Tag Archives: Cloud

You Can Find Me in the Cloud with HubStor

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It’s funny. The last thing I posted here was on January 1st. In it, I mentioned that 2019 had been a hard year. How foolish I was before 2020 came into its own…

In the midst of whatever all of 2020 will continue to bring, I’m pleased to be able to report some good news. I’m employed again — much faster than I was during my either of my last two rounds of job searching. In all, one month passed from the day I was informed that my position had been re-organized out of existence to my first day at the new job. Continue reading →

Microsoft Enters Agreement to Purchase Avere Systems

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had entered into an agreement to purchase Avere Systems, a maker of software and hardware appliances that can perform filesystem virtualization, file-to-object gateway services, and allow customers to easily connect their onsite storage to public cloud storage.

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been a big fan of the Avere platform. In my reseller days, I was involved in a few deals on solutions and designs involving Avere filers.

If you’re not familiar with Avere, you can read these quick overviews of their cloud gateway capabilities, their virtual filer, and their complete onsite storage solution.

Avere Systems customers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, John Hopkins University, and Sony Corporation’s entertainment division. (I’m fairly familiar with how two of those three customers are employing their Avere filers.)

If I were to sum up what the Avere filers provide for customers, it would be that they provide the performance of local (onsite) storage for data that’s stored remotely (offsite). Clients access the Avere systems front-end using either the NFS or SMB protocols. The back-end can connect to multiple storage sources using either NFS, SMB, S3, or some combination. The Avere filers present clients with a single global namespace, meaning the client has no knowledge of where the data’s source actually is. Data can be migrated between sources on the Avere’s back-end with no interruption of service to clients connecting to the front-end.

With the virtual filers, Avere can also allow offsite compute clients in the cloud to access data in a customer’s private onsite data center…

In all, it’s not difficult to see why Microsoft might want to acquire them — especially since they’ve announced their intent to move it into their Azure division. What’s surprising, really, is that no other cloud provider saw Avere as an acquisition target earlier.

If Microsoft is able to incorporate that ability to have cloud computing resources accessing data from private onsite data centers into Azure, it will be a big differentiator for them as no other cloud providers currently offer a similar capability.

At this time, there’s been no news regarding the purchase price. Estimates and specualtion range from $300 Million to $500 Million. If true, compared to the potential Avere’s intellectual property has to add to a cloud service provider, this could turn out to have been quite the bargain for Microsoft.

Today, Avere Systems supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform. Obviously we should expect closer integration with Azure in the future, but Microsoft says they’ll continue to support AWS and Google, which I’m sure is welcome news to existing Avere Customers.

Resources

 

The Virtustream MicroVM

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Very soon after I joined Virtustream, I quickly realized that one piece of Virtustream technology in particular was something that was causing confusion for customers, prospects, and even employees — especially me as our group’s FNG (you know, the group’s New Guy).

That technology was Virtustream MicroVMTM — often abbreviated as µVMTM. There has been so much confusion about what the MicroVM is — and how it works — that a lot of folks didn’t seem to understand the full benefits that Virtustream MicroVM can provide.

The short version is that MicroVMs are what enables customers to use Virtustream Enterprise Cloud in a true pay-as-you-go consumption model. I’ll get into the longer version in just a little bit. Continue reading →

VMware Names First vExpert Cloud Recipients

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On Friday, VMware announced the recipients of their first-ever vExpert Cloud designation. This will be called “vExpert Cloud 2017”.

This is the third specialization added to the long-running vExpert program, after vExpert VSAN and vExpert NSX. Already holding a current vExpert designation is a prerequisite for any of the specialty vExpert programs.

What is a vExpert? Well, in VMware’s own words, they are people who have:

demonstrated significant contributions to the community and a willingness to share their expertise with others. Contributing is not always blogging or Twitter as there are many public speakers, book authors, scriptwriters, VMUG leaders, VMTN community moderators and internal champions

I am very proud to have my name included on this first-ever list of vExpert Cloud recipients. I am humbled and a bit nervous to have my name included on this first-ever list of vExpert Cloud recipients… I feel like I’ve been given something that I now have to earn and live up to.

You can see the full list of 134 VMware vExpert Cloud 2017 designees here.

 

Aparavi Emerges From Stealth with an SaaS Solution for a Multi-Cloud World

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Yesterday, Aparavi, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-up company, emerged from stealth with a SaaS offering for managing long-term data retention in a multi-cloud world.

The company says their name is derived from the Latin word apparare which means “to prepare”. Now, I’ve never had any formal training in Latin, but my own research suggests that apparare is actually a noun that is more accurately translated as “preparations”, so it’s still in the neighborhood they were shooting for. (There are some readers asking themselves right now: “Was that bit of nit-picking really necessary?” To them, I answer, “You haven’t known me very long, have you?”)

Whether you view it as preparing or making preparations, the name is a fitting one. Aparavi’s software offers a solution to make managing long-term retention of data across multiple clouds simple. Continue reading →

Amazon Adds Per-Second Billing for Some EC2 Instances

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Amazon’s per-second billing is now available for some types of Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Announced back in September, this billing model change went into effect on 2 October.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) first launched their EC2 service in 2006. The success of AWS and cloud computing in general proves that there are uses for leasing a virtual server for an hour at a time.

Recently, some AWS competitors have moved from per-hour to per-minute billing. This move by AWS seems like an attempt to leapfrog past their competitors by offering billing that’s even more granular. In this post, I’ll look into some of the details of this billing change. Continue reading →

Turbonomic Announces Version 5.9, Adds Support for Hybrid Cloud

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Today Turbonomic announced  a new release of their autonomic management suite, version 5.9. The new version adds new capabilities, expanding their automated management into hybrid cloud environments, as well as a number of performance enhancements.

With this release, Turbonomic is furthering their mission: to enable their customers to automate and control any workload, on any infrastructure, any time, and any place.

What’s New in 5.9

I’ll summarize what I see as the key new things Turbonomic has added in version 5.9. Continue reading →

Premise vs. Premises: A Modest Proposal

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If you’ve ever listened to, or been involved in, a conversation about Cloud, you’re familiar with the idea that the infrastructure that runs any specific cloud can be either on-premises (local or private cloud), off-premises (remote or public cloud), or a combination of both (hybrid cloud).

If you’re familiar with that, then I feel safe predicting that you’re also familiar with the seemingly-eternal debate over whether the term is “premises”, “premise”, or if it actually matters. In this case, there is, in fact, only one correct answer.

In the rest of this article, I will:

  • Make the clear case for the correct answer
  • Explain why it does, in fact, matter
  • Discuss three approaches for handling this, including a proposed solution that, if adopted, would end the premises/premise confusion in cloud forever

Continue reading →

Virtustream Launches Cloud Offering Designed for Healthcare

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Today, at Dell EMC World, Virtustream — the enterprise-class cloud provider company in the Dell Technologies family of businesses — announced that they are offering a new service called Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.

This service provides cloud-based hosting of mission-critical healthcare platforms and applications in an environment that is completely compliant with all Health Insurance Portability  and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) regulations. Customers are able to get the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud with fully-managed services and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of 99.999% uptime. The service can be deployed in both public and hybrid cloud models.

As healthcare organizations transition to the near-exclusive use of digital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, they are faced with the dual challenges of access to records and securing them. EMR data needs to be accessible to patients, doctors, and analytical medicine applications, all while remaining fully-secure and compliant with a complex set of regulations. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud offering enables healthcare organizations to achieve these goals as a managed service.

To give an idea of why this is a big deal, several other public cloud providers will allow customers to run this type of workload in their infrastructure, but the customers are 100% responsible for ensuring the HIPAA and HITECH compliance. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides that compliance built-in.

With consolidation happening across the industry, and more hospitals and healthcare organizations joining into collaborative “Medical Group” type organizational structures, the ability to store, protect, and share EMRs in a secure and compliant public cloud solution becomes even more desirable.

Today, the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud service has been certified by Epic, a leading provider of EMR applications. I’ve spoken with a few of the folks at Virtustream and I believe we’ll see the certification with additional EMR software vendors coming in the near future.

You can read the Virtustream press release on their Healthcare Cloud here and read more details on the solutions here.

Turbonmic Support for AWS and Kubernetes

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[DISCLAIMER: Turbonomic is, in fact, a sponsor of this blog. That said, there was no requirement or even request from them that I write this post. I’m writing it because it’s news that I think folks will find useful. No one from Turbonomic has contributed to, or reviewed the contents of this post.]

turbo-heartIf you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably already know I’m a fan of Turbonomic’s suite of tools for monitoring, management, and automation. Personally, I believe they’re the best at what they do — providing application performance, uptime, and resiliency, along with improving over all IT infrastructure efficiency and automated remediation of potential problems for on-premises environments.

Of course, more organizations are moving their workloads into the public cloud, either exclusively or as part of a hybrid cloud set-up. An on-premises-only automation tool isn’t enough to meet these organizations’ needs.

So, Turbonomic has extended their suite of offerings by adding support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Kubernetes. I’ll talk about each of these, and let you know how you can take them for a six-month test drive for free.

Continue reading →