Year: 2014

Cisco announced on September 17 to be intentioned to acquire Metacloud. Metacloud, was founded in 2011 in Pasadena, California, and provides a managed OpenStack-based product called Carbon|OS that, running on existing hardware, allows to run a private cloud “on premises” (as the company says).

Apparently Cisco’s new acquisition which should be completed in the Q1 2015, is aimed to provide its customers with Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform integrated on Cisco’s Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services solution, which is based on OpenStack open source software, this acquisition will help the Californian company to accelerate its Intercloud strategy.

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Last week the New York times published an article titled: “EMC explores selling stake in VMware“. While the news that EMC is exploring selling VMware is not new though. Paul Singer, CEO of Elliot Management Corporation who has a stake in EMC has been pressuring EMC to exit the 80% stake it has in VMware.

The option that HP might be interested in buying VMware is quite interesting though, even though the New York times doesn’t name its source. HP Both EMC and HP decline to comment as expected.

EMC acquired VMware in 2004.

Cloudyn, the company headquartered in Tel-Aviv, founded 2011, provider of a solution for cloud monitoring and optimization announced to have raised $ 4 million in its first institutional round of financing led by Titanian Investments, along with existing investors RDSeed.

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Two weeks ago we were wondering about Brian Stevens, who resigned as Red Hat’s CTO, asking ourselves if this could be seen as a “tremendous opportunity” for both.

Red Hat has not yet released any official news about its CTO office, on the other side, according to his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, Stevens has joined Google as VP of Cloud Platforms.

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Yesterday HP announced to have reached a definitive agreement to acquire Eucalyptus, provider of an open source Cloud Solution competing with OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula.

This acquisition will put the Eucalyptus CEO, Marten Mickos, in charge of the company’s cloud business unit, based on HP Helion portfolio that leverages OpenStack technology.

The economic terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and the press release only stresses how Eucalyptus will provide a valuable experience with private clouds deployments that also interoperate with Amazon AWS, where actually Eucalyptus products have always demonstrated a good maturity degree.

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Microsoft last week announced a limited preview of Migration Accelerator (MA) for Azure. MA can seamlessly migrate physical, VMware, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Hyper-V workloads into Azure, automating discovery of source workloads, remote agent installation, network adaptation and endpoint configuration. MA is based on the technology which Microsoft received when it acquired InMage in July this year.

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On September 3, Amazon announced that Chief Financial Officer Thomas Szkutak plans to retire in June 2015 after about 13 years in the business, beginning in October 2002, where he was and still is in charge of treasury, investor relations, tax, internal audit and facilities functions as well as financial management of the company’s business units.

The manager will be replaced by Brian Olsavsky, which currently is Vice President of Finance of Amazon responsible of the global consumer business, reporting to Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.

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This is a guest post by Debra Shinder, also included in virtualization.info’s Tech Talks section.

Your SQL server database most likely holds some of your business’s most important mission-critical information, the loss of which could be catastrophic. You undoubtedly back up that data regularly – but if you’re keeping those backups on premises, a natural disaster such as a tornado or flood or explosion could still leave you in the lurch.

One big advantage of the cloud is that it makes it easier than ever to make and maintain off-premises backups that will be safe even in the face of such a calamity. In a Windows shop, Microsoft Azure is frequently the “cloud of choice.” Microsoft Azure can be the basis for your business continuity plan.

If you have a Microsoft Azure subscription with an Azure Storage account, you’re good to go, but there are a few things that you’ll need to do in order to enable backing up your SQL server databases to the Azure cloud. Blobs are one of the three types of data that you can store in Azure Storage. What you need to do now is log into the Azure Management Portal and create a Microsoft Azure Blob Storage container.

Now luckily, you don’t have to figure out how to copy the SQL data to your Azure Blob Storage container manually, because Microsoft provides tools that simplify the process. If you’re running Microsoft SQL Server 2014, you have it made. You can use the Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure tool in the SQL Server Management Studio.

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ManageIQ was acquired from Red Hat in December 2012 with the plan to release its flagship cloud management platform under maintenance as CloudForms and as an open source project retaining the original name.

Yesterday Red Hat announced the first open source GA release called ManageIQ Anand, introducing a naming convention bonded to chess grandmasters, introducing the following features:

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Just before the beginning of VMworld 2014 VMware announced the rebranding of its owned and operated public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) into the more friendly and Apple-like VMware vCloud Air.

This announcement prepared the ground for a couple of new services and features unveiled on-stage last week and summarized as follows:

• vCloud Air Mobile Development Services: VMware introduces a set of pre-validated solutions, specifically focused on the mobile landscape, accessibile from vCloud Air:

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