Virtual Bridges joins OpenStack Foundation as Corporate Sponsor

On February 18, Virtual Bridges provider of desktop virtualization solution, announced to have become Corporate Sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, the organization which aims to develop and distribute the OpenStack cloud operating system. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Austin, Texas. Virtual Bridges focuses on VDI and desktop virtualization, delivering solutions either on-premises or in the cloud.

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Release: Xervmon Management and Monitoring suite

Xervmon, a start up headquartered in Houston with development center in India, provider of a integrated cloud management tool, announced the availability of its product: Xervmon Management & Monitoring Suite, supporting the administration of public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Rackspace Cloud, Digital Ocean and HP Cloud System Matrix.

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Cloud Cruiser adds Windows Azure cost analysis

Cloud Cruiser is a cost analysis tool targeted at enterprises and service providers. It provides features like showback, chargeback, reporting. It is able to compare different cloud platforms on costs and shows cost savings if workloads are shifted to a different platform. This feature is called the Hybrid IT cost advisor.

Cloud Cruiser is now able to provide insight in costs of using public Windows Azure in addition to the  current support of Windows Azure Pack running in private clouds.

Using  hybrid cloud infrastructures organizations have a choice where to deploy a workload. Either  in their private cloud or in a public cloud.  Cloud Cruiser can help making the decision. It can compare costs of resources like websites, virtual machines, storage, databases and networking. Supported platforms are besides Microsoft public and private clouds: HP, Cisco, Amazon Web Services and OpenStack.

See a video of hybrid cost advisor here.

Datadog raises $15M in funding

Privately held, venture funded company based in New York Datadog, announced to have raised $15 million in a Series B round led by OpenView Venture Partners with investments from Index Ventures, RTP Ventures, Amplify Partners, IA Ventures and Contour Ventures.

Datadog is provider of monitoring services that grants to unify the infrastructure, gathering together metrics and events from servers, databases, appications on a Saas data analytics platform.

Datadog’s product enables a single view on premise and cloud, it combines metrics and events across the full Dev/Ops Stacks, it can be integrated among others tools and services, with Pivotal and Puppet. The company announced that it is aiming to use this funding to develop a new monitoring platform with highly scalable cloud infrastructure.

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Windows Azure adds two compute intensive instances featuring Infiniband connections

Microsoft added two new instances which are targeted at high performance computing. Instance called A8 has 8 virtual cores with 56 GB of internal memory. Instance A9 has 16 virtual cores with 112 GB of memory.

In addition both A8 and A9 instance have a 40Gbit/s InfiniBand network that includes remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology for maximum efficiency of parallel MPI applications. This powers  high performance applications that require a low latency and high throughput communication between compute instances.

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Paper: VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 Reference Architecture

VMware has released a paper titled: "VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0 Reference Architecture", the paper which contains 21 pages provides recommendations about deployment topology, hardware specifications and scalability for vCloud Automation Center version 6.0, vCloud Application Director version 6.0 and IT Business Management Suite Standard Edition version 1.0. The paper provides recommendations for small, medium and large deployement scenario’s.

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Microsoft joins Open Compute Project

Microsoft has announced that it will contribute to the Open Compute Project a community whose mission is to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware designs for scalable computing . Microsoft will contribute cloud server specifications, which cover the hardware used by Microsoft te deliver cloud services like Windows Azure, Office 365, Bing and others. More information about the specification can be found here.

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Microsoft reduces storage pricing for Windows Azure

Microsoft last week announced that it will lower storage prices in Windows Azure, in order to match the storage prices from Amazon, which announced reduction of storage prices earlier this month. Microsoft promised to match Amazon Web Services prices for services like compute, storage and bandwidth in April this year.

Per March 13, Microsoft will lower the prices for Block Blobs Storage with 20 % and Disks/Page Blobs Storage with 28% also Azure Storage transactions will be reduced by 50%.

IBM invests $1.2 Billion to expand its Cloud Footprint, sells x86 server business to Lenovo

IBM last week announced that it will commit over $ 1.2 billion in order to expand its global cloud footprint. IBM plans to have cloud facilities in major geographies and key financial centers expanding from 15 to 40 data centers worldwide. It will open data centers in Washington D.C., Hong Kong, London, Japan, India, China, Canada, Mexico and Dallas also it wants to expand to the Middle East and Africa in 2015. In order to achieve this IBM will use the technology which it acquired when buying Softlayer paying $2 billion in July last year. In order to expand its presence IBM has created a new business unit called the Watson Group, which will focus on development and commercialization of cloud-delivered innovations.

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Tech: Windows Server 2012 R2 Private Cloud Virtualization and Storage Posters

Microsoft has made available for download the Windows Server 2012 R2 Private Cloud Virtualization and Storage Poster and Mini-Posters. The posters provide a visual reference for understanding key private cloud storage and virtualization technologies in Windows Server 2012 R2.

The posters focus on understanding storage architecture, virtual hard disks, cluster shared volumes, scale-out file servers, storage spaces, data deduplication, Hyper-V, Failover Clustering, and virtual hard disk sharing.

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