cloud-native – Digital IT News

Veritas InfoScale Revolutionizes Software-Defined Infrastructure

Taylor Graham — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:58:06 +0000

Veritas Technologies, the leader in enterprise data protection, announced the next evolution of Veritas InfoScale, the company’s leading software-defined infrastructure availability solution, that will enable customers to deploy InfoScale as containers in native Kubernetes platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift. Native deployment will make it easier to provide InfoScale’s high availability, persistent storage and storage optimization for stateful Kubernetes critical workloads.

“Containerization is revolutionizing the data center, allowing applications to burst and shrink their processing capacity to reduce costs and deliver scalability,” said Karthik Ramamurthy, vice president of product management at Veritas. “However, many organizations are hesitant to bring the benefits of containerization to mission critical applications that have historically relied on persistent storage. The Kubernetes-native deployment of InfoScale will deliver the features organizations need to migrate their most important applications into environments like OpenShift with confidence. This is a game changer for companies that want to take the training wheels off their Kubernetes deployments and realize the benefits where they really matter.”

The evolution will begin with InfoScale 8, which will be available later this year and will enable enterprise customers and DevOps engineers to deploy the following InfoScale features as containers:

Software-defined persistent volume storage classes
Dynamic and static persistent storage provisioning
Non-disruptive scaling of persistent volumes
Non-disruptive migration of persistent volumes
REST APIs for third party integration
Persistent volume snapshots
Container lifecycle management

InfoScale 8 will also be the first time the product is available as a Red Hat certified container application and Red Hat OpenShift Certified Operator available in the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog with single-click deployment.

“As containers and cloud-native applications become more crucial to enterprise digital transformation, our customers are seeking expanded choice in the technologies that support these environments and workloads,” said Joe Fernandes, senior vice president, Platforms Business Group at Red Hat. “Veritas InfoScale 8 adds a certified option for customers that want additional layers of resiliency and storage optimization for their OpenShift environments. We’re pleased to collaborate with Veritas as part of our broad partner ecosystem, helping our customers to select the solutions that best meet their unique needs, all certified on the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.”

This announcement builds on other recent InfoScale and Veritas NetBackup updates to support containerization, making Veritas the most comprehensive data protection provider across physical, virtual, cloud and container environments.

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Optiv Security Launches Next-Gen Managed XDR to Stop Threats Earlier in Attack Lifecycle

Leigh Porter — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 16:02:09 +0000

Optiv Security, launched its Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR) offering at Black Hat USA 2021. The technology-independent offering enables clients to take rapid and decisive action against today’s most critical cyberattacks and strengthen their security posture.

Optiv Managed XDR is a next-generation tech-enabled service that leverages your existing technology investments and deploys Optiv’s deep expertise to detect, analyze and remediate threats in real time.

“Optiv MXDR brings simplicity, transparency and automation to clients’ environments, enhancing existing defenses to counter known and emerging threats with confidence and speed,” said David Martin, chief services officer for Optiv. “What’s more, we can seamlessly leverage the power of Optiv to extend and layer the offering with a full suite of complementary services like remediation, incident response, threat hunting, and beyond.”

Optiv MXDR is the only managed cloud-based, next-gen advanced threat detection and response service that ingests data across various layers of technologies to correlate, normalize, enrich, and enable automated responses to malicious activity in real-time. By automating incident investigation with actionable insights, organizations can detect threats faster and prioritize which threats to mitigate first, significantly reducing the attack surface.

“We know the threat landscape; both what’s at stake and how to circumvent threat actors while significantly reducing time to detect and respond,” said John Ayers, XDR vice president for Optiv. “We meet clients where they are and customize our continuously managed approach to ease the burden of the unknown and allow teams to detect, respond and remediate threats faster while also automating deeper investigation for future improvements.”

Devo has been named a foundational partner in Optiv MXDR, delivering scalable, cloud-native logging and security analytics via the Devo Platform, enabling full visibility across cloud and on-premise environments for Optiv customers.

“Security teams are eager to learn more about XDR as they look to consolidate their security stack for greater efficiency and accuracy in threat detection and response,” said Ted Julian, SVP of Product at Devo. “Two constraints have always stood in their way: lack of real-time access to historical data, and the inability to collect and analyze the massive data volumes associated with modern operational environments. Devo eliminates these concerns and is uniquely qualified to power solutions like Optiv’s MXDR.”

Optiv delivers threat management solutions to more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies. View the complete MXDR service brief and find out how organizations can enhance their security posture with Optiv.

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New SAS Viya offerings help better manage and navigate big data for AI and analytics

Leigh Porter — Mon, 03 May 2021 18:29:40 +0000

Diverse and complex data environments create a challenge for organizations seeking to operationalize analytics to enable the best business decisions. Global analytics leader SAS continues to enhance its powerful, cloud-native SAS^® Viya^® platform with the inclusion of new data management solutions to further strengthen the foundation for data and analytic success.

“Analytics help organizations harness big data and use it to identify new opportunities. And the starting point for effective analytics is applying new techniques to discover, prepare and govern data,” said Tapan Patel, Senior Marketing Manager for AI and Analytics at SAS. “New SAS Viya data management offerings allow businesses to catalog assets across the cloud and on-premises and prepare data without hassle. These are fundamental elements of a successful analytic journey.”

Most analytics professionals spend too much time on data preparation rather than building models and delivering analytic insights for their organizations. Whether data is simple or complex, organizations need innovative solutions that cut through the chaos, provide flexibility and efficiently transform data to create better analytical assets. Today, SAS is announcing two such innovative solutions.

SAS Studio Analyst
As analytics and AI become more embedded in day-to-day operations, organizations need data in the right place, in the right condition and at the right time.

Now available in SAS Viya, SAS Studio Analyst empowers data scientists and data analysts with a self-service environment to expedite delivery of trusted data for analytics. SAS Studio Analyst allows users to visually represent, prebuilt or custom, data quality and data preparation steps as part of the flow, which can be easily reused and managed. This helps to jump-start analytics initiatives and efficiently orchestrate data needed for it.

SAS Information Governance
In a world with endless data sources, many organizations struggle to grasp all data that is available, identify the contents of a data set, and evaluate data for analytics fitness. And as the amount of data increases from more and more sources, these issues are compounded, affecting the value of analytical outputs.

SAS Information Governance, also now available in SAS Viya, provides an intuitive data catalog and metadata search facility for analyst, business and IT users to ingest, discover and manage data resources, while simultaneously governing and protecting data. With the solution, data professionals can spend less time searching and organizing data, and more time on actual analysis.

Better data management and governance improves people’s health
Riverside County in Southern California relies on data integration and analytics from SAS to improve the health and well-being of more than 2.5 million residents. The county faced the challenge of pulling together innumerable amounts of data from multiple sources. The goal is to better serve the needs of its diverse and large population through the county’s health system, which includes a large medical center, an inpatient psychiatric facility and several health care clinics.

To ensure the most vulnerable populations receive coordinated medical, behavioral health and socioeconomic services, Riverside County worked with SAS to design a solution that combines data preparation, advanced analytics and data visualization capabilities. The solution, powered by SAS Viya, enables the county to integrate health and non-health data from its public hospital, county jail, and behavioral health, social services and homelessness systems.

By connecting these databases, Riverside County can now see how individuals interact with different services across its health system and map care pathways to health outcomes. This is enhanced by entity resolution, a feature of the technology that enables the county to identify unique entities, even if a person’s name, address or other personal identifiers don’t match up across different databases.

“Before SAS, we had a massive data integration problem,” said Judi Nightingale, Director of Population Health at Riverside County. “If we can get an integrated look at every client and reduce our siloed efforts, we can get everyone in the county to their health and wellness goals more quickly.”

Read the full story of how Riverside County tapped SAS Viya to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable Californians at sas.com/en_us/customers/riverside-county.html.

The latest release of SAS Viya includes the new data management offerings – SAS Studio Analyst and SAS Information Governance – and is designed to be delivered and updated continuously. The cloud-native software enables customers to efficiently democratize analytics throughout their organizations, while seamlessly managing analytic workloads and embedding analytics into variety of operational applications for making confident decisions.

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Oracle Announces Java 16

Leigh Porter — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 19:18:43 +0000

Oracle announced the availability of Java 16 (Oracle JDK 16), including 17 new enhancements to the platform that will further improve developer productivity. The latest Java Development Kit (JDK) finalized Pattern Matching for instanceof (JEP 394) and Records (JEP 395), language enhancements that were first previewed in Java 14. Additionally, developers can use the new Packaging Tool (JEP 392) to ship self-contained Java applications, as well as explore three incubating features, the Vector API (JEP 338), the Foreign Linker API (JEP 389), and the Foreign-Memory Access API (JEP 389), and one preview feature, Sealed Classes (JEP 397).

Oracle delivers Java updates every six months to provide developers with a predictable release schedule. This offers a steady stream of innovations while also delivering continued performance, stability and security improvements, increasing Java’s pervasiveness across organizations and industries of all sizes.

“The power of the six-month release cadence was on full display with the latest release,” Georges Saab, vice president of development, Java Platform Group, Oracle. “Pattern Matching and Records were introduced a year ago as part of JDK 14 and have since gone through multiple rounds of community feedback based on real-world applications. This process has not only given Java developers the opportunity to experiment with these features before they were finalized, but also incorporated that critical feedback which has resulted in two rock-solid JEPs that truly meet the needs of the community.”

The Java 16 release is the result of industry-wide development involving open review, weekly builds and extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java developer community via the OpenJDK Community and the Java Community Process. The new features delivered in Java 16 are:

Language Enhancements First Introduced in JDK 14, Finalized in JDK 16

JEP 394: Pattern Matching for instanceof – Enhances the Java programming language with pattern matching for the instanceof operator.
JEP 395: Records – Enhances the Java programming language with records, which are classes that act as transparent carriers for immutable data. Records can be thought of as nominal tuples.

New Tool to Improve Developer Productivity

JEP 392: Packaging Tool – Provides the jpackage tool, for packaging self-contained Java applications.

Improved Memory Management to Improve Performance

JEP 387: Elastic Metaspace – Returns unused HotSpot class-metadata (i.e., metaspace) memory to the operating system more promptly, reduces metaspace footprint, and simplifies the metaspace code in order to reduce maintenance costs.
JEP 376: ZGC: Concurrent Thread-Stack Processing – Moves ZGC thread-stack processing from safepoints to a concurrent phase. This work eliminates the last significant bottleneck for allowing concurrent stack processing.

Improved Networking to Improve Developer Productivity and Flexibility

JEP 380: UNIX-Domain Socket Channels – Adds support for all of the features of UNIX-domain sockets that are common across the major UNIX platforms and Windows to the socket channel and server-socket channel APIs in the java.nio.channels package. UNIX-domain sockets are used for inter-process communication (IPC) on the same host. They are similar to TCP/IP sockets in most respects, except they are addressed by filesystem path names rather than Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and port numbers.

Addressing Future-incompatible Code

JEP 396: Strongly Encapsulate JDK Internals by Default – In JDK 9 we strongly encapsulated new internal API elements, thereby limiting access to them. As an aid to migration, however, JDK 9 deliberately chose not to strongly encapsulate at run time the content of packages that existed in JDK 8. JDK 16 tightens this constraint by encapsulating most internal elements of the JDK by default, except for critical internal APIs such as sun.misc.Unsafe. End users can still choose the relaxed strong encapsulation that has been the default since JDK 9. This will encourage developers to migrate from using internal elements to using standard APIs, so that both they and their users can upgrade without fuss to future Java releases.
JEP 390: Warnings for Value-Based Classes – Designates the primitive wrapper classes as value-based and deprecate their constructors for removal, prompting new deprecation warnings. Provides warnings about improper attempts to synchronize on instances of any value-based classes in the Java Platform.

Incubating and Preview Features

JEP 338: Vector API (Incubator) – Provides an initial iteration of an incubator module, jdk.incubator.vector, to express vector computations that reliably compile at runtime to optimal vector hardware instructions on supported CPU architectures.
JEP 389: Foreign Linker API (Incubator) – Introduces an API that offers statically-typed, pure-Java access to native code.
JEP 393: Foreign-Memory Access API (Third Incubator) – Introduces an API to allow Java programs to safely and efficiently access foreign memory outside of the Java heap.
JEP 397: Sealed Classes (Second Preview) – Enhances the Java programming language with sealed classes and interfaces. Sealed classes and interfaces restrict which other classes or interfaces may extend or implement them.

Improvements for OpenJDK Contributors

JEP 347: Enable C++14 Language Features (in the JDK source code) – Allows the use of C++14 language features in JDK C++ source code, and gives specific guidance about which of those features may be used in HotSpot code.
JEP 357: Migrate from Mercurial to Git – Migrates the OpenJDK Community’s source code repositories from Mercurial (hg) to Git.
JEP 369: Migrate to GitHub – Hosts the OpenJDK Community’s Git repositories on GitHub.

New Ports Provide Support for Java on More Platforms

JEP 386: Alpine Linux Port – Ports the JDK to Alpine Linux, and to other Linux distributions that use musl as their primary C library, on both the x64 and AArch64 architectures.
JEP 388: Windows/Aarch64 Port – Ports the JDK to Windows/AArch64.

Constantly Making Java Better
Java remains among the most successful development platforms ever, based on continuous innovation to address the evolving needs of modern application developers. To make the Oracle Java SE Subscription even more valuable to customers, Oracle added GraalVM Enterprise as an entitlement. GraalVM can help improve performance and reduce resource consumption by applications, especially in microservices and cloud-native architectures. Organizations that manage their Java estates by leveraging the Oracle Java SE subscription not only benefit from having the latest enhancements and direct access to Java experts at Oracle, but experience substantial savings over other approaches.

“Instead of getting interested every three or four years about what was new in Java, this cadence keeps me active as a passionate developer, teacher and trainer,” said José Paumard assistant professor, University Sorbonne Paris Nord and co-organizer, Paris Java User Group. “I have eagerly awaited using Records to improve the performance and readability of my data processing code, and after being able to use it as a preview feature, it is now going live with this latest release.”

Developers can learn more about Java 16 and get hands-on experience at Oracle Developer Live: Java Innovations on March 23, 25 and 30.

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Informatica Speeds Cloud-Native Enterprise Data Management with NVIDIA Accelerated Computing

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Informatica Speeds Cloud-Native Enterprise Data Management with NVIDIA Accelerated Computing

Leigh Porter — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 20:35:42 +0000

Informatica, announced the availability of its serverless, Spark-based Cloud Data Integration engine that offers accelerated performance using the NVIDIA RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark with NVIDIA accelerated computing.

For the first time users have access to end-to-end machine learning operations (MLOps) capabilities by operationalizing machine learning models, and to the power of data management with the scalability and speed delivered by RAPIDS data science software and NVIDIA infrastructure. This is a big milestone on the road toward data democratization and a critical step to scale up digital transformation efforts.

According to Gartner, “Forty-one percent of employees outside of corporate IT are no longer just ‘end users’ of technology. They are technology producers who customize or build their own analytics or technology solutions to support their work.”¹ These technology producers perform advanced analytics and manage vast datasets, resulting in data democratization. But for this to be successful, companies need to provide these users access to timely and accurate data.

Informatica is the industry’s first cloud data management company offering citizen integrators, data engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists alike zero overhead, zero coding data access through serverless multicloud data management while applying NVIDIA’s revolutionary GPU acceleration to Informatica’s MLOps and DataOps workloads.

“Data science is the backbone of AI, as it is key to transforming oceans of enterprise data into business opportunities,” said Manuvir Das, Head of Enterprise Computing, NVIDIA. “Informatica’s integration of RAPIDS Accelerator for Apache Spark with NVIDIA accelerated computing brings the world’s most advanced infrastructure to the many industries that rely on Informatica’s enterprise cloud data management solutions, enabling customers to speed their data science and AI pipelines across their cloud and on-prem data centers.”

With this product milestone customers will now experience:

Increased Data Processing Speed up to 5X: To generate business insights, data analytics, machine learning, and data science projects all rely on clean and processed data from data pipelines that collect, transform, cleanse, and prepare it for extraction. Traditionally, the data pipelines run on slower CPUs whereas GPUs are faster, utilizing parallel processing that allows for multiple threads to execute at the same time. With this announcement, Informatica customers can accelerate their data management workloads and operationalize machine learning models using NVIDIA GPUs to ingest and process data up to 5X faster and at scale, enabling faster insights to make critical business decisions.
Accelerate Data Democratization Across the Enterprise: The accelerated computing made possible by NVIDIA GPUs and software has been used to improve the performance of compute-intensive AI and machine learning workloads, but traditionally required sophisticated Spark expertise and highly skilled developers. Informatica’s simple drag-and-drop GUI-based development experience removes the complexity by converting simple mappings to sophisticated Spark code that can execute on GPUs at scale. Informatica has been democratizing data access with its data integration products for years and is now pushing the frontiers by democratizing GPU access to data consumers at large.
Up to 72% Lower Total Cost of Ownership: Data analytics and data science projects are compute-intensive and data heavy. Operationalizing these projects at scale requires a constant feed of cleansed data from various sources at high velocity, often at a high cost. By leveraging the power of GPU-accelerated software and computing, data management pipelines, MLOps and DataOps frameworks built on Informatica can deliver up to 72% TCO savings, allowing customers to accelerate their data delivery and realize huge cost savings.

“Data democratization is the holy grail of digital transformation initiatives,” said Jitesh Ghai, Chief Product Officer, Informatica. “You can’t leverage the power of data and gain valuable insights if you are restricted in your data access. Our collaboration with NVIDIA is valuable to us in bringing enterprise-scale data democratization and narrowing the gap between the data-haves and the data-have-nots within the enterprise. This important milestone with NVIDIA shows our continued commitment to unlock the value of data embedded in organizations across all levels and more importantly empower all key users to gain faster business-critical insights and operationalize data analytics and data science projects at scale.”

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Veeam Expands Google Cloud Partnership and Increases Public Cloud Support

Taylor Graham — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 15:25:18 +0000

Veeam ^® Software, the leader in Backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management, announced its expansion of public cloud support with the general availability of NEW Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform – completing Veeam’s support for all three major public cloud providers. With the majority of organizations now running hybrid or multi-cloud environments and 72% of those using public cloud currently having more than one vendor in place^[i], Google Cloud is one of the top five-largest public cloud infrastructure providers worldwide.^[ii] With this new offering, Veeam delivers a single platform to protect, secure and manage all applications and data – cloud, virtual and physical – enabling organizations to accelerate hybrid-cloud adoption.

“Veeam recognizes the strategic importance of the cloud to our 400,000+ global customers and we are committed to providing broad platform support and choice,” said Danny Allan, chief technology officer and senior vice president of product strategy at Veeam. “As we now expand public cloud support even further with the general availability of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform, we have simultaneously expanded our partnership with Google Cloud, enabling Veeam to jointly engage customers through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Additionally, with Veeam recently acquiring Kasten, customers can also acquire Kasten’s K10 datamanagement platform, purpose-built for Kubernetes, through the Google Cloud Marketplace.”

Veeam helps customers address security and data protection responsibilities by delivering Google Cloud backup and recovery to protect and secure applications and data, utilizing and automating Google Cloud-native technologies to quickly and reliably overcome any cloud data loss.

New functionality of Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform includes:

Google Cloud-Native: Simple yet powerful web UI, deployable from the Google Cloud Marketplace starts protecting data in minutes; Policy-Based Automation of Google Cloud-native snapshots for fast and frequent recovery points, and rapid full- and file-level recovery options to overcome any cloud data loss.
Cost Optimization: Industry-first cost calculation to align service-level objectives (SLOs) with budgets while avoiding cloud overspend; back up to Google Cloud object storage for cost-effective long-term retention and compliance.
Security: Overcome security threats including ransomware as well as insider threats by isolating backup data from production (cross-project/cross-region); layered security to protect against brute force attacks with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Hybrid-Ready: Portable data format and integration with Veeam Backup & Replication external repositories enables easy recovery outside of Google Cloud; utilizes flexible Veeam Universal Licensing (VUL) to simplify license management and enable Cloud Mobility.

New Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform FREE edition (up to 10 Google Cloud workloads can be backed up with unlimited restore options and best effort support) and BYOL edition (VUL with flexible Cloud Data Management and production 24/7 support) is available now in the Google Cloud Marketplace.

For more information, please visit www.veeam.com.

Supporting Quotes

“As customers migrate their most business-critical workloads to the cloud, data protection and management are top of mind. With the expanded availability of Veeam’s data backup solutions on Google Cloud, customers can quickly deploy and manage these applications at global scale, while benefiting from Veeam’s capabilities in data protection.” – Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud

“Organizations leveraging hybrid cloud infrastructure can increase both the value and performance of their workloads by taking advantage of data movement across on-premises and cloud environments. However, this environment requires complex data protection solutions to meet customer demands for data recovery and resilience. While solving this problem has historically been the responsibility of the enterprise, providers like Veeam can help by adding granular levels of automation and data protection which allow organizations to ensure they are prepared in the event of data loss or downtime. Veeam can also provide organizations with abstracted tools to help better understand their resource usage and cost in hybrid cloud environments. When it comes to cloud infrastructure deployment, cost and data resilience remain two of the most difficult challenges facing organizations. Veeam’s updates show it is dedicated to helping organizations understand and overcome these challenges.” – Andrew Smith, Research Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC

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Cloudian Announces General Availability of S3

Taylor Graham — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 15:17:50 +0000

Cloudian® announced that VMware customers will be able to use Cloudian’s fully S3-compatible object storage software for both cloud-native and traditional applications, all managed in VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu. Integrated with the new VMware vSAN Data Persistence platform, Cloudian’s HyperStore® object storage delivers massive scalability, military-grade security and multi-tenancy while reducing infrastructure complexity and enabling new efficiencies and cost savings.

One Storage Environment for Cloud-Native and Traditional Applications

Because modern applications require cloud-like access on-premises and in the public cloud, they demand modern storage solutions to maximize workflow potential, accelerate development, minimize strain on IT teams and reduce costs. At the same time, these solutions must also support traditional applications. Addressing these needs, Cloudian HyperStore object storage is built on cloud-derived technology and the industry’s first native S3 API implementation, providing a flexible, unified storage platform and high-level, API-driven infrastructure that modern application developers demand from infrastructure platforms.

Cloudian is the most widely deployed independent provider of object storage, and the benefits of combining HyperStore and the vSAN Data Persistence platform include:

Enterprise-grade object storage powered by the vSAN Data Persistence platform: Leverage vSAN support for Shared Nothing Architecture (vSAN-SNA) or vSAN Direct Configuration for object storage to improve storage efficiency.
Automated deployment and scaling through Kubernetes: Easily install and deploy HyperStore on VMware vSphere® clusters straight from the VMware vCenter® UI and dynamically provision and scale in a self-service manner through Kubernetes APIs.
vSphere-integrated capacity and health monitoring: Seamlessly manage a HyperStore cluster across data centers, edge environments and clouds without leaving vSphere.
Cost savings: Consolidate both modern, cloud-native workloads and traditional workloads on the same platform, eliminating infrastructure silos and capitalizing on common skills and training.

Support for Multiple Use Cases

In addition to providing the industry’s most S3-compatible object storage for modern applications, the integration of HyperStore on VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu enables VMware customers to use VMware HCI for use cases that were previously not supported with object storage. Spanning vertical industries such as healthcare, education, financial services and government, these use cases include:

Data protection – Backup, archive and disaster recovery for cloud-native and traditional applications, including ransomware protection and Office 365 data backup.
Analytics – Rich metadata tagging, facilitating AI/ML applications with Google-like search.
Big data – Decoupling of compute and storage in Splunk environments, enabling retention and analysis of more data and significant TCO savings.
IoT/edge computing – Support for a hybrid edge and hub model, leveraging object storage’s highly distributed, peer-to-peer architecture.

Supporting Quotes

“Today’s multi-cloud customers are looking to run, manage, and protect applications of all types with a consistent operational model,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing, CPBU, at VMware. “We are delighted that the scalability, security and cost savings of Cloudian HyperStore object storage are now available for our joint customers, with simplified deployment and management provided by the VMware Cloud Foundation.”

“We’re excited about building on our VMware partnership to provide VMware HCI users with a truly unified, hybrid cloud-ready storage platform for both modern and traditional applications,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian. “Together, we’re enabling VMware customers to more easily and quickly take advantage of cloud-native opportunities while continuing to capitalize on their prior infrastructure investments.”

Additional Resources

To learn more about the new combined solution:

See a demo at http://bit.ly/3agA9Om_demo.
Visit Cloudian’s VMware partner page at cloudian.com/vmware/.

Cloudian also offers a full-featured, free trial of HyperStore software for installation on virtual machines or commodity hardware at cloudian.com/free-trial/.

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Advanced Cloud-Native Container Security Added to Trend Micro’s Cloud One Services Platform

Taylor Graham — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 22:18:32 +0000

Trend Micro Incorporated, the leader in cloud security, announced its advanced container security solution Cloud One – Container Security. Designed to ease the security of container builds, deployments and runtime workflows, the new service helps developers accelerate innovation and minimize application downtime across their Kubernetes environments, from a single tool.

This new service is an important addition to Trend Micro’s Cloud One services platform that was introduced last year. As IDC stated, “Trend Micro launched Cloud One, its integrated cloud security services (SaaS) platform that addresses customers’ security challenges around datacenter servers and virtual machines, IaaS workloads, containers and containers services, cloud security posture management, cloud file and object storage services, and serverless.”

Global organizations are increasingly leveraging containers to accelerate cloud migration, rearchitect monolithic applications and build and integrate seamless cloud native applications. This can create security gaps that traditional network and endpoint tools are not capable of addressing.

“Containers are helping teams innovate faster by simplifying development and deployment. To safely keep this pace, teams needs to integrate security practices more easily in the container lifecycle,” said Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of Cloud Research at Trend Micro. “That’s where this new service comes into play perfectly. It provides automated continuous protection at three critical stages of the container lifecycle; build, deploy, and run.”

Trend Micro Cloud One Container Security offers three main elements:

Container image scanning

This scans at build time for the earliest possible detection and lowest cost remediation. In addition, through partnership with Snyk there is a scan against the market leading open source vulnerability database. This provides early detection and mitigation of vulnerabilities in third-party code dependencies. Cloud One – Container Security will:

Look for vulnerabilities in the packages included in the container
Detect malware using signatures and advanced machine learning techniques
Find embedded secrets such as passwords, API tokens, or license keys
Sweep for IoCs using industry-standard Yara rules

Policy-based deployment control

Container security enables you to create policies that allow or block deployments based on set rules. Native integration with Kubernetes ensures that all deployments run in a production environment are safe.

Cloud-native runtime security

Once an image has been deemed safe and is deployed into production, Cloud One Container Security will protect the container in the runtime environment. This offers ongoing vulnerability detection for the containerized application and provides relevant feedback to security and DevOps teams in case further action is needed.

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Red Hat Builds a Common Kubernetes Foundation for Windows and Linux Container Workloads for Red Hat OpenShift

Leigh Porter — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 18:34:38 +0000

Red Hat, Inc., announced the ability to run and manage Windows Containers through Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes Platform. With the ability to manage both Linux and Windows-based containerized workloads side-by-side, IT teams can eliminate the need for parallel software stacks in environments across the hybrid cloud.

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation 2020 Cloud Native Survey, this year, 92% of survey respondents say they use containers in production — a 300% increase from just 23% in the first survey in March 2016. As use of containers in production has continued to expand, Red Hat sees the need for an enterprise Kubernetes platform that can not only span all open hybrid cloud infrastructure, but also the variety of workloads and applications running on this foundation.

A common platform for Windows and Linux container innovations
As organizations move to modernize more of their applications with containers, the vast majority of these workloads are supported by two leading operating systems — Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows. However, heterogeneous environments with both Windows and Linux platforms often silo applications, making it difficult for enterprises to transform and scale their operations. Red Hat OpenShift smooths out IT processes by now enabling both Windows and Linux based containerized applications to be managed side-by-side by a single control plane.

“Red Hat OpenShift already provides enterprises with a powerful foundation to connect workloads across the hybrid cloud and with each new feature or capability we aim to further that mission. With Red Hat OpenShift support for Windows Containers, organizations no longer need to manage separate IT stacks for their Linux and Windows containers — helping to break down silos and make it easier for enterprises to pursue their cloud-native agenda.”

ASHESH BADANISENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CLOUD PLATFORMS

Red Hat OpenShift provides organizations running mixed Windows and Linux workloads the benefits of a common Kubernetes platform with a single, cohesive solution to manage containers regardless of whether the cloud-native workloads are running Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

To enable support for Windows Containers, Red Hat OpenShift uses the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO), a certified OpenShift operator based on the Kubernetes Operator Framework, jointly supported by both Red Hat and Microsoft. Red Hat OpenShift users can access the Windows Machine Config Operator via the Operator Hub to begin managing their Windows Containers within the OpenShift console.

Increased flexibility and control across heterogeneous environments
With the Windows Machine Config Operator as the linchpin, Red Hat OpenShift orchestrates both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows to run as building blocks of applications and supports .NET Core applications, .NET Framework applications and other Windows applications. Organizations can then run Windows containers on Red Hat OpenShift wherever it is supported across the open hybrid cloud, including bare-metal servers, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and, in the future, VMware vSphere.

Red Hat OpenShift now provides organizations with the ability to:

Move Windows containers to Red Hat OpenShift without needing to completely re-architect or write new code.
Lower deployment costs for containerized workloads in heterogeneous IT environments.
Improve productivity and DevOps agility by providing cloud-native management through a single platform.
Greater portability and survivability of applications across hybrid cloud environments, including new public cloud deployments or edge installations.

Availability
Support for Windows Containers in Red Hat OpenShift will be available early 2021.

Supporting Quotes
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president, Cloud Platforms, Red Hat
“Red Hat OpenShift already provides enterprises with a powerful foundation to connect workloads across the hybrid cloud and with each new feature or capability we aim to further that mission. With Red Hat OpenShift support for Windows Containers, organizations no longer need to manage separate IT stacks for their Linux and Windows containers — helping to break down silos and make it easier for enterprises to pursue their cloud-native agenda.”

John Gossman, distinguished engineer, Microsoft
“Our collaboration with Red Hat continues to evolve as we work to meet customer needs centered around business modernization and hybrid cloud adoption. We already work closely together on Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a jointly-managed and supported Kubernetes service on Microsoft Azure. Today’s announcement further cements our commitment to support customers by addressing dynamically changing IT demands, bringing Windows and Linux containers to a single, streamlined platform for the hybrid cloud in Red Hat OpenShift for Windows Containers.”

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Accenture Helps Rakuten Mobile Launch Fully Virtualized Cloud-Native Mobile Network

Leigh Porter — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:20:17 +0000

Accenture has helped Rakuten Mobile launch its fully virtualized cloud-native mobile network, from business model design to development and operation.

Rakuten Mobile’s network is fully virtualized, meaning hardware and software can be managed as a single entity. Such an approach enables network operators to minimize the cost of building, maintaining and operating large-scale infrastructure, helping increase the competitiveness of their service.

In a bid to reinvent how the network is built and operated, Rakuten Mobile enlisted the help of Accenture to design a new organization and business model to support the launch of its fully virtualized mobile network. In addition to providing overall project management, Accenture also developed new operations engineering capabilities to help Rakuten Mobile better monitor and manage the performance and architectural integrity of the network.

Since its full-scale commercial launch in Japan in April, Rakuten Mobile’s cloud-native mobile network has handled a 2.5 times higher level of data traffic consumed by its subscribers when compared with a typical operator, despite the impact of COVID-19. Rakuten Mobile’s network operating costs are now 30% lower than those of other mobile network operators, and the company can develop and launch software more quickly than most operators can.

“I want to thank the Accenture team for working with us on this courageous journey,” said Tareq Amin, Rakuten group executive vice president and Rakuten Mobile chief technology officer. “With Accenture’s support, we have been able to transform how we operate — harnessing new network engineering principles, automation and emerging technologies — to make the world’s first fully virtualized cloud-native network a reality.”

Accenture also helped design Rakuten Mobile’s Service Experience Center, a customer-centric variation of the traditional network operations center. The Service Experience Center team is managing operations and acquiring new capabilities as Rakuten Mobile’s network evolves.

In addition, Accenture supported the development and integration of Rakuten Mobile’s Network Operating System (RNOS), which enables near real-time monitoring and control of the network. Leveraging machine learning based on real-time data reports from across the platform, the RNOS enables proactive fault detection and prevention and enhances network performance and reliability. Through the development of the RNOS platform, Accenture is helping Rakuten Mobile increase the efficiency of its operations workforce, enabling the company to pass operational savings directly to customers across Japan.

Another capability Accenture powers for Rakuten Mobile is its Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment platform, which provides automated build, test, security and deployment functionality for Rakuten Mobile’s engineering teams, enabling the teams to innovate rapidly and consistently. All capabilities are orchestrated to work together seamlessly.

Following the launch of Rakuten Mobile’s 4G network in Japan this year, Accenture helped the company design and build a proof-of-concept that has become the Rakuten Communications Platform. This cloud-native, 5G telecommunications-as-a-service offering — enabled by Rakuten Mobile’s world-class automation practices — draws on the company’s engineering pedigree and Accenture’s cloud architecture and implementation experience to usher in a new era of computing and telecommunications convergence.

“Rakuten’s heritage of disruption, software development and delivery excellence enabled it to bring a totally new, radical vision for its Rakuten Mobile network,” said Francesco Venturini, a senior managing director at Accenture who leads its global Communications & Media industry group. “Our approach to this bold project has been to share and amplify Rakuten’s sense of discovery by helping to explore the unknown, making investments in the development of 5G and edge cloud, and bringing together the people, capabilities and assets from across Accenture’s global network to help Rakuten Mobile forge the path forward.”

Today’s announcement comes as the edge cloud is emerging as an interchangeable cloud ecosystem encompassing storage and compute assets located at the edge and interconnected by a scalable, application-aware network that can sense and adapt to changing needs, securely and in real-time. Companies need to innovate even faster with emerging technologies to become leaders of their industries.

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