supported package.

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