TierPoint Cited As A Strong Performer In The Hosted Private Cloud Sector

TierPoint LLC has announced that it was recognized as a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services, North America, Q2 2017.  In the report, analysts from Forrester Research evaluated nine providers that met the qualifications to participate in the Wave.

In the report, TierPoint received the top score among all participants in the “Services and Customer Experience” criterion. TierPoint was cited for “customer reference reviews that rave about its innovative and technically astute customer-centric support teams.”  In their comments, Forrester analysts pointed to TierPoint’s strength across onboarding, ongoing support and customer service.

TierPoint earned the highest possible score (5 out of 5) for its data center locations and for “Business Technology (BT) Vision.” The latter is a Forrester criterion that considers an evaluated vendor’s vision for hosted private cloud and how that vision aligns “with near and future trends, customer demands, and Forrester’s business technology (BT) vision of the hosted private cloud service.” Forrester also noted TierPoint for “delivering high levels of network and onsite security along with a massive North American data center footprint.”

“I believe our recognition in this report reflects the strength of our strategy and the importance we place on collaborating with our customers to provide the best customized cloud solutions for them,” said Terry Morrison, chief technology officer, TierPoint. “Our hosted private cloud is built from market-leading technologies that, along with our capabilities and experience, make us an industry leader in hybrid IT solutions.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Cirba™ Unveils Optimization Service For Public Cloud

Cirba, Inc. has unveiled an analytics service, Densify™, for optimizing public cloud and on-premise virtual infrastructure. The Densify service is the next evolution of SaaS as it combines the organization’s predictive and real-time optimization analytics with an assigned Densification Advisor™, eliminating the burden of learning, operating, managing and maintaining software. Cirba also announced it is rebranding to Densify, reflecting the company’s strategic value proposition to reduce cloud and infrastructure costs while also improving application performance. The Densify service offers fast time to value, ease of adoption and use and the greatest potential for savings in the market through the industry’s most powerful optimization engine. For a limited time, customers can start with Densify service free for the first 14 days.

“Based on our experience, we know that organizations desperately want to reduce their cloud bill and show highly utilized infrastructure, but there are only so many hours in the day,” said Gerry Smith, CEO of Densify. “We understand that IT is looking for more than a software product — they want outcomes. They are looking for experts who can tune and watch over the automated analytics; they want to know that someone is there for them, helping them deliver results – not another management and maintenance burden.”

Driving Immediate Business Value

With a unique combination of SaaS-based analytics and the Densification Advisor service, Densify is a complete service for automated optimization of public, on-premise or hybrid cloud infrastructures. With Densify, companies automate virtual machine (VM) placement and resource allocation actions to proactively remove risk and drive the lowest unit cost. The new service also offers precise, data-driven cloud migration and transformation strategies and real-time hybrid and multi-cloud workload placements. One of the key benefits of Densify is that it delivers better application performance with the highest asset utilization and lowest public cloud spend without requiring any special training. The service is up and running within 15 minutes, maximizing efficiency, simplicity and results for customers under the guidance of the Densification Advisor.

“Densify serves as the ‘brain’ of our customers’ environments, right-sizing them, taking the guess work out of adding new applications, and determining the best way to leverage cloud,” said Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder of Densify. “The analytics engine is extremely robust and has the ability to model some really advanced modernization techniques such as stacking workloads in bare metal clouds or optimizing container placement within a public cloud instance, which can save upwards of 80 percent of the cloud bill for some customers. Our approach is completely different from other products that are reactionary and can’t offer any visibility or insight into the reasoning or best practices of cloud utilization.”

The new service offering delivers immediate business value in these key areas:

• Reduced Cloud Costs – Densify examines detailed public cloud utilization and billing data to help customers actively reduce costs for services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)®, Microsoft Azure®, Google® Cloud Platform and IBM® SoftLayer®.  Densify leverages workload pattern analysis and industry benchmarks to enable more advanced optimization of cloud usage. For customers, this translates into savings of 41% on average.
• Reduced Infrastructure Requirements – In bare metal clouds and on-premise infrastructure, such as an internal VMware® environment, Densify analyzes workload patterns to right-size allocations and strategically place VMs. Densify is the only solution that can dovetail workloads to increase density by an average of 48%, resulting in a savings of 33%.
• Better Performing Applications – Densify’s predictive analytics leverage historical patterns to model what a workload is going to do in the future. This enables Densify to automatically and proactively place and size VMs to avoid compute and storage risks. It also provides real-time responses to address operational anomalies and unexpected resource shortfalls.
• Optimized Application Placement and Transformation – Densify reviews all application requirements and workload patterns to automatically place workloads in the best hosting environments whether in the cloud or on-premise according to requirements, cost and strategic priorities. It also provides detailed cloud migration and technology refresh plans.

Addressing Cloud Infrastructure Market Challenges

Despite a growing desire to move to the cloud, many organizations remain concerned about the complexity and risk of such a transition, the scarcity of skilled resources that truly understand new cloud environments, and the time and costs required to manage these new implementations. Other cloud optimization solutions require companies to learn and manage tools, which is resource intensive. At the same time, these offerings lack deep analytics to truly identify how to reduce and control operating costs and risk, putting customers in an ongoing reactive mode with ever escalating operating expenses. In contrast, Densify’s deep, pattern-based workload analysis provides sophisticated cloud optimization capabilities through right-sizing and advanced hosting strategies, such as leveraging containers. With this unique approach, Densify safely reduces cloud spend by 20 to 80 percent.

“Enterprises are often painfully reminded by their monthly AWS and Azure bills that shoveling their apps to public cloud can lead to unpredictable OPEX,” said Torsten Volk, managing director, Hybrid Cloud & Infrastructure Management, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).   “Our research shows that cost control is the number one priority in hybrid cloud operations, driving demand for a solution that increases the efficiency of public cloud use and provides guidance regarding which public cloud service offers the desired compromise between risk and cost. Densify’s service provides exactly this analytics and control layer to instantly optimize existing application environments and show how future environments will be deployed in a policy driven and cost effective manner. This gets even more interesting when considering the new economics introduced by container-as-a-service offerings and by server-less functions.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Epsilon Selects 1025Connect For Direct Access To Cloud Connectivity

1025Connect has announced the availability of Epsilon’s Cloud Link eXchange Platform (CloudLX) service offering at its Long Island facility designed for network interconnection and colocation. Epsilon, a privately owned global communications service provider, also recently announced the establishment of its United States headquarters within the same property where 1025Connect is located.

This location will allow Epsilon to expand its services throughout the U.S. with direct access to multiple subsea cables for enhanced global connectivity at the Continental Edge. 1025Connect customers can now leverage CloudLX, available through Epsilon’s on-demand connectivity platform, Infiny by Epsilon, to rapidly interconnect new services and benefit from direct connectivity to leading global cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. This deployment enables greater quality and high-speed connectivity for Long Island businesses and international network traffic.

“The CloudLX module of Infiny accelerates access to global cloud service providers and gives customers a friction-free model for connecting the cloud,” states Carl Roberts, chief commercial officer of Epsilon. “It is making connecting the cloud simple and removes the limits on how service providers and enterprises grow in the U.S., and around the world.”

“Long Island is host to a great number of leading enterprise businesses and is a key landing point for subsea systems interconnecting North America to Europe,” comments Dan Lundy, managing director, 1025Connect. “The location of 1025Connect on this Continental Edge offers a unique opportunity to bypass traditionally congested network routes, eliminating multiple points of failure while saving customers on cross connect fees. 1025Connect is the pinnacle of diverse, reliable, network enablement sitting at the true nexus of subsea cable systems and the cloud.” 

1025Connect delivers direct access to multiple submarine cable systems connecting North America, Europe and Latin America, as well as the ability to bypass Manhattan fiber routes for greater network redundancy and diversity. 1025Connect is also home to the easternmost peering point in the New York metro area, enabling easier access and delivery of content distributed to the Continental Edge.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Nvidia's new TensorRT speeds machine learning predictions

Nvidia has released a new version of TensorRT, a runtime system for serving inferences using deep learning models through Nvidia’s own GPUs.

Inferences, or predictions made from a trained model, can be served from either CPUs or GPUs. Serving inferences from GPUs is part of Nvidia’s strategy to get greater adoption of its processors, countering what AMD is doing to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on the machine learning GPU market.

Nvidia claims the GPU-based TensorRT is better across the board for inferencing than CPU-only approaches. One of Nvidia’s proffered benchmarks, the AlexNet image classification test under the Caffe framework, claims TensorRT to be 42 times faster than a CPU-only version of the same test — 16,041 images per second vs. 374—when run on Nvidia’s Tesla P40 processor. (Always take industry benchmarks with a grain of salt.)

Serving predictions from a GPU is also more power-efficient and delivers results with lower latency, Nvidia claims.

TensorRT doesn’t work with anything other than Nvidia’s own GPU lineup, and is a proprietary, closed-source offering. AMD, by contrast, has been promising a more open-ended approach to how its GPUs can be used for machine learning applications, by way of the ROCm open source hardware-independent library for accelerating machine learning.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data

GlobalSCAPE, Inc. Launches First iPaaS Solution

Rapid cloud adoption has made powerful applications readily accessible and easy to implement across an organization, but many of these applications do not natively communicate or connect, requiring significant IT development time and cost to integrate. Addressing this dilemma, GlobalSCAPE, Inc. has announced that it has extended the Company’s reach further into the cloud with the launch of Kenetix, its new integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution.

Kenetix is a markedly different kind of data integration platform, focused on bringing rapid digital transformation to businesses with the quick connection to, and integration of, new and existing technologies like cloud-based applications, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and third-party application interfaces. With Kenetix, customers are empowered to rapidly create complex application and data integrations in the cloud, with the utmost security, reliability, transparency, and control.

“Globalscape’s decades-long leadership in secure, flexible and highly manageable data movement remains unmatched. However, as more and more customer applications move to the cloud, we saw the need and opportunity to apply our expertise to helping customers accelerate that transition. With Kenetix, we are delivering an extremely powerful and agile platform that not only allows customers to unleash the power of their data with very little technical expertise, but also establishes a platform through which we can extend and expand our own portfolio for maximum customer value. We see this as a natural extension to our work in managed file transfer and our larger desire to help our customers overcome their most complex data obstacles,” said Matt Goulet, president and CEO at Globalscape.

Kenetix supports application connectivity in an effort to synchronize data across systems, and empowers business teams to create and integrate applications without having to wait on IT.

The new platform differentiates itself from other iPaaS solutions with its easy to use yet powerful functionality that meets the demands of large enterprises, while also being simple and intuitive enough to satisfy the needs of non-technical staff or line-of-business managers who require the flexibility to develop their own data integrations quickly. Kenetix comes with a suite of features and benefits that make it the ideal solution for application and data integration, business process automation and microservices orchestration. Among the many features are:

• Access to a library of connectors for more than 120 applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Basecamp, etc.
• Simple drag-and-drop data mapping to ensure data integration flows without the need for coding
• Ability to launch and orchestrate microservices as well as automate workflows quickly
• Granular controls to ensure administrators can manage what application data individuals or teams have access to
• Built-in reporting to facilitate audits and compliance mandates
• Military-grade security with stringent audit and validation tools

Source: CloudStrategyMag

SolarWinds Simplifies Enterprise Network Management With New Products

SolarWinds has announced two new unified network management solutions — SolarWinds Network Operations Manager and SolarWinds Network Automation Manager — that the company will showcase at Cisco Live® US, June 25-29, 2017, in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay® Convention Center.

Ensuring mission-critical enterprise networks remain optimized and running at scale in today’s increasingly complex hybrid IT environments can be a daunting task. Selecting, deploying, and integrating software to help monitor such networks often adds to the challenge. These new SolarWinds offerings build on the comprehensive, single-pane-of-glass visibility of the SolarWinds® Orion® Platform to simplify large-scale network management. These unified products provide everything needed to monitor and manage networks in a seamlessly integrated solution available as a single purchase.

“Leveraging our experience with thousands of large-scale customers, we’ve designed our new unified network management solutions to streamline almost everything about network management software,” said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds. “In essence, we’ve taken our most popular network monitoring and management capabilities and unified them into products specifically designed for large-scale networks. We’ve applied the SolarWinds philosophy of powerful, affordable, and easy-to-use software to enterprise network management.”

SolarWinds Network Operations Manager

Based on the SolarWinds Orion Platform, SolarWinds Network Operations Manager provides:

• Fault, availability, and performance monitoring
• Critical path hop-by-hop monitoring both on premises and in the cloud thanks to the SolarWinds NetPath™ feature
• Bandwidth and traffic monitoring
• Switch port monitoring with end-user tracking
• Dynamic drag-and-drop dashboard creation with the SolarWinds PerfStack™ dashboard to better visualize networking, systems, and application relationships

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager includes all the features of SolarWinds Network Operations Manager and adds:

• Network configuration automation
• DHCP, DNS, and IP address management
• High availability for instantaneous failover

 See SolarWinds Unified Network Management Solutions in Action at Cisco Live US, Booth 1111

 Meet SolarWinds Head Geeks™ Patrick Hubbard, Leon Adato, and Destiny Bertucci, as well as other SolarWinds product experts at booth 1111 to participate in live demonstrations of SolarWinds Network Operations Manager and SolarWinds Network Automation Manager, along with the complete portfolio of products from SolarWinds. The company was recently named the global market leader in network management software by industry analyst firm International Data Corporation® (IDC®) in its Worldwide Semi-Annual Software Tracker. 

Join “Blame the Network, Hybrid IT Edition”

On Tuesday, June 27, 2017 from 5-5:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Hubbard will also present, “Blame the Network, Hybrid IT Edition,” as part of the Cisco Live US 2017 Think Tank at booth 1601. During the talk, Hubbard will address the following:

“Hybrid IT, the conflagration of distributed on-premises, cloud, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications has a major downside: the opportunity for businesses to blame network engineers for service issues. Troubleshooting and resolution are further complicated by application evolution, causing many of the go-to tools we’ve relied on for years to become less effective, or worse, obsolete. In this session, you’ll learn how both IT organizations and technology vendors are trying to not only catch up, but get ahead in this time of IT transition, and continue to assure visibility of the complete Hybrid IT network.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Named A Leader In Gartner Magic Quadrant For DRaaS

IBM has announced that Gartner, Inc. has positioned IBM as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) for the third consecutive year. And this year, IBM was once again positioned as one of the highest in ability to execute and the furthest in completeness of vision.

IBM continues to offer one of the most comprehensive sets of related professional and managed services in the industry, and it enhanced its long-standing history in disaster recovery with its 2016 purchase of Sanovi Technologies to complement its IT and applications resiliency orchestration capabilities. IBM also continues to integrate IBM Watson into its resiliency services offerings to enhance disaster avoidance.

“We believe IBM’s recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service report speaks to the value, consistency and reliability our clients find in our resiliency services across the globe, as we work to innovate and deliver for them every day,” said Laurence Guihard-Joly, general manager, IBM Resiliency Services. “Beyond natural disasters and other outages, the increasing number of cyberattacks and other threats today requires the most advanced and most proactive set of solutions possible so our clients can combat those threats and focus on differentiating in the era of ‘always-on’ expectations.”

IBM Resiliency Services offers an innovative portfolio of resiliency and business continuity solutions and services with expanded public cloud options to enable clients with greater flexibility and agility in managing their backup and disaster recovery workloads. Today, IBM operates over 300 global delivery data centers across 54 countries to help companies worldwide maintain continuous business operations and improve overall resiliency for any size organization.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Databarracks Recognised In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant For DRaaS For 2017

London-based provider Databarracks has been recognised in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service 2017.

Peter Groucutt, managing director at Databarracks, commented on the announcement, “We are very proud to be included in the Magic Quadrant for DRaaS for a third consecutive year. We feel it is an incredible achievement for us as a specialist provider of disaster recovery and business continuity services and is a testament to the hard work and commitment of our team.

“There has been a great deal of change in the last year. We have seen some commoditisation in the market and this year’s MQ reflects that with many more service providers evaluated. I completely agree that DRaaS has now become a ‘mainstream offering’. Organisations now recognise that DRaaS is a mature service and the benefits extend beyond pure cost savings. The organisations we speak to appreciate the value a specialist DRaaS provider brings. Customers of DRaaS know that in the event of a disaster, they not only have the technology to allow for rapid recovery but the skills of recovery specialists to bring their IT back online, minimising data loss and downtime.

“In the last 12 months we have also seen further change in both the risk landscape and the attitude towards IT downtime. The recent WannaCry attack raised the level of awareness of ransomware beyond the IT team and into the wider business-consciousness both here in the UK and around the world. Major IT outages have also highlighted just how reliant organisations are on technology to deliver their services –— whether that is an airline, a bank or a university.

“Our focus has been to continue to develop the next generation of DRaaS services. That means research and development finding new methods to protect against growing cyber threats. It also means extending our services help our customers build out their Business Continuity Plans and be truly resilient businesses. We have some further exciting announcements to make on that front in the coming months.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Equinix Achieves Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform Status

Equinix, Inc. has announced that it has achieved Microsoft Gold Cloud Platform status via its Equinix Professional Services (EPS) organization. This designation reinforces Equinix’s ongoing commitment to delivering Microsoft hybrid cloud to its customers inside a global footprint of International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers. Since Equinix began offering direct access to Microsoft Azure in 2014, it has seen significant growth in the amount of enterprise customers developing hybrid and multi-cloud deployments across five continents including North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Australia. Equinix currently offers direct connections to Microsoft Azure via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in 20 metros around the world.

Equinix’s Gold Competency status was awarded in recognition of its expertise in the areas hybrid cloud enablement through EPS. Hybrid cloud continues to be a top priority for enterprise CIOs. In fact, based on results from IDC’s 2017 CloudView Survey, nearly 70% of cloud users expect that within two years the majority of their IT capabilities will be delivered through some form of cloud service — public, private, or hybrid. Yet the path to the hybrid cloud can be technically challenging. Through EPS and Equinix’s ability to provide direct access to Microsoft Azure via the Equinix Cloud Exchange, Equinix helps its enterprise customers advance their cloud strategies and capitalize on these cloud benefits by seamlessly incorporating cloud services into their existing architectures.

“Hybrid cloud is revolutionizing the way enterprises do business, and Equinix is committed to empowering our customers to deploy high-performance, scalable and secure hybrid cloud solutions on a global scale. A critical component of this is interconnectivity to Microsoft Azure and Office 365 platforms inside our vast platform of data centers. We are honored to have reached Gold partner status with Microsoft, and look forward to providing additional ways for our global customers to achieve improved performance of their cloud-based applications,” said Bob Breynaert, global managing director, Microsoft strategic alliance, Equinix.

Microsoft Gold certification, provided to a select group of partners who demonstrate that they meet strict criteria, is the highest level of certification for companies that are part of the Microsoft partnership program. Companies, such as Equinix, that attain this status must provide successful client references and demonstrate that they have developed innovative products and solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Equinix has been aligned with Microsoft for many years to provide high-level interconnection and global access to Microsoft Azure. Equinix will also be expanding its role as a critical partner in Microsoft hybrid cloud solutions by integrating Microsoft Azure Stack into its interconnection offerings.

“We are incredibly proud to have achieved Gold Cloud Platform status. The recipe for our accomplishment ultimately stems from the right mix of a number of symbiotic ingredients: Equinix’s hybrid cloud enabling interconnection platform with unprecedented global reach, Microsoft’s reputable cloud service offerings, the exceptional quality of work delivered by our Professional Services organization, and last but not least, our extremely innovative customers. Teaming with a pioneering organization like Microsoft is instrumental in being able to deliver end-to-end solutions that quickly deliver business results and satisfy the evolving needs of our customers,” said Ryan Mallory, vice president, global solutions enablement, Equinix.

With Equinix, applications and workloads operating in a hybrid cloud are optimized for business value. By directly and securely connecting to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure Stack inside Equinix, customers can take advantage of:

• Superior application performance and user experience
• Enhanced compliance by connecting privately to Microsoft Azure and keeping data within region, without going over the public internet
• Increased cloud security, by bypassing the public internet

EPS offers practical guidance and proven solutions to help enterprise customers optimize and future-proof their data center architecture and cloud journey. EPS provides hands-on experience in assessing, enabling, migrating, optimizing, planning, designing, testing and deploying IT infrastructure, networks and cloud architectures.

*Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2017 Predictions; Doc # US41863916, Nov. 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Rackspace Named A Leader In Hosted Private Cloud Services

Rackspace has announced that it was named a leader in the Forrester Research, Inc. June 2017 report, The Forrester Wave™: Hosted Private Cloud Services, North America, Q2 2017. The report evaluated nine vendors based on 33 criteria, including current offering, strategy and market presence. Rackspace was ranked above all vendors in strategy and automation capabilities for its Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud offering.

According to the report, “Rackspace enjoys a highly visible market position by virtue of its lengthy history in the managed hosting segment, OpenStack contributions and close partnerships with the leading hyperscale public cloud providers … Although its current offering is strong, Rackspace stands out by virtue of its customer-centric, ‘Fanatical Support’ strategy as well as its coexistence with hyperscale providers through management and migration services.” Additionally, customer references contacted during the evaluation called out Rackspace for “its superior self-service control options relative to other evaluated solutions, describing it as best-in-class.”

Rackspace scored highest among vendors in the strategy category for its Rackspace® OpenStack® Private Cloud, which Rackspace believes indicates the strength of its go-to-market strategy and future vision for hosted private cloud services. The independent research firm evaluates strategy using eight criteria, and Rackspace received the highest score possible in three of these criteria including: business technology vision, market approach and partner ecosystem.

In addition, Rackspace received the highest score in the automation capabilities criterion within the current offering category, and was among the vendors that scored the highest for self-service portal and user interface, integration strength, service level agreements (SLAs), storage and contract agreements.

“I believe that Rackspace’s position in this report further validates that it is the clear market leader in the OpenStack private cloud space,” said Scott Crenshaw, SVP and GM of OpenStack and Microsoft clouds at Rackspace. “In my view, our positioning is a testament to our strategy to deliver OpenStack private clouds as a service, providing self-service tools and an industry-leading 99.99% API uptime SLA. As a co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace is well positioned to enable customers of all sizes to succeed through operational expertise gained from more than one billion server hours managing OpenStack clouds at scale. We are proud to be named a leader in this report and will continue to innovate and lead by providing industry-leading SLAs, world-class economics and a revolutionary, utility-based private cloud consumption model.”

Rackspace delivers a broad portfolio of managed private cloud solutions that support multiple platforms including OpenStack, VMware® Private Cloud, and Microsoft® Private Cloud. These private cloud solutions give customers the agility, scalability and efficiency of the public cloud, with the greater levels of control and security of a single-tenant, dedicated environment.

Source: CloudStrategyMag