Red Hat announces the Cloud Suite for Applications

Red Hat yesterday announced a new Suite which bundles its cloud portfolio to manage both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) workloads. The suite, which is called the Cloud Suite for Applications contains Red Hat Enterprise Linux Openstack Platform (RHELOSP) as the IaaS engine, OpenShift by Red Hat as the PaaS engine and Red Hat CloudForms to provide an unified management layer. The Cloud Suite for Applications will first be made available in an early access program. General availability for Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications will be announced at a later date.

The Cloud Suite will complement, as a commercial bundle, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) which includes Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and an optional Red Hat Enterprise Linux unlimited guests, where the Cloud Suite will basically add OpenShift as a different entry point to implement cloud-native capabilities on premises. CloudForms will be more integrated with OpenShift in order to manage the Container based workloads.

Read more

Infographic: OpenStack adoption in Italy

The IT roadmap throughout the digital transformation process is a journey, long and complex, and must not be underestimated. Like any other journey it starts with a first step which most organizations have identified as implementing an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service model.

This is convenient both from a technical and cultural standpoints.

OpenStack Survey thumbnail

We are living in the era of “seamless user experience”, in other words, we have the ability to follow our customers through many different touchpoints both online and offline, recognizing and empowering them through many new services offered in the cloud.

Read more

Release: OpenStack Kilo

OpenStack Foundation has released the 11th version of its IaaS platform for public, private and hybrid clouds. This version has 400 new features and includes input from 1,492 contributors representing 169 companies.

The Kilo release, where K is the eleventh letter of the alphabet, includes the first full release of Ironic, a service that can be used to provision directly on bare metal, in addition to VMs.

According to OpenStack, Ironic is already at production stage in some companies, including in Rackspace’s OnMetal managed cloud offering, but with the new release it’s finally ready for broader adoption.

Read more

Release: Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack – UPDATED

Microsoft Logo

Microsoft has released Update Rollup 6 for the following products within the System Center 2012 R2 suite: Service Manager (SCSM), Operations Manager (SCOM), Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and Service Provider Foundation (SPF)

The following updates are available:

Besides fixing serveral issues, the Update Rollups which Microsoft provide also introduce new functionality in some cases. By adding functionality to the current product Microsoft eases the pain for customers who want new functionality but don’t want to wait for the next version of System Center which is still expected in 2016.

Read more

Release: Docker Engine 1.6

Docker Logo

Docker has released version 1.6 of its container virtualization solution, Docker Engine. Also updates for Registry, Compose, Swarm and Machine and a preview of a client for Microsoft Windows were released.

The Docker Engine contains the following new features:

  • Container and Image Labels, which allow attachment of user-defined metadata
  • Logging Drivers, which can send container logs to other systems such as Syslog or other Third Party logging Systems
  • Content Addressable Image Identifiers, which allows you to pull, run, build and refer to images using a Digest.
  • Specify ulimit for all containers
  • Ability to make changes to images on the fly without having to re-build the entire image.

Read more

Release: Piston CloudOS 4.0

On April 6, Californian Piston Cloud Computing announced the newest release of  its operating system for data center Piston CloudOS 4.0. The main highlights of this version are the ability to deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal and the planned support also for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

Read more

Docker raises $95 million in Series D funding

Docker Logo

Docker, provider of the Docker container virtualization platform has announced that it has raised $ 95 million in a series D funding round. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with new contributions from Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round.

The series D funding follows the series C funding from September last year, where Docker raised $ 40 million. Docker itself states that it doesn’t have an imminent need for additional financing, but wants to be ready for the next several years to come.

OpenStack startup Nebula goes out of business

One of the most commented news lately has been that Nebula, the open source cloud computing startup founded by Chris Kemp, former NASA CTO, shut down on April 1st, April Fools’ Day, what an unfortunate coincidence. Nebula has been one of the players in the OpenStack world since the very beginning.

The company published on its website an announcement where the management team broadcast about ceasing operations, thanking its team and clients, reassuring its customers that private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally but support will no longer be available, encouraging to shuffle alternatives such as HP, IBM and Red Hat.

Read more

Microsoft releases technical preview for VMware workload support by Azure Site Recovery – UPDATED

Microsoft Logo

Last week Microsoft announced new features for its Azure Backup solution. Azure Backup is a Microsoft solution which protects files and folders by providing multiple copies in multiple geographies. It integrates seamlessly with System Center Data Protection Manager (SCDPM) in order to protect Microsoft workloads. It can also perform online backups of Windows and Linux IaaS VMs, a functionality which is now in technical preview.

Read more