Products – Digital IT News

SearchStax Launches Serverless Cloud Service

Leigh Porter — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:49:15 +0000

New offering enables developers to build web and mobile applications without worrying about sizing, provisioning, or managing infrastructure.

SearchStax, announced a new offering, SearchStax Cloud Serverless, that radically simplifies the management of Apache Solr workloads in the cloud.

SearchStax Cloud Serverless delivers a fast, scalable, and cost-effective Solr Service, allowing web and product teams to build quickly and scale automatically while optimizing resource utilization.

In today’s landscape, search infrastructure provisioning becomes a moving target. If overprovisioned, teams pay for idle resources, but if under-provisioned, teams risk poor performance, creating an unreliable environment and greater downtime, leading to a poor user experience and high abandonment rates. SearchStax Cloud Serverless complements the SearchStax Cloud offering by providing a deployment option that optimizes cost efficiency and delivers scalable performance, by eliminating the need for capacity planning and simplifying operations while reducing overhead.

SearchStax Cloud Serverless is ideal for teams building or maintaining search-powered applications with low to medium data volume, intermittent or seasonal traffic, and long idle times for lower cost. Typically, these projects need to avoid being locked into long-term contracts or technical lock-ins. By abstracting away server, CPU, memory, and network provisioning and management, SearchStax Cloud Serverless enables web teams to focus on differentiating features and building great web experiences. Web teams can save time by going from development to staging to SLA-backed production environments without being slowed down by the planning cycles associated with infrastructure. This means faster setup time, more flexibility, and seamless autoscaling within minutes or seconds, allowing for a better development workflow and configuration management experience.

“The introduction of SearchStax Cloud Serverless delivers market-wide innovation in the category of Search Infrastructure Management – our team is proud to be able to deliver a solution that enables developers to focus on implementation of business functions, without having to worry about constantly tuning the environment to meet dynamically changing needs. A major analyst firm forecasts that 25% of cloud IaaS buyers intend to utilize serverless in the next 12 months — one of the highest rates of planned adoption compared to other adjacent cloud services. Along with SearchStax Cloud, our managed Solr offering now enables an even greater number of search use cases across more industries, and delivers the capabilities needed for any organization to scale and grow toward operational maturity faster, more securely, and within budget,” said Sameer Maggon, Founder and CEO of SearchStax.

SearchStax Cloud Serverless is generally available. For more information, go to https://www.searchstax.com/pricing/cloud/serverless-solr-service-pricing-details/.

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Platform9 Announces Managed Kubernetes with SaaS GitOps Engine

Leigh Porter — Thu, 21 Oct 2021 19:03:47 +0000

Platform9 announced a number of new enterprise features that greatly eliminate operational complexities in managing multi-cluster and multicloud Kubernetes deployments. Key advances include the Profile Engine for template-based cross-cluster governance, IDE enhancements for fast access to running workloads, user-specified upgrade strategies, KubeVirt enhancements, and CIS Benchmarking compliance.

“Focused on multicloud governance, security, and ease-of-use features, this product release further simplifies Kubernetes by introducing new developer-focused features that enable instant access to any running Pod, Deployment, or Service,” said Madhura Maskasky, Platform9 co-founder and VP of Product. “The result is tangible and significant productivity gains through the simplicity of consistent single-pane-of-glass management and governance.”

With Platform9 Managed Kubernetes (PMK), users can easily create upstream Kubernetes clusters using the SaaS platform, on bare metal, AWS, and Azure IaaS layer, and with a few clicks, import clusters from EKS, AKS, and GKE.

Featured updates in this release include:

GitOps Profile Engine: Profile Engine enables GitOps style automation in multicloud environments by allowing administrators to define cluster configurations as desired state templates, and then deploy those to any target cluster. The deployment process updates the target cluster’s state to ensure it conforms to the profile. Comparison and drift analytics are built in to detect changes from compliant configurations so users can take appropriate corrective actions. By treating cluster configuration via declarative profiles, which can be treated as versioned source code, it is easier to provision multiple clusters for new applications or teams, to rebuild clusters, or to compare clusters and analyze differences. Furthermore, the Profile Engine ensures consistency, compliance, and standardization to combat sprawl, security holes, and a lack of policy conformance.

Upgrade Strategies: Customers want flexibility in how and when they upgrade their clusters in production. This release provides three options to upgrade:

Sequential: Worker nodes are upgraded in sequence in a rolling fashion
Parallel Percentage: Users can specify a percentage of nodes to be upgraded simultaneously
Batch: Users can manually select nodes

Storage Classes/PV/PVC/CSI Drivers: This release provides comprehensive drill-down views of objects across all cluster types, providing unparalleled visibility into storage details directly in the UI. Adding a new storage class is easy with the auto-detection of CSI drivers for one-click deployment of persistent storage.

KubeVirt Enhancements: Platform9 Managed KubeVirt enables users to run both legacy VM applications and containers on a fully managed unified platform. This new release introduces a management UI and wizard-based configuration and provisioning so that users can easily create VMs, attach disk(s), start/stop VM instances, view instance details, and much more all with a few clicks.

CIS Benchmark: Platform9 is now CIS Benchmark compliant, extending our security posture that includes SoC2 compliance, encrypted networking between Clusters, Pods, and Nodes, encryption at-rest, and ZeroTrust SaaS architecture.

Other significant updates include a 10x improvement in UI performance and responsiveness; drill-down details on storage, pods, deployments, and services views; logs, events across all cluster types; support for Kubernetes 1.21 and containerd.

All of these advances are paired with Platform9’s unique SaaS-based closed-loop automation–including deployment, monitoring, alerting, self-healing, and proactive troubleshooting and support–that guarantees 99.9% multicluster, multicloud SLA. Platform9’s 100% CKA certified solution architects and customer success teams operate as an extension of customers’ SRE and DevOps teams providing in-depth K8s on-demand Kubernetes expertise and proactively resolving issues 24/7/365.

Image Licensed by: Pixabay.com

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Cisco Flexes Its Muscle in Cloud: Helping Customers Be Cloud Smart to Deliver Exceptional Digital Experiences

Taylor Graham — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 09:40:51 +0000

Cisco announced new ways it is helping customers accelerate digital transformations as they move more resources to the cloud.

The hyper-connected, distributed world we live in now relies on cloud more than ever, and IT teams are facing challenges to provide people with optimal digital experiences wherever and whenever they need access. As a result, businesses are migrating to a cloud-driven operational model based on speed, insight and control to bridge the greater distribution of applications, users and tech staff.

Enabling Customers to Realize Better Outcomes from the Cloud
Cisco has made multi-billion-dollar investments over the past six years to build cloud into every aspect of its business, focusing on helping customers develop complete cloud strategies with confidence across five key areas: Continuity, Insights, Security, Connectivity and Operations.

During a virtual event, the company will showcase how it is advancing its cloud strategy across several of these areas to help businesses connect, secure and automate to deliver seamless digital experiences in today’s hybrid cloud world.

“User experience is key to success in a digital world,” said Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM, Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Cisco. “We are focused on empowering technology groups to securely deliver the best possible application experiences. Only Cisco can power the hybrid cloud solutions, observability, insights and automation necessary to be truly cloud smart.”

New hybrid cloud innovations announced include:

Hybrid Cloud Operations:

Introducing the new Cisco UCS® X-Series: Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) is used in data centers by more than 50,000 customers worldwide. Fully integrated with Cisco Intersight, UCS X-Series is a first-of-its kind system designed for hybrid operations from the cloud and across the clouds. Blending the best of rack and blade systems and featuring revolutionary UCS X-Fabric technology, it’s built for workload versatility today and comes future-ready for the next decade of industry innovation in processors, accelerators and computing interconnects.
Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use automation framework that simplifies complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.
Intersight Workload Engine: A powerful platform for modern, cloud native workloads. Built on an open-source Kubernetes and Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) foundation using container-native virtualization, Intersight Workload Engine is a Cisco operating system for HyperFlex featuring consistent SaaS management.
Cisco Service Mesh Manager: A new extension to the Intersight Kubernetes Service, bringing deep observability and simplified management with policy-based security and intuitive visualization of services topologies across K8s clusters on-prem and in the cloud.
Cisco Cloud ACI: Available on AWS, Azure, and now on Google Cloud with general availability in the Fall of 2021. The Cloud ACI^®common policy and operating model drastically reduces the cost and complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud deployments.
For more information on additional new products supporting hybrid cloud operations visit here.

Observability and Insights:

Integration of ThousandEyes Internet and Cloud Intelligence with the Cisco Catalyst^®8000 Edge Series for SD-WAN and Cisco Nexus^®9000 switches for data centers to provide customers with valuable insights on network health and application performance by monitoring across campus, branch, data centers and every point of the WAN network between the user and applications.
Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator acts a single pane of glass for configuring and managing common policies across multiple on-prem ACI sites, AWS and Microsoft Azure regions and, announcing today, coming this fall to Google Cloud.
Intersight Cloud Orchestrator: Provides a low-code, easy-to-use framework to create and automate complex workflows, so IT Ops can easily orchestrate infrastructure and workloads and accelerate delivery of services.

Customer Experience (CX) Services for Cloud

CX Business Critical Services for Cloud provide advisory services plus expertise to architect, deploy, secure and optimize digital transformations.
CX Intersight Workload Optimizer Services enhance the resource consumption of applications in the cloud.
CX Advanced Services for ThousandEyes and SD-WAN deliver the best application experience for cloud solutions, providing expert design and integration to reduce project complexity and speed transformation.
Custom Quick Start Solutions provide services for end-to-end automation and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

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Dizzion Announces New Managed Desktop Offering on IBM Cloud to Help Enterprises Manage Their Remote Workforce

Leigh Porter — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 15:52:45 +0000

Dizzion, Inc. announced a new managed desktop offering on IBM Cloud designed to assist enterprises in managing their workforce by making it easier for employees to work remotely in a secured and collaborative environment.

Dizzion’s new managed desktops on IBM Cloud offering provides an upgraded Desktop as a Service environment for VMware Horizon on IBM Cloud users and is ideal for enterprise IT organizations looking for a long-term remote work solution that addresses performance, security and compliance challenges.

Dizzion’s new managed desktop offering on IBM Cloud has been designed to leverage VMware Horizon and other technologies to deliver applications, files, corporate network access, security and settings to an end-user’s computer from network-accessed cloud resources, as opposed to the end-user device itself. The process will offer an optimized experience for employees who work remotely and will enable access from internet-connected devices. The new offering will leverage IBM Cloud as the underlying cloud architecture, including servers, storage, networking, and security, with Dizzion as the managed cloud desktop service.

“Dizzion’s managed desktop offering for IBM Cloud can help address a high-priority IT challenge facing a wide range of organizations in 2021,” says Steve Prather, CEO at Dizzion. “Customers will receive the enterprise-level performance and protection they demand. Employees working with media-intense software from home will find their heavy applications optimized for maximum productivity. In-the-know users will have their confidential data secured when working from remote locations. Plus, with IBM Cloud as the delivery engine and VMware Horizon as the desktop virtualization platform, customers will be able to effectively respond to unexpected change.”

Dizzion customer Arise Virtual Solutions, a global customer experience outsourcing specialist, adopted Dizzion’s managed desktop offering on IBM Cloud and realized success using the solution. Arise expanded to 1,500 desktops, citing PCI-DSS compliance and strong performance levels when using customer service software as differentiators, which enabled the company to win the full outsourced customer service business from a well-known global retailer.

“The Arise® Platform is a premier provider of virtual-first customer support BPO solutions that enable brands to be there for their customers. Leveraging an expansive network of gig-economy service partners, Arise uses innovation to change the way brands think about customer care,” said Ken Braatz, Vice President of Technology Operations at Arise Virtual Solutions. “With the resulting agility, performance and compliance of the new Dizzion Managed DaaS, we proved another level of capability to our clients, which led to increased demand and corresponding expansion. Our clients and service partners depend on us to deliver the optimal customer experience solution while securing their sensitive data. With Dizzion Managed DaaS, we are able to do both.”

Dizzion is leveraging IBM’s Cloud Engagement Fund, established as part of IBM’s $1B investment into its partner ecosystem, to accelerate the company’s global expansion through access to technical resources and cloud credits that support the migration of client workloads to hybrid cloud environments, including IBM Cloud.

“By working with Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem partners like Dizzion, we can help to develop and offer new solutions that address evolving customer and partner challenges. Dizzion’s managed desktop offering for IBM Cloud is engineered to help enterprises address the need to manage more complex remote work environments,” said Willie M. Tejada, IBM Chief Developer Advocate and GM ISV/Build Ecosystem. “Supported by IBM’s Cloud Engagement Fund, Dizzion will be able to scale their offering to help expand operations to help enterprises globally.”

Dizzion’s managed desktop offering on IBM Cloud is available immediately and will replace the Horizon Cloud on IBM Cloud Service, with current customers transitioning to the new offering without having to alter their desktop images, protocols or endpoint devices. Dizzion Managed DaaS offers HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR and SOC 2 Type II-compliant services with a zLink BYOD option that extends compliance to personal end-user device use cases. The offering will be available in the United States, Europe and Asia, with plans to expand globally in 2021.

Dizzion is part of IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem, an initiative to support partners of all types — whether they build on, service or resell IBM technologies and platforms — to help clients manage and modernize workloads with Red Hat OpenShift for any cloud environment, including the IBM public cloud. The IBM public cloud is the industry’s most secure and open public cloud for business. With its security leadership, enterprise-grade capabilities and support for open source technologies, the IBM public cloud is designed to differentiate and extend on hybrid cloud capabilities for enterprise workloads.

For more information visit https://www.dizzion.com/managed-daas-on-ibm-cloud/.

VMware and VMware Horizon are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.

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Dell Hybrid Client Delivers Increased Flexibility To Employees and IT

Leigh Porter — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 19:18:05 +0000

News Summary:

World’s first client computing software with hybrid cloud management enabling seamless access to work applications and data, whether they are delivered from the public cloud, private cloud or on the device
Ready out-of-the-box and controlled through the cloud to ease both IT and team member stress while promoting the ability to work from anywhere
Creates personalized PC experiences for thousands of professionals while protecting employee and customer data

Dell Technologies unveiled Dell Hybrid Client to meet the changing needs of businesses, end users and IT. Dell Hybrid Client is a centrally managed client software solution that is ready to deploy with select Dell mobile and desktop devices, helping employees get to work quickly with a consistent experience. As the world’s first client computing software with hybrid cloud management, enabling easy access to applications and data regardless of where they live – in the public cloud, private cloud or on the user’s device.

In an increasingly cloud connected world, organizations need to easily deploy and maintain data and applications from a variety of locations without burdening IT teams or hindering employee productivity. Dell Hybrid Client simplifies and personalizes the user and IT experience while still providing security and flexibility across devices and work environments. Features like built-in everyday productivity applications, browser security, and others are available out-of-the-box and managed through the cloud empowering employees to work how and where is best for them.

“At the core of Dell Hybrid Client sits an elevated experience for both employees and IT teams,” said Brooke Huling, vice president, Modern Computing Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. “For employees, Dell Hybrid Client delivers the same, personalized experience regardless of the device you chose to work on. Everything you need is at your fingertips. For IT, we’ve opened access to multiple clouds enabling experiences to be scaled and customized for workforces at rapid pace.”

“Dell Hybrid Client has the potential to be a game-changing offering,” said Rob Enderle, President and Principal Analyst, Enderle Group. “The new work from anywhere environment coupled with the need to support virtual, local and cloud apps means we’re approaching a window of opportunity for a new client computing solution. Dell has the breadth and reach to drive such a shift in the industry.”

How it works

Dell Hybrid Client begins with single sign-on where users will find their personalized desktop interface and all their applications, whether in the cloud or virtual. This first-of-its-kind solution provides:

Endpoint Security: Securely scale to thousands of users while still protecting employee and company data through built-in features including system lockdown, secure boot, user file encryption and more.
Simplified Workflow: Your workday doesn’t need to be interrupted as users have secure access to web and virtual applications from Citrix, VMware and Microsoft and various storage locations.
Optimized Productivity: Zoom or Microsoft Teams clients run locally, enabling faster collaboration while helping reduce strain on IT infrastructures.
Consistent Experience: With an enhanced “Follow-me” feature, users will find their applications and data on any supported desktop interface – even after changing devices.
Flexibility in Cloud Providers: Organizations can embrace a more flexible mindset by supporting and seamlessly integrating from Wyse Management Suite’s multiple cloud vendors including, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Comprehensive Software Support: With ProSupport for software, Dell Hybrid Client users receive proactive resolution. With automatic alerts and case creation, remote diagnosis and access to ProSupport engineers,² employees can experience little to no downtime and IT can proactively support business needs.

Dell Hybrid Client is currently available across a variety of desktop, VDI and mobile form factors – including the OptiPlex 7090 Ultra, OptiPlex 3090 Ultra, Wyse 5070 and the new Latitude 3320.

Availability and pricing:

The latest Dell Hybrid Client is available on March 26, at $60.00 (USD) per year per device.

Image licensed by: Pixabay.com

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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Delivers New Low-code Service to Simplify Application Development

Leigh Porter — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 18:24:38 +0000

Oracle today is making its popular APEX low-code development platform available as a managed cloud service that developers can use to build data-driven enterprise applications quickly and easily.

Oracle APEX Application Development expands on two decades of APEX functionality already used by 500,000 developers as an easy-to-use, browser-based service for creating modern Web and mobile apps. While the original APEX platform was only available as part of the Oracle Database, APEX Application Development is available as a standalone service and works with a variety of applications. Starting at $360 per month, the APEX service supports unlimited applications across 500+ users and elastically scales as additional capacity is needed. A recent study from Pique Solutions showed that developers could build enterprise applications 38x faster with the Oracle APEX service without having to learn complex, full-stack technologies.

Developers interested in easy, declarative development instead of complex traditional coding can start building low-code applications for free using the new APEX Application Development service, which is included with Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Applications built and deployed using the APEX Application Development service benefit from high security, scalability, availability and performance provided by Oracle Autonomous Database, allowing developers to focus on solving business problems and not the underlying technology.

“Oracle continues to support developer communities and the new APEX service is the latest example, enabling citizen developers, business analysts, and professional developers to rapidly create and deploy beautiful, responsive, data-driven applications with minimal effort,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, executive vice president, database server technologies, Oracle. “APEX is powerful enough to build the vast majority of business applications. Building data-driven applications with traditional coding should now be the exception rather than the rule.”

The APEX service is also pre-configured with Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) and SQL Developer Web. Developers can utilize ORDS to create custom REST APIs against their application data and SQL Developer Web to compose SQL queries and graphically model data. If the business requires traditional coding against the database beyond what can be done in APEX, then with one click developers can upgrade the service to a full Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing database with Oracle APEX that supports the full Oracle Database client APIs, SQL*Net, and Autonomous Data Guard.

The Oracle APEX architecture provides extremely tight integration with the database, enabling a 10x reduction in round trips between the application and the database, resulting in much faster response times for end-users of data-driven applications. Additionally, APEX allows application developers to fully exploit the power and simplicity of SQL.

Pricing
The APEX Application Development service includes everything needed to build and run low-code applications, with no extra fees per user, per developer, per application, or for data ingress and egress, making it easy for developers to build and deploy applications at scale. The APEX service is fully managed, so customers do not need to manage the application platform, database or infrastructure. Starting at $360 per month for 1 OCPU and 1TB of data, which can easily support more than 500 active users using multiple applications, the APEX service can elastically scale to support larger workloads when needed.

Oracle APEX: Delighting Customers and Partners for Nearly Two Decades

“Whether you know it or not, Oracle APEX has been around for the best part of two decades, and has evolved to be an industry-leading, low-code, data-driven application development framework with over 500,000 community developers,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst and practice director, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “No other development platform better exploits the unique capabilities of the Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata in OCI. Best of luck finding another low-code cloud platform that provides its level of scale, cost effectiveness, proven-ruggedness, and ease-of-deployment.”

“In late 2019 we started leveraging Oracle Autonomous Database with APEX on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deliver a mission-critical solution within our Logistics Division,” said Giovani Cani, vice president, IT delivery, Wilson Transportation & Leasing Group. “The APEX low-code platform has enabled the delivery team to quickly go from prototype to a final product and rollout within five months. The result was a secure, elegant, and responsive web-based solution deployed in four distribution centers being used by more than 250 active users around the clock managing a fleet of 600 assets.”

“Without a doubt, Oracle APEX on Autonomous Database is the gold standard for low-code development platforms. For almost 20 years, we have built our entire business on APEX,” said Michelle Skamene, vice president, Insum Solutions. “It has given us a huge competitive advantage, allowing us to deliver beautiful, scalable, feature-rich solutions for our clients in a fraction of the time compared to any other technology we’ve seen. We’re delighted to see this new offering from Oracle, which offers a simple and more affordable entry point into the world of APEX on Autonomous Database and Oracle Cloud.”

“We have used Oracle APEX since its very inception, and in that time we have found it to be the most flexible, powerful, scalable and cost effective solution available to us. We have based an entire solution development strategy on an APEX platform, and can deliver low-code solutions to a higher quality, lower cost and quicker timescales than the equivalent tools from other providers,” said Dermot Murray, vice president ideation, Inoapps. “The continuous delivery of new capabilities, combined with the power of the underlying Oracle Cloud database, allows us to deliver a huge range of business use cases both internally and to our customers.”

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Google Cloud Announces Database Migration Service

Leigh Porter — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 18:26:20 +0000

Google Cloud announced its serverless Database Migration Service (DMS) is available in Preview, enabling customers to migrate MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases to Cloud SQL from on-premises environments or other clouds. For early customers like Samsung Electronics, DMS makes migrating their databases easy, cost-effective, and reliable.

Database Migration Service provides a guided experience to make it easy to create and run migration jobs.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform¹. However, commonly used database migration offerings are costly, hard to set up, and error-prone. They frequently require additional provisioning for migration compute resources, introduce new complexities during the migration process, and can’t guarantee data fidelity.

Google Cloud’s differentiated approach

DMS is designed to be reliable and simplifies network connectivity. The serverless offering eliminates the typical need to provision and pay for migration-specific compute resources. The easy-to-use, guided experience eliminates the need for customers to read through lengthy documentation in order to set up their network. Customers can take advantage of its native replication capabilities and avoid incompatibilities between source and destination, especially for metadata operations.

“As organizations modernize their infrastructure and advance their digital transformation strategies, migrating mission-critical operational databases that power their business success is crucial,” said Andi Gutmans, General Manager, and Vice President, Engineering, Databases at Google Cloud. “Database migration is a complex process for most businesses. With Database Migration Service, we’re delivering a simplified and highly compatible product experience so that, no matter where our customers are starting from, they have an easy, and secure way to migrate their databases to Cloud SQL.”

DMS is the fast track to Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL is one of the fastest-growing services at Google Cloud, powering mission-critical workloads at some of the largest enterprises across the globe.² DMS accelerates migrations from legacy on-premises and other database cloud services to Cloud SQL, where enterprises can take advantage of unique integrations with Google Kubernetes Engine for development and BigQuery for analytics. For native like-to-like migrations to Cloud SQL, DMS is available at no additional charge.

DMS sets a new standard for accelerating cloud migrations

Simple. From preparing the databases, to configuring secure connectivity, to validating the migration setup, DMS provides a guided, integrated experience. Customers benefit from a fast and repeatable setup, with fewer surprises.
Serverless. DMS is unique as a serverless migration service, eliminating the manual customer hassle of provisioning, managing, or monitoring migration-specific resources. Automatic scaling means fast data replication, minimizing downtime for production workloads.
Secure and compatible. DMS protects sensitive data during migration with support for multiple secure, private connectivity configurations. DMS leverages native database replication capabilities to ensure compatibility, reliability, and high fidelity.

“HCL customers across every industry are moving to the cloud to be more agile, secure and scalable, and looking for a trusted partner to deliver an end-to-end experience to migrate their production workloads without disrupting their business,” said Sanjay Singh, Vice President & Head of HCL Google Cloud Ecosystem at HCL. “Database Migration Service accelerates their migration path to help them unlock the benefits of Google Cloud databases.”

“We have seen an acceleration in migrations across the board, including a wave of customers leaving AWS for other cloud service providers. This makes it vital for providers like Google Cloud to provide tools to streamline these migrations,” says John Santaferraro, Research Director for Data and Analytics at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Google Cloud’s Database Migration Service takes an innovative, serverless and user-first approach to eliminate some of the complexity and risk normally associated with production database migrations. This new offering is a strong signal that Google Cloud is committed to helping their customers achieve success easily, securely, and reliably.”

Availability and Getting Started

DMS, now in Preview, supports migrations of self-hosted MySQL databases, either on-premises or in the cloud, as well as managed databases from other clouds, to Cloud SQL for MySQL. Customers can start migrating with DMS at no additional charge for native like-to-like migrations to Cloud SQL. Support for PostgreSQL is currently available for limited customers in Preview, with SQL Server coming soon (request access for both).

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AWS Says Amazon EC2 P4d Instances with EC2 UltraClusters Capability Now Available

S.J. Fisher — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 22:40:48 +0000

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P4d instances, the next generation of GPU-powered instances.

P4d instances feature eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 400 Gbps of network bandwidth (16x more than P3 instances). Using P4d instances with AWS’s Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA (remote direct memory access), customers are able to create P4d instances with EC2 UltraClusters capability.

EC2 UltraClusters allow customers to scale P4d instances to over 4,000 A100 GPUs by making use of AWS-designed non-blocking petabit-scale networking infrastructure integrated with Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage, offering on-demand access to supercomputing-class performance to accelerate machine learning training and HPC.

Data scientists and engineers are continuing to push the boundaries of machine learning by creating larger and more-complex models that provide higher prediction accuracy for a broad range of use cases, including perception model training for autonomous vehicles, natural language processing, image classification, object detection, and predictive analytics. Training these complex models against large volumes of data is a very compute, network, and storage intensive task and often takes days or weeks. Customers not only want to cut down on the time-to-train their models, but they also want to lower their overall spend on training. Collectively, long training times and high costs limit how frequently customers can train their models, which translates into a slower pace of development and innovation for machine learning.

The increased performance of P4d instances speeds up the time to train machine learning models by up to 3x (reducing training time from days to hours) and the additional GPU memory helps customers train larger, more complex models. As data becomes more abundant, customers are training models with millions and sometimes billions of parameters, like those used for natural language processing for document summarization and question answering, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, image classification for large-scale content moderation, recommendation engines for e-commerce websites, and ranking algorithms for intelligent search engines—all of which require increasing network throughput and GPU memory. P4d instances feature 8 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs capable of up to 2.5 petaflops of mixed-precision performance and 320 GB of high bandwidth GPU memory in one EC2 instance.

AWS says P4d instances are the first in the industry to offer 400 Gbps network bandwidth with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA network interfaces to enable direct communication between GPUs across servers for lower latency and higher scaling efficiency, helping to unblock scaling bottlenecks across multi-node distributed workloads. Each P4d instance also offers 96 Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) vCPUs, 1.1 TB of system memory, and 8 TB of local NVMe storage to reduce single node training times.

By more than doubling the performance of previous generation of P3 instances, P4d instances can lower the cost to train machine learning models by up to 60%, providing customers greater efficiency over expensive and inflexible on-premises systems. HPC customers will also benefit from P4d’s increased processing performance and GPU memory for demanding workloads like seismic analysis, drug discovery, DNA sequencing, materials science, and financial and insurance risk modeling.

P4d instances are also built on the AWS Nitro System, AWS-designed hardware and software that has enabled AWS to deliver an ever-broadening selection of EC2 instances and configurations to customers, while offering performance that is indistinguishable from bare metal, providing fast storage and networking, and ensuring more secure multi-tenancy. P4d instances offload networking functions to dedicated Nitro Cards that accelerate data transfer between multiple P4d instances. Nitro Cards also enable EFA and GPUDirect, which allows for direct cross-server communication between GPUs, facilitating lower latency and better scaling performance across EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances. These Nitro-powered capabilities make it possible for customers to launch P4d in EC2 UltraClusters with on-demand and scalable access to over 4,000 GPUs for supercomputer-class performance.

“The pace at which our customers have used AWS services to build, train, and deploy machine learning applications has been extraordinary. At the same time, we have heard from those customers that they want an even lower cost way to train their massive machine learning models,” said Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2, AWS. “Now, with EC2 UltraClusters of P4d instances powered by NVIDIA’s latest A100 GPUs and petabit-scale networking, we’re making supercomputing-class performance available to virtually everyone, while reducing the time to train machine learning models by 3x, and lowering the cost to train by up to 60% compared to previous generation instances.”

Customers can run containerized applications on P4d instances with AWS Deep Learning Containers with libraries for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) or AmazonElastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). For a more fully managed experience, customers can use P4d instances via Amazon SageMaker, providing developers and data scientists with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly. HPC customers can leverage AWS Batch and AWS ParallelCluster with P4d instances to help orchestrate jobs and clusters efficiently. P4d instances support all major machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Apache MXNet, giving customers the flexibility to choose the framework that works best for their applications. P4d instances are available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with availability planned for additional regions soon. P4d instances can be purchased as On-Demand, with Savings Plans, with Reserved Instances, or as Spot Instances.

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IBM Helps Clients Modernize and Accelerate Path to Hybrid Cloud

Olivia Rowan — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 18:26:26 +0000

IBM today announced a strategic expansion of capabilities to provide clients with the flexibility to choose where to deploy workloads, from on-premises to the IBM public cloud, and drive forward their journey to the hybrid cloud. The new and enhanced solutions include containerized software across IBM IT Infrastructure via IBM Cloud Paks and advancements in data storage for containers.

According to a recent IBM commissioned Forrester study, “The Key to an Effective Hybrid Multicloud Strategy,” 85 percent of respondents are increasing funding for IT infrastructure outside of public cloud, suggesting that organizations continue to rely on both on-premises and private cloud as part of their technology stack.

“The global pandemic and ensuing economic disruption have amplified the need for speed and flexibility and accelerated plans for digital transformation,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President of IBM Systems and Chairman, North America. “Our clients are increasing their investments in AI and cloud. They are moving swiftly to reduce costs while improving security with approaches like confidential computing and resiliency, and IBM’s hybrid multicloud strategy with Red Hat is at the epicenter of this transformation.”

Signaling strong adoption, many of IBM’s top IBM Z and Power Systems clients are currently running proofs-of-concept with Red Hat OpenShift on Z, and over 100 more are ready to start. In addition, more than 40 IBM clients are already using IBM Storage as a persistent, highly available repository with strong security capabilities for OpenShift. This builds on a longstanding collaboration between IBM IT Infrastructure and Red Hat as well as previous investments made across IBM Z, LinuxONE, Power and Storage offerings to support Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.

Today, over 100 new to LinuxONE and Linux on Z clients are now running mission-critical applications in the hybrid cloud. These clients are all sizes from startups to enterprises, representing industries ranging from healthcare, retail, transportation, financial and technology services, and public sector.

IBM announced new and upcoming capabilities designed to help clients implement hybrid cloud with IBM IT Infrastructure, including:

Ability to infuse AI throughout the business and consolidate databases with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, already available on IBM Power Systems, planned for November on IBM Z
Accelerate digital transformation and connect cloud native applications to existing workloads with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration on IBM Z
Faster cloud native development with integrated runtimes enabled by IBM Cloud Pak for Applications for IBM Z and Power Systems
Increased visibility, automation, and governance across the hybrid multicloud with IBM Cloud Pak for Multi-Cloud Management for IBM Z and Power Systems

Persistent Storage and Data Protection for Container Workloads

IBM Storage is also bringing extensive new and future enhancements to its storage and modern data protection solutions. These are primarily designed to support the rapidly expanding container and Kubernetes ecosystem, including RedHat OpenShift.

IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks is now expanding support for container-native data access on Red Hat OpenShift. This suite aims to provide the greatest flexibility for continuous integration and continuous delivery to teams who often need file, object, and block as software-defined storage. IBM Spectrum Scale also adds a fully containerized client and run-time operator to provide access to scalable data lakes on any Red Hat OpenShift cluster. IBM Cloud Object Storage adds support for the open source s3fs file to object storage interface bundled with Red Hat OpenShift.

“As we embark on a journey to modernize our infrastructure with containerized applications and Red Hat OpenShift we needed an infrastructure that could support our application modernization in a safe and secure way,” says Christoph Buchstätter, Head of Computing and Platform Services, Porsche Informatik. “We chose IBM Cloud Object Storage because of the built-in security and stability with high availability it will provide our containerized applications. The system is simple to manage and maintains the data in our control.”

This substantial shift to containers is having an enormous impact on modern data protection. Today’s organizations want solutions that unify data recovery, retention, and reuse and also protect critical data workloads in hybrid cloud environments.

“Container technology such as Red Hat OpenShift is the foundation for hybrid cloud deployments, enabling application and data portability and scalability across private and public clouds,” said Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst, ESG. “IBM is delivering container-native data protection and persistent storage together with expanded hybrid cloud data protection support. IBM recognizes that many of their clients will continue to have non-containerized workloads for years to come. Consequently, IBM is providing tools that span containerized and non-containerized environments: common data protection infrastructure, and unstructured data support that expands existing data oceans to provide a single ‘source of truth’ for AI and ML workloads no matter what platform they run on.”

To address these challenges, IBM will enhance IBM Spectrum Protect Plus to enrich protection for containers. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus will protect Red Hat OpenShift environments with an integrated experience that starts with the ability to deploy IBM Spectrum Protect Plus Server as a container using a Red Hat OpenShift Operator.

Image licensed from Unsplash.

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