This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Scality reports a great 2017. Cloudistics launched its Application Marketplace. Cloudian raises over $120 million with Digital Alpha. Cisco launches 5G Now portfolio. NAKIVO previews its Backup & Replication v7.4. INFINIDAT launches code.infinidat.com community. AMD’s MxGPU is now available on Citrix XenServer 7.4.
This week’s News Bits we look at a number of small announcements, small in terms of the content, not the impact they have. Scality reports a great 2017. Cloudistics launched its Application Marketplace. Cloudian raises over $120 million with Digital Alpha. Cisco launches 5G Now portfolio. NAKIVO previews its Backup & Replication v7.4. INFINIDAT launches code.infinidat.com community. AMD’s MxGPU is now available on Citrix XenServer 7.4.
Scality Reports A Great 2017
Scality was happy to announce that 2017 was its best year on record. The company saw record revenue and new customers to is RING Software-Defined Storage solution. In the last quarter alone, Scality shipped over 100PB of usable storage. It will be interesting to see what 2018 brings the company.
Cloudistics Launched Its Application Marketplace
Cloudistics launched its Cloudistics Application Marketplace integrated within its SaaS cloud controller, Ignite. Along with popular apps like Docker, Hadoop, Hortonworks, Cloudera, and Windows and Linux OSs, users can download or create instances as they would in the public cloud. Other benefits include:
- The ability to quickly create and deploy an application instances from defined application templates. The instances function as thin-provisioned clones that share a common base image, further reducing storage usage across the virtual datacenter.
- Users can import VMs from VMware or HyperV directly into a template and use that to create a new application instance.
- The option to create from installer, using an ISO file to create a new application instance.
Cloudian Raises $125 Million With Digital Alpha
Through a joint venture with Digital Alpha, Cloudian announced a $125 million in funding. $100 million is aimed at enabling flexible procurement options to accommodate growing storage environments. The other $25 million is devoted to expanding sales, marketing and customers support.
Cisco Launches 5G Now Portfolio
At MWC 2018, Cisco announced its ‘5G Now’ portfolio for service providers. Key elements include:
- Multi-cloud: Helping manage workloads across a full ecosystem of private, public, and hybrid clouds to connect enterprise, consumers, and service providers.
- IP Core: Cisco can expand programmability and capabilities of the network with real-time telemetry for automation, featuring the new Cisco NCS-500 Series of access routers with the Cisco IOS XR software as a single domain from the data center to the cell tower.
- 5G Packet Core and Service Edge: With Cisco Ultra, its cloud-native, mobile virtualized packet core, Cisco provides a unified platform for service enablement over licensed and unlicensed radio solutions and IoT services – all the way to the network edge.
- Access: Cisco offers a comprehensive solution that unifies cable, fiber, Wi-Fi, and a variety of licensed radio solutions including virtualized RAN architectures such as Open RAN. The new Cisco SONFlex Studio features drag-and-drop ease to create new self-organizing network (SON) APIs to customize service handling and quality of experience in the radio access network.
- Client Services: This is where the cloud meets the customer. Cisco will be demonstrating a number of client services that can be delivered today including Managed Cisco Spark for collaboration service over mobile, virtual managed services for cloud-based SD-WAN business services, and the Cisco Jasper platform for IoT.
- Security: Cisco secures the Service Provider from the cloud, to the network, to the client with its new 5G Security Architecture that builds upon the comprehensive portfolio of threat-centric solutions to securely enable 5G mobile networks. New offers include Stealthwatch for enhanced breach detection and visibility within Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and network slices, Stealthwatch Cloud for cloud-managed network security, and the Cisco Umbrella Security Suite.
- Professional Services: Cisco takes an open approach to partnering and co-developing with its customers to fit the right solution, offering experienced personnel to support the customers’ teams from start to finish.
NAKIVO Previews Its Backup & Replication v7.4
NAKIVO announced the beta to its upcoming Backup & Replication v7.4. The full version is expected in the first half of 2018. Features include:
- Automated VM Disaster Recovery: NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.4 can help automate and simplify the VM disaster recovery process. The new version provides VM Failover jobs, which include network mapping and re-IP rules. With this new feature, VM failover can be performed in a single click. VM Failover jobs can help NAKIVO Cloud Service Providers deliver Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service more efficiently and cost effectively.
- Instant File Recovery to Source: File recovery is one of the most frequent actions performed by backup administrators. The Instant File Recovery to Source feature can instantly retrieve files from deduplicated VM backups. The files can be restored directly to their original location on the source VM.
- Enhanced AWS EC2 Instance Backup: NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.4 can provide native backup for AWS EC2 instances and store up to 1,000 recovery points per protected EC2 instance. The AWS EC2 instance backups can be stored in the cloud or sent to an on-premises location, enabling recovery even in cases when AWS credentials are compromised or if there is an issue with the cloud infrastructure.
- Bandwidth Throttling: NAKIVO Backup & Replication was designed to be fast, and transfers data at the maximum available speeds. However, if data protection jobs are running during business hours, they may saturate the available bandwidth, affecting application performance and user experience. The Bandwidth Throttling feature provides the ability to set speed limits for data protection jobs.
- Self-Backup: The VM running backup software is subject to the same threats as any other VM in an infrastructure and can crash, get corrupted, or become unavailable. While deploying a new instance of NAKIVO Backup & Replication takes less than 1 minute, re-creating jobs and re-configuring system settings can take a while, especially in large environments. The Self-Backup feature can automatically back up the system configuration to the available backup repositories. With Self-Backup, customers can instantly restore the product configuration and perform planned system migration.
- Instant Recovery for Hyper-V VMs: This feature provides the ability to instantly boot Hyper-V VMs directly from compressed and deduplicated VM backups. Once booted, the VMs can be used for sandbox testing or migrated to the production environment for permanent recovery.
- Screenshot Verification for Hyper-V VMs: Recovery verification is a must-have for any organization as VM backups and replicas may turn out to be corrupted or not bootable at the time of recovery. The Screenshot Verification feature provides an automated way to near-instantly verify the consistency of Hyper-V VM backups and replicas. The Screenshot Verification feature can also send reports with OS screenshots of test-recovered VMs after each job completion.
- Global Search: In large environments with hundreds or thousands of VMs and dozens of backup jobs, even the simple task of finding a particular item can be time-consuming. The Global Search feature can instantly search for VMs, replicas, backups, jobs, repositories, and transporters. Customers can perform actions on the items found right from the search tab.
- Log Truncation for Microsoft SQL Server 2017: Microsoft SQL Server records all database changes in transaction log files to ensure reliability and enable data recovery. These log files grow over time and can consume all available disk space, causing a server crash. The Log Truncation feature can automatically delete the log files from the source VM after a successful VM backup or replication to free up space and ensure uninterrupted operation of the server.
- Instant Object Recovery for Microsoft SQL Server 2017: Microsoft SQL empowers a variety of business-critical applications. If an SQL database becomes corrupted or if undesired changes need to be rolled back, recovery time should be as short as possible. The Object Recovery for Microsoft SQL Server feature can instantly recover Microsoft SQL objects (databases and tables) back to their original location.
- Built-in Chat with Technical Support: The chat with NAKIVO’s top-rated Technical Support team is right where this feature is most needed – built into the product’s web interface. NAKIVO customers can get help in NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.4 without even leaving the application.
INFINIDAT Launches code.infinidat.com Community
INFINIDAT has expanded its third-party solutions ecosystem and has launched a central hub for integrations and solutions at code.INFINIDAT.com. Advancements and partners include:
- SolarWinds SRM integration for InfiniBox storage systems, enabling SolarWinds SRM users to leverage InfiniBox capacity and performance metrics for volumes and filesystems, hardware health, host attachments, and other key operational data.
- Kubernetes (k8s) persistent volume provisioner, making it simple to use INFINIDAT storage via SAN and NAS protocols in Kubernetes containers environments. INFINIDAT has also joined Red Hat OpenShift Commons and achieved OpenShift Primed designation for compatibility with INFINIDAT k8s persistent volume provisioner in Red Hat OpenShift environments.
- OpenStack Manila file services integration, complementing the existing INFINIDAT OpenStack Cinder block storage integration for clients who prefer to use INFINIDATs industry-leading NAS NFS capabilities in their OpenStack environments.
- Xorux performance monitoring and reporting tool STOR2RRD support for InfiniBox storage systems, including performance and capacity metrics as well as host information and alerting.
- VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for InfiniBox storage arrays, delivering maximum visibility into live operational data for InfiniBox storage systems to enable broader VMware software-defined datacenter functionality.
AMD’s MxGPU Is Now Available On Citrix XenServer 7.4
AMD announced that is hardware-based virtualized GPU solution, MxGPU, is now available for Citrix XenServer 7.4 and support XenDesktop and XenApp. Benefits include:
- Reliable, predictable infrastructure. AMD MxGPU graphics virtualization technology delivers leading Quality of Service (QoS) with performance that is up to nine times more consistent than the competition, which means IT managers get fewer calls about unexpected slowdowns and end users know exactly how their workflow will behave.
- More flexibility for remote workforces. AMD MxGPU technology is built on industry standard SR-IOV (Single-Root I/O Virtualization) technology and allows up to 16 virtualized users per physical GPU to work remotely. AMD offers solutions across several industries, including:
- Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC)
- Media & Entertainment
- Oil & Gas
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- Manufacturing
- Education
- Continued open-source leadership with KVM Host OS Driver. The Virtualized Graphics KVM host driver is now available to the open-source community, so cloud service providers and enterprises can customize their MxGPU GIM (Guest Interface Manager) to their production environment and build products to suit customers unique needs.
