AWS Direct Connect Service Now Available In Equinix Amsterdam

Equinix, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect cloud service in Equinix’s Amsterdam International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centers. With AWS Direct Connect, companies can connect their customer-owned and managed infrastructure directly to AWS, establishing a private connection to the cloud that can reduce costs, increase performance, and deliver a more consistent network experience. The Equinix Amsterdam location brings the total number of Equinix metros offering the Direct Connect service to eleven, globally.

“Our goal at Equinix is to help enterprises realize the full benefits of the cloud, while helping to eliminate concerns of application latency or cost. By providing access to AWS via the Direct Connect service, we are empowering customers to achieve improved performance of cloud-based applications. Additionally, AWS Direct Connect customers receive reduced data transfer costs for data from AWS by two to ten times, depending on data volume,” said Eric Schwartz, president, EMEA, Equinix.

Cloud computing continues to grow at a steady pace across Europe. IDC predicts that the EMEA public cloud market will expand 26% over the next four years, and the private cloud market will grow at a rate of 18%. By expanding AWS Direct Connect to additional locations within continental Europe Equinix and Amazon are enabling enterprise CIOs to advance their hybrid cloud strategies by seamlessly and safely incorporating public cloud services into their existing architectures.

The Equinix Amsterdam data center campus includes seven Equinix IBX data centers, which are connected via Metro Connect. While AWS Direct Connect service will reside in the AM3 facility, customers can connect to AWS Direct Connect service from any one of these IBX data centers through Metro Connect. Equinix’s Amsterdam data centers are business hubs for more than 250 companies, and offer interconnections to network services from more than 50 service providers.

Customers at Equinix Amsterdam colocation facilities can also take advantage of peering opportunities with the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) and the Neutral Internet Exchange (NL-ix), where combined approximately 1,000 ISPs, telecommunications carriers, content providers and hosting services from all over the world interconnect.

With the addition of AM3, Equinix now offers the AWS Direct Connect service in Amsterdam, Dallas, Frankfurt, London, Osaka, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia. Equinix customers in these metros will be able to lower network costs into and out of AWS and take advantage of reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rates.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Cloud Ranked Second In Worldwide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IBM has announced that International Data Corporation (IDC) has identified the IBM Cloud as the second leading global IaaS provider according to its Worldwide Semi-Annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, 2H 2015. The tracker looked at both individual cloud service providers and overall market revenue while assessing the complete gamut of Infrastructure as a Service capabilities including provisioning servers (virtual and bare metal), storage, and networking options.

In its methodology, IDC says that, “cloud services are about what the customer buys, not how the service provider delivers it.” The firm goes on to say that its definition of cloud services focuses on what the customer sees and experiences versus how things get delivered. Those choices are important but they don’t belong in the definition of an offering category like “cloud services.” This takes us out of the religious wars over what the best implementation architectures and technologies are.

“We’re glad to see IDC recognize the momentum IBM Cloud is making as our investments in data center expansion continue to pay off,” says Jim Comfort, chief technology officer for IBM Cloud. “We’re seeing customer uptake across the board for all our IaaS capabilities, which allows them to easily pick and scale the IT resources they need to create their ideal public, private or hybrid cloud environments. It all comes down to enabling choice and providing the right mix of services.”

IBM Cloud delivers fast, easy and automated access to public, private and hybrid cloud services to help clients digitally transform. IBM Cloud is a growing collection of services including analytics, mobile, networking, storage, Internet of Things and cognitive computing. With more than 47 global cloud data centers, IBM helps companies securely manage and gain insight into their data no matter where it resides.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

ClearDB Launches Channel Partner Program

ClearDB has announced the launch of its Channel Partner Program. The new program allows partners to design and deliver a customized database as a service and extends the reach of ClearDB’s award winning Data Services Platform both nationally and globally. The program offers a simple on-boarding experience and allows partners to develop predictable and recurring revenue with an accelerated path to market.

The ClearDB Channel Partner Program offers a premier partner experience that includes sales discounts and bundled service offerings along with access to technical resources, go to market development assistance and product training. Channel partners own the customer experience while receiving assistance from ClearDB, including guaranteed uptime service level agreements (SLA) and 24 x 7 support assistance.

“Database assets are increasingly the key for business success in today’s always-on, data-driven economy,” said Allen Holmes, ClearDB vice president of marketing and platform alliances. “Our valued partners play a vital role in ClearDB’s growth and success, and a strong channel partner program will further empower our partners to effectively and confidently ensure that a customers’ database-powered applications stay online and perform reliably.”

ClearDB’s Data Services Platform builds off of the company’s Data Services Platform and radically simplifies the way transactional and analytic database workloads are provisioned and managed. The secure platform employs technologies for management, orchestration, provisioning, billing, telemetry and support and provides exceptional asset utilization and overall cost savings. 

Designed to work on major public clouds and to support private cloud and on-premises operations, ClearDB’s nonstop Data Services Platform automates the provisioning and management process with an intuitive services framework that accelerates performance and guarantees high availability in any cloud marketplace, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku, AppFog, SoftLayer, and IBM Bluemix — all while reducing database license footprint and related infrastructure costs. 

Source: CloudStrategyMag

451 Research Spotlights IndependenceIT’s V 5.0 Release In Impact Report

IndependenceIT has announced the availability of a new Impact Report 451 Research, IndependenceIT Boosts User Experience with Cloud Workspace Suite 5.0, June, 2016, by 451 Research on IndependenceIT’s version 5.0 release. The new report, titled “IndependenceIT Boosts User Experience with Cloud Workspace Suite 5.0,” can be accessed here.

Version 5.0 is a powerful cloud management platform that addresses IT challenges at all levels with specific enhancements designed for cross platform software defined data center deployment and management, software defined networking, application workload delivery / management and Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS). The new software has been given a complete user interface / user experience (UI/UX) re-write, new menu structure and iconography, enhanced workflow/functionality, and more. For the IT administrator, this provides an optimized experience and time saving features for greater control over the costs of service delivery. In the recently published report which focused on version 5.0, 451 Research commented on the product’s key enhancements.

“IndependenceIT has made good efforts in keeping pace with partner requirements for platform scalability and usability. The company seems to have identified its niche and is heading in the right direction,” said Agatha Poon, research director and author of the 451 Research Impact Report. “The latest release of Cloud Workspace Suite has added features such as live server scaling and automated server cloning that channel partners and enterprise IT find attractive. Playing the role of an aggregator that facilitates management across multiple platforms and cloud environments, the company has ample opportunity to pursue new customers in both enterprise and service provider markets.”

IndependenceIT’s software is an integrated workspace automation platform that manages Software Defined Data Centers (SDDCs), cloud-based workspaces, and application services for users anywhere, anytime and on any device. The cloud management platform is deployed globally by IT service providers, independent software vendors, and IT administrators to enable workspace-as-a-service solutions and app services. Cloud Workspace Suite allows its customers to quickly and easily provision, manage and monitor complete workspaces in public, private, or hybrid cloud environments. The new capabilities in version 5.0 include:

IndependenceIT is working with a broad range of partners in preparation for upgrades to version 5.0. The company expects IT administrators to quickly adopt the new platform and capabilities as they capitalize on the product’s extended support for third-party cloud and virtual infrastructure. As stated in the report, “The company has extended support for SoftLayer, in addition to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, OpenStack, VMware vSphere/vCloud Director, Microsoft Hyper V, and Citrix XenServer. Since it has always pursued the strategy of being the aggregation point that facilitates workflow orchestration across multiple platforms and cloud environments, rather than just being one of the WaaS platforms, IndependenceIT is a strong advocate for cross-platform integration and orchestration.”

The report continued by detailing capabilities facilitating automated SDDC deployments. “Having directly integrated with Azure Active Directory, version 5.0 enables customers to provide Azure AD-as-a-service with single-sign-on and multi-factor authentication across public, private, and hybrid clouds. The full integration with Azure enables customers to rapidly self-deploy new software-defined data centers for any workload, including WaaS, app services, and private apps.”

“Version 5.0 is the most important update since the company’s founding and the experts at 451 Research have recognized the innovations and user-led capabilities we have worked tirelessly to incorporate,” said Seth Bostock, CEO, IndependenceIT. “We invite both current and new partners to consider the industry’s most complete solution for real business agility and cost containment.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Abacus Data Systems Chooses Switch SUPERNAP To Host Cloud Customers

Abacus Data Systems (Abacus) has announced that its Abacus Private Cloud customers will be hosted by a Switch SUPERNAP data center in Las Vegas.

The agreement marks the third data center for Abacus, which is expanding rapidly as more legal industry customers of all sizes recognize the advantages of keeping their mission-critical applications and data in the Abacus Private Cloud.

Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada, with additional locations under development in northern Nevada, Michigan, Italy and Thailand, Switch’s Tier IV Gold SUPERNAP data centers are the highest-ranking colocation data centers in the world and are maintained by the highest-rated mission critical operations teams. With more independent cloud providers than any other technology campus, SUPERNAP connects thousands of clients and providers in one of the most cost-efficient and technologically secure environment worldwide.

The SUPERNAP data center campus in Las Vegas is the largest in the world with more than 2 million square feet and more than 1,000 clients. It is powered by 100% clean and renewable energy, making Switch the world’s largest colocation data center environment to operate using all-inclusive green technology.

“This partnership ensures Abacus Private Cloud customers will continue to enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing their data is safely housed in the most secure and environmentally sustainable facility available,” said Abacus CEO Alessandra Lezama. “Our growth comes from cost-effectively connecting and protecting the businesses of hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.”

“The addition of Abacus Data Systems to the SUPERNAP cloud ecosystem further demonstrates the need for managed private cloud providers to select data centers that support the highest operational and efficiency standards in the industry. As hybrid cloud deployments continue to be the bellwether of companies with high compliance needs, true independent technology environments, like Switch SUPERNAP data centers, are the only choice,” said Adam Kramer, executive vice president of strategy, Switch.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

PayScale Index Shows Big Data Jobs Are Driving Wage Growth In Tech Hubs

PayScale, Inc. has released the Q2 2016 PayScale Index, which tracks quarterly and annual trends in compensation and also provides a U.S. national wage forecast for the coming quarter. In the second quarter of 2016, U.S. annual wage growth was largely positive with national quarterly wage growth of 0.5% and annual wage growth of 2.5%. Wage growth has been experiencing a slight uptick in recent quarters in the U.S. and growth for data-focused jobs has been particularly strong. The PayScale Index predicts overall US wage growth in Q3 may dip slightly, but is still anticipated to be up 1.6% from the previous year.

“Annual wage growth for IT jobs has actually been slightly below the national average in the first half of 2016,” said Katie Bardaro, VP of Data Analytics and Lead Economist at PayScale. “However, as more organizations use increasing amounts of data, data-centric jobs are in high demand and appear to be driving wages up in the technology centers such as Seattle and San Francisco.”

Key findings in the Q2 2016 PayScale Index

Tech centers experienced strong growth:

• Metros with a high prevalence of STEM workers performed well this quarter, with both San Francisco and Seattle high on the list of metros experiencing the annual wage growth at 3.5% and 3.4%, respectively. Seattle also overtook Houston for the most wage growth since 2006 at 15.2% versus 14.4%.
• Wage growth in data-focused positions such as data analyst, data scientist, data mining engineer and business intelligence analyst has been very strong over the past few quarters and is contributing to overall wage growth in these tech-focused cities. 

Wages for mining, oil and gas exploration continue to fall:

• Annual wage growth in the mining, oil and gas exploration industry decreased 2.3% last quarter. However, as far as wage growth since 2006, this industry has experienced the highest wage growth of any industry tracked by the PayScale Index at 14.9%.
• Even with wages in the mining industry falling, Houston still experienced quarterly wage growth of 1.1% and annual wage growth of 2.3%.

Highlights for U.S. metro wage growth include:

The top five U.S. metro areas experiencing the most annual wage growth were:

• Riverside, CA (4.2%)
• San Francisco, CA (3.5%)
• Seattle, WA (3.4%)
• San Diego, CA (3.1%)
• Tampa, FL (2.9%)
• The three U.S. metros experiencing the least growth in annual wages were:
• St. Louis, MO (1.8%)
• Philadelphia, PA (1.5%)
• Baltimore, MD (1.3%)

Positive Canadian wage growth:

• Similar to the U.S., most measures in Canada showed an uptick in wages where annual wage growth was 1.5% nationally. The exception was the oil city of Edmonton where annual wage growth was down 0.1%.
• Wages still buy less today than in 2006:
• Real wages are down 7.4% since 2006, reflecting a slight improvement over the past three years during which real wages reached a low of more than 8%.

PayScale’s real wages are calculated by analyzing nominal wage growth and the average change in price of a fixed basket of goods and services.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Interoute Named As A Leader In Gartner Magic Quadrant For Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe

Interoute has announced that it has been positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting Magic Quadrant, Europe, released June 28, 2016. This Gartner Magic Quadrant is an annual analysis of hybrid cloud managed hosting companies and the quality of their service offerings.

Interoute has integrated 16 cloud Virtual Data Centre (VDC) zones directly into its 70,000km private fibre network to form a global cloud services platform that has both private and public network capability. Over the last year Interoute has expanded its cloud platform in Europe and added a new zone in Istanbul. It has also extending its global reach in Asia, with a new VDC zone in Singapore.

Matthew Finnie, Interoute CTO, commented on the achievement: “We are extremely proud to again be named as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting for Europe. We believe this confirms our global cloud platform is one of the best for meeting the ICT challenges of national and international enterprises doing business in Europe. As organisations around the world look to digitally transform their businesses, Interoute’s networked cloud platform integrates both their legacy and digital IT to accelerate this evolution. Bringing the critical applications of business and their users closer, at a national, pan European and global scale.”

The Gartner report co-authored by analysts Tiny Haynes, Gianluca Tramacere and Gregor Petri said, “Infrastructure hosting services are evolving, both to include hyperscale cloud providers and within providers’ own data centers in Europe to meet demands of data sovereignty and more agile computing… Managed hybrid cloud hosting represents the continuing evolution of the traditional and cloud enabled managed hosting market, as the influences of cloud IaaS continue to alter buyer behaviours and expectations.”

Gartner classifies ‘Leaders’ as companies that “have proved they have staying power in this market, can frequently innovate on their existing products and can be relied on for enterprise-class needs. They have proved their technical competence and ability to deliver services to a wide range of customers. They address multiple use cases with standalone or integrated solutions.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Aligned Data Centers And Plexxi Partner

Aligned Data Centers and New Hampshire-based Plexxi have announced that they have partnered to deliver an integrated network and data center alternative that can be consumed as a service. The partnership provides the ability to provision data center capacity and connectivity as an on-demand utility.

Data centers and networks today are large upfront investments that require customers to predict future IT needs and either become barriers for growth or are underutilized. In fact, Gartner reports that as much as 50% of data center capacity goes unused. Aligned Data Centers offers cloud providers and enterprises with unique “plug-and-play” pods that are dynamically provisioned to deliver on-demand agility per application. These pods can scale IT resource requirements from a single rack environment to thousands with ease without having to predefine rack space and network capacity requirements. The platform adjusts to dynamic rack loads, significantly increasing the speed by which cloud players can expand and adjust to growth. Aligned’s platform can accommodate up to 10 times the power density of traditional data centers.

“The compliment between our technology platforms is significant and disruptive,” said Aligned Energy CEO Jakob Carnemark. “Cloud players need data center infrastructure that is as agile and frictionless as provisioning servers, storage and software. Our partnership solves for this by allowing customers to provision infrastructure capacity to align with application needs, significantly reducing stranded capacity and improving speed.”

“Aligned Data Centers re-invented traditional data center architecture,” said Plexxi CEO Rich Napolitano. “They’ve built the world’s first true application-defined data center from top to bottom, including power, space and cooling that adjusts based on customer application requirements and densities. This has never been done before, and truly revolutionizes the cost model of building reliable data centers. IT executives are looking to drastically reduce energy consumption in their data centers, and this partnership enhances Aligned’s transformative pay-for-use model.”

In November 2015, Aligned opened its ultra-efficient, next generation data center in Plano, Texas. Construction is well underway on their second in Phoenix, Arizona, which will be one of the largest multi-tenant data centers in Arizona, capable of offering both high-availability and high-efficiency while guaranteeing an industry-leading 1.15 PUE and reducing water consumption by as much as 85% through its patented technology.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Romonet’s Files Patents For New Analytics Platform

Romonet has announced it is filing for a number of new patents for the next phase of its data center intelligence platform, utilizing the applications of Machine Learning. The company is known as the leader in data center analytics and this development enhances the value of Romonet’s already patented solution.

“We have been working on advanced data handling and Machine Learning algorithms for over a year, focusing predominantly on enhancing our solution to learn and become as proficient as our human data scientists are today at identifying anomalies, and tracking down the cause behind the symptom. This capability provides powerful operational and business insight into data center systems and component level performance,” said Liam Newcombe, Romonet’s co-founder and CTO.

Having modeled, collected data and analyzed hundreds of data centers in the past eight years, Romonet’s platform has an incredibly detailed and expansive data archive on how facilities of every size perform under different climate, environmental, energy, IT and commercial factors.

While the use of Machine Learning applications is not new, Romonet’s platform is the first to combine metered data, Machine Learning, simulation and predictive analytics.         

“In our case, teaching the machine is much faster as we feed it pre-cleansed and calibrated data to recognize and learn patterns, incorporate additional data from outside sources, and teach the software to suggest causes and recommended actions from previously learned results,” continued Newcombe.

Like Google, Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix, who already use Machine Learning to personalize services and business intelligence, Romonet’s industry-leading platform is revolutionizing the booming global data center market.

With Romonet, Hyperscale and Multi-Tenant Data Center (MTDC) operators are improving the services they provide to their customers while strengthening financial management through investment, cost and margin analysis. Enterprise data center owners, whose facilities, while core to service delivery, are also a drain on profitability, are rationalizing their investments, accurately planning a hybrid (owned, colocated, and cloud) strategy years into the future, and improving their ability to make socially responsible decisions that impact the environment, shareholders and employees.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Advantech Releases IoT Device Management Software Platform

Advantech has launched its new WISE-PaaS/RMM version 3.1, an IoT device management software platform. WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 is an open standardized IoT software platform for users by applying MQTT, a standard and popular IoT M2M protocol for device and server communication.

WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 comes with more than 100 RESTful APIs including, account management, device management, device control, event management, system management, and database management. RESTful APIs create new web services and help integrate functions and data with their management tools. Furthermore, WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 will release WISE-Agent source code as open source. WISE-Agent software works on the device side, helping customers to develop their own applications. WISE-PaaS/RMM highly enhances connectivity for hardware, software, devices and sensors, and helps customers to transform their business to include IoT cloud services.

Centralized Management for Big Data Visualization

Based on WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.0 for remote device monitoring and management, version 3.1 offers centralized management and a dashboard builder for data visualization. Customers can develop dashboards to monitor and manage all their connected devices. WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 is also integrated with Node-Red which is a “drag and drop” logic editor tool for users to access data and features in WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 for device flow and action control management.

High Availability for Large Scalability

To provide a stable and reliable centralized management platform, WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 includes server redundancy whereby devices can have direct connection with the security of a back-up server if the main server loses connection. This is designed to make sure data and services auto-sync between the main server and the back-up server. WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 also provides a hierarchical server, which supports the main server and sub-server structure at the same time. Users can use the sub-server for local device management and use the main server to collect data from local servers in order to disperse the load on the main server.

Sensor/Device Connectivity for Data Acquisition

To connect devices and consolidate data acquisition, WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1 provides a handler structure in WISE-Agent for users to extend data acquisition capability to connected devices. Customers can develop routines based on sample code Advantech provides to create handlers for their own devices and application scenarios. Advantech provides two data bases (MongoDB and PostgreDB), SQL and no-SQL, for data storage and easy management.

WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1, Open Standardization in IoT Software Platform

With WISE-PaaS/RMM 3.1, customers can collect data from devices, equipment, sensors and software, shorten development time and reduce development resources. It helps customers develop new IoT application models and it also integrates with Advantech’s IoT Gateway Starter Kit, a ready-to-run package with pre-configured hardware, platform services (WISE-PaaS) and Microsoft’s Azure service certification.

Source: CloudStrategyMag