Digital transformation is giving IT spending a big boost

Digital transformation may promise critical benefits for the companies undertaking it, but it’s also delivering a major boost to IT spending around the world.

That’s according to market researcher IDC, which on Monday released new data indicating that global spending on IT products and services will grow from nearly $2.4 trillion in 2016 to more than $2.7 trillion in 2020. A big part of that growth, it says, will come from companies investing in cloud, mobility, and big data technologies as part of their digital transformation efforts. Such efforts are now particularly prominent in financial services and manufacturing.

Purchases on the consumer side accounted for nearly a quarter of all IT revenues in 2015, thanks largely to what IDC calls “the ongoing smartphone explosion,” but in general consumer spending on PCs, tablets, and smartphones has been waning. Even the modest growth forecast for the tablet market will be driven by commercial segments, it said.

“While the consumer and public sectors have dragged on overall IT spending so far in 2016, we see stronger momentum in other key industries including financial services and manufacturing,” said Stephen Minton, vice president of customer insights and analysis at IDC. “Enterprise investment in new project-based initiatives, including data analytics and collaborative applications, remains strong.”

IBM And VMware Expand Partnership To Enable Easy Hybrid Cloud Adoption

VMware and IBM announced the availability of industry-first cloud services that enable organizations to quickly and easily move enterprise workloads to the cloud. With more than 500 clients engaged, the global partnership between IBM and VMware is helping more organizations extend existing workloads to the cloud in hours, versus weeks or months.

Earlier this year, IBM and VMware set out to tackle one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: extending existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud without incurring the cost and risk associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies.

“IBM and VMware are making great strides to enable enterprise hybrid cloud adoption through automation,” Melanie Posey, vice president of Research, IDC’s Hosting and Managed Network Services. “The IBM – VMware partnership offers enterprises the ability to extend existing on-premises workloads to the cloud seamlessly without the need for a major IT operations overhaul, thus greatly simplifying the entire migration process.”

Rapid Enterprise Adoption of VMware Environments on the IBM Cloud
Since then, more than 500 mutual clients have begun moving their VMware environments to IBM Cloud including Marriott International, Clarient Global LLC, and Monitise. IBM is a strategic cloud platform for VMware users with a growing footprint of nearly 50 highly-scalable and security-rich cloud data centers across the globe. With almost 100% of the Fortune 100 customers using VMware technologies, the partnership is designed to preserve and extend customer investments across thousands of data centers.

“Enterprises need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads between on-premises and public cloud environments,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud. “Our collaboration with VMware is becoming the glue for many organizations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud environment.”

IBM Provides First Offering For VMware Cloud Foundation as a Fully Automated Service
Today’s introduction of VMware Cloud Foundation™ combines VMware’s market-leading compute, storage and network virtualization solutions into an integrated platform. For the first time, organizations can now automatically provision pre-configured VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) environments on IBM Cloud in hours versus weeks or months. The platform integrates VMware vSphere®, VMware Virtual SAN™, VMware NSX® and VMware SDDC Manager™, and gives customers broad choice in their infrastructure decisions.

In addition to new services, IBM is training more than 4,000 service professionals with the expertise required to provide clients with VMware solutions. This expansive team of sellers and advisers will provide clients with the expertise to extend VMware environments to the cloud.

“IBM and VMware share a common vision for providing customers with an easy path from the data center to the cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “This collaboration has been so successful that we’re investing more deeply so our customers can quickly deploy software-defined solutions in just hours to IBM Cloud with all the sophisticated workload automation they have within their own data centers.”

Marriott Enhances Customer Service Experiences via the Cloud
Marriott International is a globally recognized hospitality company, reporting more than 4,500 properties in 88 countries and territories. The company is constantly looking for ways to innovate and transform the guest experience. By extending their VMware investments on IBM Cloud, without the need to re-architect applications, development teams have the ability to focus on innovation and preserve their existing IT investments.

“It’s more than just keeping our guests happy, it’s about helping them create a memory by exceeding their expectations,” said Alan Rosa, senior vice president of Technology Delivery and IT Security, Marriott International. “From reserving and booking rooms, planning their next family vacation or facilitating an important business event, the process of consuming our services and products needs to be seamless and integrated into our guest’s style of working and transacting. Marriott has been able to keep innovating by rapidly launching new customizable applications that support these experiences. The partnership between IBM and VMware gives us an advantage in that Marriott can continue to do what we do best but expands our reach on a global scale with trusted partners whom consistently deliver.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

VMware Releases New Cross-Cloud Architecture™

VMware, Inc. has announced the extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy with the new VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture™, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.

In support of the company’s cloud strategy, VMware also announced the following:

• VMware Cloud Foundation™ is a unified software-defined data center (SDDC) platform that makes it easy for customers to manage and run their SDDC clouds;
• Technology Preview of Cross-Cloud Services™ to showcase how customers can manage, govern, and secure applications running in private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud;
• VMware vCloud® Availability™, a new family of disaster recovery offerings purpose-built for vCloud Air™ Network partners;
• A new release of VMware vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager™ to provide VMware vSphere® users zero downtime application migration to VMware vCloud Air.

“Customers are increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds to run their applications, but are daunted by the challenge of managing and securing applications across diverse cloud platforms,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, software-defined data center division, VMware. “When customers combine a best-in-class private cloud with leading public clouds, all enabled by VMware, they have the strongest, most flexible hybrid cloud strategy. VMware is delivering cloud freedom and control by providing a common operating environment for all clouds with our unique Cross-Cloud Architecture.”

As the world’s most complete and capable hybrid cloud architecture, the Cross-Cloud Architecture enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set of Cross-Cloud Services which VMware is developing and the VMware vRealize® cloud management platform.

Unified SDDC Platform for the Hybrid Cloud

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers the next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds that for the first time combines VMware’s highly scalable hyper-converged software (VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN™) with the world’s leading network virtualization platform, VMware NSX®. VMware SDDC Manager™, a core component of VMware Cloud Foundation, helps customers and service providers automate the deployment and management of VMware cloud software. SDDC Manager helps to build and maintain the entire VMware cloud software stack, freeing cloud administrators from the complex and tedious task of installing, configuring, managing and updating their cloud infrastructure, making it possible to build a complete cloud in a matter of hours. The result is that customers can gain a 6 to 8x reduction in time to deploy cloud infrastructure, and save 30% to 40% on TCO.¹

For the first time, VMware Cloud Foundation offers a new “as-a-service” option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network partner delivering new offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation with its VMware Cloud Foundation™ on IBM Cloud offering. VMware Cloud Foundation will be available on additional public clouds, including vCloud Air, in the future.

For private clouds, customers can procure turnkey VxRack Systems integrated solutions from EMC today, or combine Cloud Foundation software with qualified VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and QCT.

VMware Cloud Foundation runs any traditional or cloud-native application, from business-critical scale-up applications to distributed scale-out applications. Regardless of whether they are in virtual machines or containers, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a consistent infrastructure platform that delivers the unique performance, resiliency, security and manageability benefits of vSphere, Virtual SAN and VMware NSX. VMware Cloud Foundation integrates with existing VMware solutions to support cloud flexibility and choice, and enable business mobility, including:

VMware vRealize Suite delivers a comprehensive enterprise-ready cloud management platform (CMP) that can speed up IT service delivery, improves IT operations, and delivers end-user choice with control, across heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments (vSphere and non-vSphere).

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™ will enable developers to innovate faster with secure, multi-tenant self-service access to containers, while IT will be able to leverage existing tools, knowledge, and processes to deploy and manage container services.

VMware Integrated OpenStack gives customers the fastest path to deploy and manage a production-grade OpenStack cloud on top of a VMware-based SDDC infrastructure.

VMware Horizon® enables customers to quickly deliver virtualized desktops and applications through a single platform, creating a secure digital workspace.

Tech Preview: Cross-Cloud Services

Cross-Cloud Services are new Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings under development to enable visibility into cloud usage and costs, enhance consistent networking and security policies, and automate the deployment, management, and migration of applications and data across vSphere and non-vSphere private and public clouds. With a common operating environment for both public clouds and on-premises workloads, central IT can protect data and applications and control costs while enabling developers and the business to innovate freely in the clouds they choose. The Cross-Cloud Services VMware will preview at VMworld and include:

• Discovery and Analytics: enabling discovery, onboarding, and governance of public cloud applications;
• Compliance and Security: using micro-segmentation and monitoring to provide security and compliance for applications across clouds;
• Deployment and Migration: providing developers the ability to work cross-cloud, and IT the ability to manage cross-cloud applications with security and compliance​.

Continued Innovation for vCloud Air and the vCloud Air Network

VMware vCloud Air and the VMware vCloud Air Network service provider ecosystem remain critical parts of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy. VMware vCloud Air Network partners offer a wide array of services, provide geographic and industry specialization, and help customers meet complex regulatory requirements.

VMware is announcing VMware vCloud Availability for vCloud Director®, which will enable partners to offer simple, cost-effective cloud-based disaster recovery services that seamlessly support customers’ vSphere environments by leveraging native vSphere replication capabilities. This solution will be designed expressly for VMware vCloud Air Network service providers to be easy to operate, and foster customer adoption and growth, with a radically simple on premises installation process. The solution will also enable further monetization of existing VMware cloud environments based on VMware vCloud Director’s multi-tenant cloud management capabilities.

To extend a VMware private cloud to VMware vCloud Air, the latest version of Hybrid Cloud Manager offers new enhancements that simplify application migration and improve the performance of the connection between the two environments. vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager enables customers to extend on-premises networks to vCloud Air over an optimized, software-defined WAN, enabling networks to stretch in the cloud, yet perform almost as if they were local. vCloud Air Hybrid Cloud Manager also enables zero downtime, bi-directional migration of entire applications, as well as the migration of NSX security policies to vCloud Air Advanced Networking Services. Customers can move virtual machines up to 20x faster with an optimized network while retaining the same security policies and controls available on-premises, all with the least disruption to the business.

 (1) Based on VMware internal testing and estimates from January 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Primary Data To Launch Datasphere At VMWorld

At the VMworld 2016 U.S. conference next week, Primary Data is introducing its new DataSphere data orchestration platform to automate IT storage services and ensure applications meet business objectives by uniting enterprises’ different storage resources across flash, object/cloud, SAN, and NAS systems for the first time. Through data virtualization, the Primary Data DataSphere platform transparently connects storage infrastructure from any vendor, media or protocol under a single, global dataspace, allowing data to easily move between server, shared and cloud storage without application interruption.

“Storage diversity across flash, cloud, hyper-converged, and traditional systems give enterprises the right storage tool for any job, but until now, data has been trapped in the typical storage silos, forcing IT to overprovision and limit the value of billions of dollars of enterprises storage investments,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data CEO. “DataSphere automatically orchestrates the right data to the right place at the right time according to IT-defined objectives, without business or application disruption. This industry first can easily cut customers’ storage costs in half by finally aligning data to the ideal storage system according to business needs.”

DataSphere unites heterogeneous storage resources across file, block and object protocols by separating the data path from the control path through data virtualization. The uniquely storage-agnostic DataSphere architecture gives customers the flexibility to easily add new storage resources to their infrastructure. By connecting storage resources across a global dataspace, DataSphere significantly increases utilization of existing storage to reduce overprovisioning and save budget.

DataSphere sets a new standard for enterprise agility with storage policies down to file-level granularity. Application admins are now able to select easy-to-use storage policies on a per application basis and continually validate if the storage is delivering according to the defined policy. DataSphere automatically aligns application I/O with available storage resources to meet the application owner’s business needs. In addition, Smart Objectives, a unique feature of DataSphere, enables IT to manage the data lifecycle without any impact to application data availability and performance. Data is load balanced across all available resources in real-time to ensure business requirements are continually met by the infrastructure, minimizing overprovisioning and the cost of maintaining individual storage silos for each application.

The DataSphere platform delivers numerous benefits to enterprises, including the ability to:

• Simplify management by converging data using automated orchestration across all storage
• Reduce costs of overprovisioning up to 50% by increasing storage utilization
• Respond instantly to new and changing application needs
• Increase application uptime during migrations and upgrades
• Gain agility and customer choice by enabling scale out storage with any vendors

In addition to delivering unprecedented automation and optimization across storage systems, DataSphere enables enterprises to maintain service level agreements (SLAs), automate data lifecycle management, expand scale out storage to more workloads, and add VMware Virtual Volumes for VM-aware storage using existing storage resources. Primary Data features detailed solution briefs for these and other use cases on its website.

DataSphere utilizes next-generation storage analytics and efficiency through a number of features that automate data orchestration across enterprise storage systems. These include:

• Data Awareness offers insight into applications’ storage usage and requirements, as well as storage utilization across systems connected to DataSphere
• Storage Awareness provides visibility into storage system capabilities to ensure the appropriate storage type is paired to meet application needs
• Dynamic Data Orchestration places data according to data objectives and storage resource availability for optimal data placement
• Non-Disruptive Data Mobility automatically realigns data placement as business needs change, to ensure service levels are met, without application disruption or any impact to performance
• Unified Storage Management simplifies administration of storage capacity across separate systems by delivering a single virtual pool of aggregated storage managed in DataSphere

IT industry analyst firm Gartner has taken note of how data virtualization software can introduce new operational efficiencies beyond traditional architectures, and recently reported that new computing styles and approaches will complement server virtualization.

“As an increasingly important part of a comprehensive data integration strategy, data virtualization is attracting renewed interest as organizations recognize its potential for a growing range of use cases*,” according to Gartner. “Data silos slow organizations’ transformation into digital business by limiting information discovery and access. Data virtualization offers information leaders a mitigation strategy that can lead to new analytical and operational opportunities. Through 2020, 35% of enterprises will implement some form of data virtualization.**”

*Gartner, Market Guide for Data Virtualization, Ehtisham Zaidi, Mark A. Beyer, Shubhangi Vashisth, 25 July 2016

**Gartner, Use Data Virtualization to Help Resolve Data Silos, Mark A. Beyer, Eric Thoo, Nick Heudecker, 20 May 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

DataCore Releases Second-Generation Universal VVols Software Functionality

DataCore Software has unveiled the second generation of its universal vSphere Virtual Volumes (VVols) software technology. DataCore is the only VMware-certified software vendor supporting universal VVols functionality, and these powerful new capabilities allow VVols to work across a wide diversity of other vendors solutions and all types of storage (disk subsystems, flash/SSD arrays, DAS, etc.).

With VVols, server administrators can create policies and self-provision storage that suits their needs. DataCore adds the ability to provide a universal control plane that allows the instrumentation and administration of virtual machine-based storage policies to be easily managed across a mix of new and existing storage infrastructure investments from one or many vendors. This improves operational efficiency through a common management and policy platform where data services and performance service level demands are decoupled from any underlying deficiencies.

“DataCore is a great example of a company that has taken the powerful capabilities of what VMware has done with VVols and developed a software-based universal control plane so VVols can be used by a wider-base of customers and architectures,” said Rawlinson Rivera, principal architect, office of CTO at VMware.

The challenges of managing storage for virtual environments have driven the need for simple policy based techniques and VMware’s VVols technology has proven to be a major advance forward. However, many existing and current storage offerings are not yet VVols certified. Even with a growing number of storage vendors providing VVols support, each has their own offering and enterprises can face the issue of having multiple VASA (VMware vSphere API for Storage Awareness) providers. The misalignments created as different generations or storage from multiple vendors occupying the datacenter can lead to a sprawl of provider and storage silos. 

DataCore delivers a software-based VVols VASA provider, so that vSphere high availability and/or multiple VASA provider installations can provide full redundancy and availability across a full heterogeneous environment. DataCore’s implementation of VVols creates a storage services platform that unifies data storage resources whether they are SAN, converged, hyper-converged, or cloud. This provides one set of universal storage services across all storage devices regardless of type — internal or external based storage. As a result, diverse storage platforms are now able to communicate seamlessly, reducing complexity and improving operational efficiency. 

For example, DataCore’s universal VVols VASA provider empowers vSphere administrators to allocate datastores from Western Digital’s SanDisk® InfiniFlash™ platforms using familiar VM provisioning and storage allocations without any special training on SanDisk or DataCore technologies. Behind the scenes, DataCore SANsymphony software pools capacity from multiple high-density InfiniFlash systems and synchronously mirrors data across them for high-availability.

“By using DataCore’s software, vSphere administrators can easily see and manage multiple petabytes of high-performance storage for rapidly expanding at-scale data centers,” said Gary Lyng, senior director of marketing, Data Center Systems business unit, Western Digital. “In addition, multiple SanDisk InfiniFlash platforms can be added economically and non-disruptively to fully redundant storage pools supporting growing high-performance and massive capacity demands of hyperscale and cloud customers.”

The vendors that have no plans to support VVols in their current architecture simply cannot afford to retrofit equipment with the new VM-aware schema. DataCore software allows VVols to work universally across all types of storage — regardless of whether the systems support VVols or not. This enables enterprises to benefit from VVols on popular storage systems and all flash arrays simply by layering storage virtualization software in front of them. As a result, vSphere administrators can self-provision virtual volumes from virtual storage pools — they can specify the capacity and class of service without having to know anything about the hardware.

“The ‘universalism in the datacenter’ that DataCore is providing with its universal VVols support greatly improves storage provisioning, resulting in numerous benefits, including VM policy automation, a more logical process in setting up virtual machines, and the proper alignment of resources to storage demands,” said Todd Mace, tech evangelist for DataCore Software. “We are enabling our customers to extract the maximum value out of their legacy storage and arrays even if their equipment does not yet support VVols.”  

The benefits of using DataCore’s universal VVols software technology include:

• Only one VASA provider is needed for all disparate arrays
• No firmware upgrades or special licensing is needed to support storage
• Local storage and external array are fully supported with VVols
• All FibreChannel and iSCSI based storage can now be VVols capable
• Virtual Machine migrations VMFS > VVols or vice-versa are fully supported with no application down time
• Full availability and redundancy for VASA providers 
• Up to 16,000 VVols per Protocol Endpoint are supported

DataCore also now includes enhanced support for VVols’ VM-centric storage policy-based management (SPBM) using multi-tiered storage pools. The new virtual disk templates can be tailored to establish different classes of service (storage profiles) that the vSphere administrators can choose from when creating virtual machines (VMs) or adding disks to those VMs.  DataCore software becomes a universal adapter, providing universal data services where virtual machines can be based on a defined policy or through virtual machine provisioning when using SPBM. The data services that DataCore currently supports is aligned with the vSphere certification for the current VVols framework including multi-writer support, deduplication support, synchronous mirroring support, snapshot support, and caching support.

DataCore will be demonstrating its universal VVols software technology in booth #2406 at VMworld 2016, taking place from Aug 28, 2016 – Sept 1, 2016 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Conference Center in Las Vegas.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Virtustream And Iron Mountain Partner To Build Cloud Platform

Virtustream has announced that Iron Mountain Incorporated has selected Virtustream® xStream®,  and Virtustream Viewtrust® software to orchestrate, automate, and secure cloud storage services for Iron Mountain’s cloud-based service offerings.

“Changes in technology and business processes are challenging the most progressive companies to adopt new strategies to handle the resulting explosion of high value data,” said Eileen Sweeney, senior vice president and general manager for data management at Iron Mountain. “To enable our customers to adapt their data management processes to these challenges, we are embracing technology and offering clients a hybrid approach to manage all types of data, through various stages of the data lifecycle. Partnerships with companies like Virtustream provide the technology foundation to offer an advanced portfolio of solutions that will enable our customers, regardless of size or budget, to adopt cloud services to advance their data management agendas.”

Virtustream xStream is an integrated management platform that enables service providers such as Iron Mountain to deliver enterprise-class, IT-as-a-Service to their customers. Iron Mountain’s cloud offerings are strengthened by the integration of Virtustream’s Viewtrust enterprise risk management and continuous compliance management solution with xStream. As a Cloud Storage Service Provider using Virtustream’s xStream solution with Viewtrust integration, Iron Mountain will be able to assist its clients with their storage needs, and facilitate infrastructure compliance with requirements such as PCI-DSS 2.0, HIPAA/HITECH, and FISMA, and compliance with security frameworks like IS0 27001-2005, ISO 9001-2008, SSAE16, ISAE3402 and others.

“Iron Mountain is transforming the data management and data storage industries,” said Kevin Reid, president and chief technology officer, Virtustream. “Our shared commitment to innovation, plans for continuous development, and other synergies between our companies form the foundation for a strong, sustainable partnership.”

As a part of this new collaboration, Virtustream will leverage Iron Mountain’s data center facilities to offer Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, a fully capable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform. Leveraging 65 years in storage and information management expertise all over the world, Iron Mountain cloud and Iron Mountain data center facilities provide an ideal environment for its customers and partners prioritizing the protection and preservation of high value data to manage risk. 

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Expands Cloud Footprint In Korea

IBM has announced the opening of a new IBM Cloud Data Center in Korea, in collaboration with SK Holdings C&C. Located outside of Seoul in Pangyo, the new data center is designed to support growing cloud adoption and customer demand across the country.

According to IDC, a leading information technology research firm, the public cloud services market in Korea is expected to grow from $445 million in 2015 to approximately $1B in 2019.¹

The new facility in Pangyo is IBM’s ninth Cloud Data Center in the Asia-Pacific region, and part of the company’s growing global network of 47 Cloud Data Centers. With access to a local on ramp for IBM and SK Holdings’ Cloud services, Korean enterprises and start-ups can accelerate their digital transformation, business innovation and global expansion.

“A key part of our cloud strategy is to fuel new ecosystems to spur innovation and collaborate with companies who understand the local market.” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud.  “That’s why we chose to partner with SK Holdings C&C in Korea. Together, we are able to bring the local expertise, platform, and data services that gives Korean customers the ability to compete on a global scale.”

IBM’s network of Cloud Data Centers offers both global reach and the opportunity to keep data local to client locations — whether for performance, security or flexibility. Clients in Korea are expected to benefit from faster time-to-market, improved performance, support for industrial-strength public and hybrid cloud, and access to IBM’s global network of 47 Cloud Data Centers so they can manage their data more securely and efficiently across global markets to drive expansion.

Modeled after IBM’s standardized pod design, the new facility in Korea will have the capacity for thousands of physical servers and offer the full range of cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage, security services and networking. With services deployed on demand and full remote access and control, customers can create their ideal public, private, or hybrid cloud environments.

New Cloud Data Center Builds on Existing IBM and SK Holdings Partnership
The new Cloud Data Center builds on the existing partnership between IBM and SK Holdings C&C, with more than 20 local companies already using their joint hybrid cloud capabilities across the gaming, IT, manufacturing and retail industries. As Korean companies increasingly look to extend the value of their existing systems to the cloud, the two companies anticipate a high demand for hybrid cloud services with the opening of the new facility.

“Companies all over the world are seeking for new business and profit opportunity throughout digital transformation,” said Jung-ho Park, CEO of SK Holdings C&C. “The new Cloud Data Center provides one-stop cloud converting service of existing IT system and infrastructure, and become the base camp to support digital innovation for customers’ businesses by converging digital technologies such as IoT, Big data and AI.” 

Growing the Cloud Ecosystem in Korea
The new data center will further accelerate the commitment of IBM and SK Holdings C&C to foster the growth of cognitive and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies throughout the region. The two companies plan to make a cognitive cloud platform available at the Cloud Data Center in Pangyo, enabling local startups and IT developers to create cognitive apps and industry-specific services that leverage Watson.

Developers in Korea will also have access to Bluemix, IBM’s Cloud platform, and more than 150 APIs and services spanning key areas such as cognitive, blockchain, Internet of Things and big data.

Local universities are also participating by cultivating future cloud talent. To prepare the next generation of cloud-based app developers, IBM and SK Holdings C&C have been teaming with leading universities, including Dankook University, Ewha Woman’s University, and Sungkyunkwan University, providing students with education and training based on the IBM Cloud.

“Cloud computing has rapidly become a key driver of digital transformation throughout Korea,” said Goodhyun Kim, a well-known developer and IT columnist in Korea. “By making IBM Cloud and its easy, fast, and robust APIs and services available on Bluemix to local developers, I anticipate that we will rapidly see a whole new wave of cloud-based innovation across Korea.”

IBM Cloud is helping businesses of all sizes and industries innovate and grow throughout Korea. For example:

• Amorepacific, a global leader in the beauty industry, recently established a ‘Global Smart Workplace’ on the IBM Cloud to create a flexible and efficient work environment that integrates its headquarters, partners, and branch offices worldwide. By moving to the cloud, Amorepacific has improved productivity by reducing and simplifying business process and time to market.
• Gravity, a leading South Korean video game corporation and one of the original pioneers in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), has selected IBM Cloud as the preferred platform for its new mobile role playing game Wonderfolic R and its widely popular RAGNAROK Online game. Gravity turned to IBM Cloud for its stability, security, global reach and to take advantage of IBM’s network of Cloud Data Centers throughout Asia-Pacific. By tapping into IBM’s Cloud Data Center in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Gravity has been able to expand its reach by providing gamers with better throughput performance and the ability process data faster, even when lots of users access the game at the same time.
• Coolio, a social content analysis app developer, is using IBM Cloud to analyze and manage social media data and drive global expansion. Working with IBM, Coolio has built “Sprd”, a content-recommendation app that identifies and extracts information from social data that has the highest possibility of dissemination. The app then shares this data with people that have similar interests. By adopting IBM Cloud, Coolio has been able to manage sharp increases of traffic very quickly, without any downtime or access delay, while providing users with stable service.
• UpRoot, a data security start-up that provides real-time detection and analysis of malicious link sources and their routes of passage over websites across the world, has been able to take on complicated and repetitive analysis with speed and security by adopting the IBM Cloud. Additionally, by tapping into IBM’s global network of Cloud Data Centers, the company has been able to achieve fast analysis of websites worldwide and share data from the process seamlessly.

1. IDC, Worldwide Premium Black Book, Version 1, 2015, July 1, 2015.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Named A Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant For Its Flash Storage Solutions

IBM has been recognized as a Leader for Flash Storage in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays (SSA).¹

According to Gartner, “Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. A vendor in the Leaders quadrant has the market share, credibility, and marketing and sales capabilities needed to drive the acceptance of new technologies. These vendors demonstrate a clear understanding of market needs; they are innovators and thought leaders; and they have well-articulated plans that customers and prospects can use when designing their storage infrastructures and strategies. In addition, they have a presence in the five major geographical regions, consistent financial performance and broad platform support.”

IBM’s position as a leader comes after it announced the expansion of its FlashSystem portfolio, including DeepFlash and Storwize products, to help clients more quickly extract value from data for competitive advantage. Among the 380 patents that differentiate IBM’s flash products and services are its FlashCore and MicroLatency technologies. Clients rely on these technologies to quickly access the mounting volumes.

For example, Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital (Henry Mayo), a not-for-profit community hospital and trauma center in Valencia, California, needed to implement a storage solution that would deliver faster access to patient data for their electronic health records (EHRs) system. Henry Mayo required a solution for its medical teams who perform a wide range of healthcare and outpatient surgical services.

After thorough testing of information systems software, MEDITECH, Henry Mayo selected a combination of IBM flash technologies. To quickly access EHRs, the hospital selected IBM’s FlashSystem® V9000 all-flash array. The solution also includes the VersaStack™ converged infrastructure platform by IBM and Cisco using IBM’s Storwize® V7000 hybrid storage array. Key to its decision was that the IBM arrays would provide security through hardware level encryption and deliver the hospital’s database administrators a single dashboard into its storage assets.

“From arrival to aftercare, our medical teams are constantly viewing and updating EHRs, so delays or interruptions to retrieving data can directly affect their care, which is why we were committed to MEDITECH and wanted to deploy its latest release,” said Cindy Peterson, vice president/CIO, Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. “It was therefore particularly important to implement IBM’s FlashSystem V9000, which our testing proved could be relied upon for quick access of patient information.”

Physicians at Henry Mayo are now able to access patient records more quickly, which helps them make faster, high-quality clinical decisions without delay. As a result, they may be able to spend more time with patients, leading to enriched patient care and improved outcomes.

“Whether it’s a hospital or retail organization, organizations across the globe understand the value that fast and reliable access to data will provide,” said Michael Kuhn, vice president of offering management, Storage Solutions. “Achieving this requires technology found in IBM’s FlashSystem portfolio, which is proven to dramatically accelerate the movement of data when and where it is needed, while delivering the reliability and availability to keep data always accessible.” We believe client testimonials like this help support the Gartner recognition.

1. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, August 22, 2016

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Platform9 Introduces High Availability For OpenStack Users

Platform9 has released its High Availability capability for OpenStack users, supporting both traditional and cloud-native workloads. Platform9 will be showcasing this industry-first capability in its booth #649 at VMware’s VMworld, taking place August 28 – September 1 in Las Vegas.

“High Availability is fundamental to enterprise customers looking to run production workloads on OpenStack. Given the massive demand we’ve seen from enterprise customers, we are excited to provide a solution with the industry’s first High Availability capability for both traditional and scale-out workloads,” said Madhura Maskasky, co-founder and vice president of product at Platform9. “This new capability makes it possible for customers to migrate to OpenStack for mission-critical workloads without sacrificing the powerful, enterprise-grade High Availability capabilities they’ve come to expect.”

“For production workloads, High Availability is a critical capability and we have had to run those workloads on VMware vSphere thus far. With this update to Platform9 Managed OpenStack, we can now use OpenStack and KVM for all workloads,” said Rob Horstmann, Manager of Technical Operations at Moz, Inc.

Traditional applications need support from the infrastructure layer to be highly available. Historically this capability has only been available in VMware vSphere and not with OpenStack. Because of these limitations, enterprise customers have found it challenging to run production workloads on OpenStack, and instead have relied on expensive VMware ELAs for such scenarios.

Likewise, cloud-native workloads need support from the infrastructure layer. While these workloads are designed to “scale-out” across multiple-nodes, they are only highly available if the infrastructure is distributing the worker nodes across failure domains (such as hosts, racks, or data centers). Until now, there has not been an out-of-the-box solution for workloads that require both programmatic scale-out (using auto-scaling-groups) and High Availability awareness.

Today, cloud architects can use the concept of availability zones — already in OpenStack — to automatically configure groups of servers that represent a zone of availability, such as a rack or a data center. Platform9’s newly announced High Availability capability automatically configures liveness detection among servers that are in such a zone. When a server in a zone fails, the capability orchestrates the recovery of workloads running on that server onto other servers in that zone. In addition to recovering traditional workloads, scale-out workloads that are being spawned by auto-scaling-groups can be distributed across availability zones, mitigating the risk of simultaneous failure.

This High Availability capability is available in Platform9 Managed OpenStack Enterprise Edition. Platform9 is also open sourcing this capability, making it freely available via a Github repository where the code, documentation and demonstrations reside.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Google is using AI to compress images better than JPEG

Small is beautiful, as the old saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in media files. Compressed images are considerably easier to transmit and store than uncompressed ones are, and now Google is using neural networks to beat JPEG at the compression game.

Google began by taking a random sample of 6 million 1,280×720 images on the web. It then broke those down into nonoverlapping 32×32 tiles and zeroed in on 100 of those with the worst compression ratios. The goal there, essentially, was to focus on improving performance on the “hardest-to-compress” data, because it’s bound to be easier to succeed on the rest.

The researchers then used the TensorFlow machine-learning system Google open-sourced last year to train a set of experimental neural network architectures. They used one million steps to train them and then collected a series of technical metrics to find which training models produced the best-compressed results.

In the end, their models outdid the JPEG compression standard’s performance on average. The next challenge, the researchers said, will be to beat compression methods derived from video compression codecs on large images, becuase “they employ tricks such as reusing patches that were already decoded.” WebP, which was derived from the VP8 video codec, is an example of such a method.