SaaS security provider CloudPassage is filling out its software as a service (SaaS) offering with support for Microsoft's Windows Server platform.
CloudPassage today said its Halo cloud firewall automation and multi-factor authentication software, which customers can provision either in a customer's data center or on a server in a public cloud, now runs on both Linux and Windows Server 2008/R2-based infrastructure. Since launching Halo last year, it only ran on Linux servers.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/25/20121 comments
The unexpected management shakeup at VMware this week begs the question, is the company succeeding in its effort to reshape its image as a supplier of datacenter virtualization technology to that of a cloud infrastructure and platform provider?
Many also wonder, was the move in which Paul Maritz will be removed as VMware's CEO Sept. 1 to become chief strategist of parent company EMC a reward for a job well done or was he kicked upstairs for not moving fast enough?
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/19/20120 comments
Looking to include the fees from using public cloud services into your IT budgets? Cloud management provider RightScale today launched a free Web-based service that helps customers predict cloud costs.
RightScale, one of the largest independent cloud management providers, said it has acquired ShopForCloud for an undisclosed amount and re-launched the service as PlanForCloud.
The cloud forecasting service is designed to help customers predict the cost of using public clouds based on various usage models including compute, storage, file transfer and database. The models take into account usage patterns and fluctuating prices from different cloud providers. Based on those models, the service creates forecasts and generates reports.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/18/20120 comments
Rackspace is making it easier for enterprises using its cloud offerings to procure and integrate software as a service (SaaS) tools and apps.
The hosting provider this week launched its Cloud Tools Marketplace, which aims to let its customers find and ultimately subscribe to any number of SaaS offerings. Cloud Tools is built on the marketplace platform of closely-held AppDirect. Rackspace describes the new marketplace as an upgrade, though until now the company effectively offered static listings of partners. Cloud Tools lets customers view demos such as videos and screen shots and allows them to subscribe to the services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/18/20120 comments
Coming off last month's announcement that its Windows Azure service will let customers run virtual machine instances, Microsoft this week took a step toward enabling third party hosting providers to build cloud service offerings running on Windows Server.
Microsoft released the community technology preview (CTP) of Windows Server for Hosting Providers. Based on Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Server 2012, the suite will allow hosting providers to provision and manage through System Center, Windows Azure Web Sites, virtual machines, the Service Management Portal and API.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/12/20120 comments
Google made it official this week that it will offer an infrastructure as a service cloud, dangling performance as its value.
The launch of Google Compute Engine at the company's annual Google I/O developer conference was widely expected, though overshadowed by its foray into the tablet market with its own Nexus 7. By launching an IaaS, Google is taking on some large players including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, which earlier this month launched its long-anticipated IaaS services.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/29/20121 comments
It's certainly not a shocking revelation that enterprise customers don't want to be tied to any one cloud service, but a new survey commissioned by Rackspace shows 86 percent see portability as a key consideration when choosing a provider.
Rackspace CTO John Engates said in an interview this week that concern over provider lock-in validates its decision to spawn the OpenStack initiative, borne nearly two years ago with the contribution of cloud compute code co-developed with NASA. Now with 180 software, hardware and infrastructure providers on board, Engates said OpenStack should take vendor lock-in off the table.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/29/20120 comments
Those that rely on Amazon Web Services for their compute infrastructure felt the ramifications of that dependence last week when a power outage brought on by a cable fault in its North Virginia Availability Zone shut down a number of sites including Quora, Pinterest and Salesforce.com's Heroku platform as a service cloud.
The overnight outage lasted a few hours but it gave proponents of private and hybrid clouds cause to extol the virtues of distributing infrastructure and applications to internal datacenters and/or collocation facilities. Coincidentally, a number of software vendors this week are rolling out wares designed to give enterprises the benefits of public cloud computing within their own datacenters. ActiveState, Eucalyptus and Virtustream introduced new software aimed easing the sharing of compute and application workloads between public and private clouds.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/19/20120 comments
Over the past year, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has evangelized the social enterprise and the shift by workers to mobile devices. In addition to enabling social networking by bringing out apps such as Chatter and acquiring companies like Radian 6 last year and Buddy Media earlier this month, the company has its cloud-based platform, Force.com and Database.com, that lets developers and ISVs integrate their apps with Saleforce.com.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/19/20120 comments
Riverbed is best known for its WAN acceleration appliances but the company also offers software designed to improve Web app performance in virtual and cloud environments. Now Riverbed is tying its software that optimizes Web site performance with its application delivery controller (ADC), designed to automate load balancing in order to provide app scalability.
The company's new Stingray Traffic Manager 9.0, announced yesterday, combines the ADC with its Aptimizer Web content optimization software. Naveen Prabhu, a senior product marketing manager at Riverbed pointed to research by various players including Forrester Research, Google and Microsoft that concluded that anytime a user has to spend more than 250 milliseconds more on one site than another. Since many application environments already have ADCs, Riverbed sees adding Web site optimization to them as a natural extension.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/19/20120 comments
There is some really bad blood between executives at Rackspace and Citrix and the result is two fragmented open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) compute platform efforts. Perhaps it's not surprising that Rackspace felt jilted by Citrix's decision to abandon its commitment to the Rackspace-founded OpenStack project in favor of its newly acquired CloudStack platform, but the fur was flying at this week's Cloud Expo and the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) Forecast 2012 conference in New York.
Rackspace CTO John Engates, who is the company's cloud computing evangelist, aired his disdain for Citrix's move (which was underway for some time but became official in April) during a keynote address at the ODCA conference Tuesday. "I don't know what Citrix was thinking when they moved away from OpenStack because OpenStack had all the momentum in the world," Engates said in response to a question about the matter. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/15/20122 comments
Symantec this week said it will extend its Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows and Veritas Volume replicator disaster recovery (DR) software to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service. The two companies inked a co-development agreement to build what Symantec is calling DR as a Service, or DRaaS.
The pact, announced at Microsoft's Tech-Ed conference taking place in Orlando, appears to be in the early stages. While the resulting deliverable will be a continuously available data protection service, Symantec officials said the new data replication software will use Windows Azure as a storage target sometime in 2013. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/14/20120 comments