Silver Spring Networks Opens New Silicon Valley Headquarters

On June 23, 2016, Mike Bell, president and CEO of Silver Spring Networks, Inc., was joined by Sam Liccardo, Mayor of San Jose, CA, executives from Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), and other local public officials to officially open Silver Spring’s new headquarters at 230 West Tasman Drive in San Jose. With an Internet of Things (IoT) demonstration facility, Silver Spring’s new headquarters is the innovation and operations focal point for its global customer base.

During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Silver Spring highlighted Starfish™ — Silver Spring’s public cloud IoT network service — and its deployment across San Jose. Silver Spring and the City of San Jose highlighted how the Internet of Things platform will help contribute to San Jose’s Smart City Vision of becoming America’s most innovative city by 2020. Starfish is built on open standards-based technology that has a proven track record of delivering over 23.6 million devices across five continents. A reliable and secure network platform, Starfish helps developers, entrepreneurs, enterprises and other third parties support and accelerate the development of new IoT devices and services.

The ceremony also provided PG&E the opportunity to showcase its Grid of Things™ vision, which helps PG&E better serve its customers by offering enhanced personalization while improving the safety and reliability of the energy grid. PG&E has worked with Silver Spring to deploy its IPv6-based platform and solutions for multiple smart grid projects, including its SmartMeter™ program serving more than five million PG&E electric customers across Northern and Central California.¹

“We are thrilled to officially open our new worldwide headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, and are grateful to Mayor Liccardo and the city of San Jose for their support,” said Bell. “As Silver Spring’s coverage area expands, we are able to unlock benefits for our customers and the communities they serve.”

“In addition, we are excited to be actively deploying Starfish in San Jose, where we are engaging with some of the hottest entrepreneurs and developers in the Valley who are looking to leverage a trusted IoT network to build the industry’s next big innovations,” continued Bell.

“We are excited to welcome Silver Spring Networks to San Jose and to be partnering with this innovative company to deploy an Internet of Things network here in our city,” said Mayor Liccardo. “This partnership is a great example of how we can embrace game-changing technology and data-driven decision-making in order to help create a safer, more sustainable and productive community and enhance the quality of life for our residents. I’d like to thank Silver Spring Networks for their many, significant investments in San Jose and for being at the forefront of helping cities address some of our biggest 21st century challenges.”

‘Developer Day’ Enables Hands-On Experience With Silver Spring’s Proven IPv6 IoT Network

Silver Spring recently hosted an inaugural ‘Developer Day’ at its new headquarters where developers and academic researchers learned how to leverage Starfish to create smart city, smart energy, resource conservation, and other IoT applications for public and commercial use. To register your interest for future Developer Days, visit the website.

Starfish offers a platform that includes standards-based IEEE 802.15.4g wireless interoperability standard (Wi-SUN), as well as speeds up to 2.4 Mbps, 10 millisecond latency, up to 50 miles in point-to-point range, and multiple network transports, along with industrial-grade security, reliability, and scalability.

As a part of Starfish, Silver Spring plans to offer a free service plan – Haiku™ – which includes 5000 messages x 16 bytes per month, ideal for entrepreneurs and start-ups with smaller data needs who want to access a proven IoT network service to develop new IoT applications for the industry. In addition to San Jose, Silver Spring is ramping up Starfish deployment in Bristol, Chicago, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Kolkata, London, and San Antonio.

¹ SmartMeter and Grid of Things are registered trademarks of Pacific Gas & Electric.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Equinix Extends Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Availability Into Canada Azure

Equinix, Inc. has announced that it will provide private access to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute via its Equinix Cloud Exchange™ in the company’s Toronto (TR2) International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data center. Through this partnership, Canadian-based companies gain private access to both Azure and Office 365 while maintaining data residency in region. This deployment is part of Equinix’s global partnership with Microsoft which now directly connects 18 markets globally with Azure ExpressRoute.

“We are thrilled to continue collaborating with Equinix and are happy to welcome them in Canada as an Azure ExpressRoute partner. Equinix now connects to 18 markets globally with Azure ExpressRoute, helping to further business innovation and competitiveness in a cloud-first, mobile-first world,” said Janet Kennedy, president, Microsoft Canada.

Many companies are looking to deploy hybrid clouds through private interconnection, to reap the scalability and cost benefits of the cloud, while at the same time maintaining the control of on-premises infrastructure. In fact, a recent study, Enterprise of the Future, found that by 2017, 84% of IT leaders will deploy IT infrastructure where interconnection — defined as private, secure physical or virtual connections — is at the core, compared to only 38% today. By offering private access to Azure ExpressRoute and Office 365 across the global market, Equinix helps enterprise CIOs achieve this by seamlessly incorporating Azure and Office 365 services into their existing architectures.

Opened in 2015, Equinix’s TR2 facility offers interconnections for more than 155 enterprise companies, financial services firms, and more than 60 cloud and network providers that have collocated with Equinix via the company’s original data center in Toronto, TR1. Expanding Azure ExpressRoute into this critical market provides our many Canadian enterprise customers the benefit of a high-performing and private connection to the Microsoft Cloud and our growing cloud ecosystem.

Equinix is working with several reseller partners in the Canadian market to help customers quickly realize the benefits of Equinix Cloud Exchange and the Microsoft Cloud. These partners include Airgate, IMP Solutions, New Signature, Powerland and Solgenia.

“By providing direct access to Azure and Office 365 via ExpressRoute inside Equinix data centers, we are enabling companies, worldwide, to bridge their cloud and data center strategies and fully realize the benefits of hybrid and multi-cloud. By offering this capability now in Canada, local companies concerned with data residency can now get the full benefits of Microsoft cloud services, in a trusted, secure, low-latency deployment,” said Greg Adgate, vice president of global technology partners, Equinix.

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Source: CloudStrategyMag

BlueData Introduces BDaaS For On-Premises And Cloud Deployments

BlueData has announced that the enterprise edition of its BlueData EPIC software will run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other public clouds. The BlueData EPIC enterprise edition is now in directed availability for AWS. General availability for AWS — as well as availability for Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and other public cloud services — will be released in the coming months. Customers will have the same BlueData user experience, distribution flexibility, and application configurability for Hadoop and Spark deployments on-premises and/or in the cloud. 

BlueData’s software innovations make it easy to deploy Big Data infrastructure and applications, leveraging embedded Docker container technology. The BlueData EPIC software platform provides a self-service Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) experience with the highest levels of security and performance for Big Data analytics in the enterprise. BlueData has offered a free community edition of BlueData EPIC running on AWS since last year; but until now, BlueData’s enterprise edition was available only for on-premises deployments. 

BlueData delivers simplicity, agility, flexibility, and cost savings for Big Data deployments — now in both on-premises and cloud-based environments. Data scientists, analysts, and data engineers no longer have to deal with the complexities of their underlying infrastructure or cloud provider. They can choose their own distributions and applications for Big Data analytics, and tap into data either on-site or in the cloud. IT teams can control costs with resource quotas, and rely on BlueData’s multi-tenant security and governance capabilities to meet enterprise-class auditing and regulatory compliance requirements.

“Big Data has been too darn hard to implement. Cloud deployments provide a simpler path and are helping to fuel the next wave of Big Data adoption,” said Tony Baer, principal analyst for Big Data at Ovum. “BlueData is well positioned to help enterprise customers on this next phase of their Big Data journey, whether on-premises or in the cloud — or more likely, some combination of the two.” 

The benefits of the BlueData EPIC software platform for cloud deployments include:

Consistent user experience: BlueData will offer the only unified Big-Data-as-a-Service software platform for hybrid (on-premises and cloud) and multi-cloud (e.g. AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) deployments. End users and administrators will have an easy-to-use “single pane of glass” for creating and managing Big Data environments; and the Docker images for Hadoop, Spark, and other Big Data applications will be the same irrespective of the underlying infrastructure or cloud service.

Greater flexibility and choice: Only BlueData provides customers with the ability to create their own unique BDaaS environments — with their preferred Big Data platforms (and versions) and applications, either commercial or open source. They can have multiple environments for different use cases, for different user groups, and for dev/test/QA or production. And they’ll have the flexibility to update their Big Data distributions and applications on their timeline, not the timeline of the cloud service provider.

Eliminate data movement: BlueData will provide the first and only solution that enables customers to tap into both cloud-based data stores (such as Amazon S3) as well as on-premises data for analytics with Hadoop and Spark. This allows them to leverage the elastic compute of the public cloud while keeping data on-premises — avoiding the cost and complexity of duplicating, copying, and transferring data to the cloud service. 

“The BlueData software platform is the first Big-Data-as-a-Service solution available for both on-premises and public cloud environments,” said Kumar Sreekanti, CEO of BlueData. “The future of Big Data analytics will be neither 100% on-premises nor 100% in the cloud. We’re seeing more multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, with data both on-prem and in the cloud. BlueData provides the only solution that can meet the realities of these mixed environments in the enterprise.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Lightower Cloud Connect Enables All-Fiber, Direct Paths To Major Cloud Providers

Lightower Fiber Networks has announced that its Cloud Connect solutions enable end-to-end fiber connectivity directly to major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Lightower Cloud Connect offers customers a wide range of flexible bandwidth and service options including Ethernet, wavelengths, and dedicated Internet access, with bandwidths up to 10 Gbps.

As customers continue to move vital business functions to the cloud, the network connecting the organization to their cloud services has become more critical than ever. With over 30,000 route miles of fiber serving over 15,000 service locations in 17 states throughout the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic, Lightower can deliver end-to-end, fiber connectivity between organizations and the dedicated on-ramps to cloud providers. An all-fiber network between organizations and the cloud enables the network performance needed to ensure cloud-based applications run smoothly, data and files transfer quickly, and latency can be minimized. 

The Cloud Doesn’t Work Without the Network (SM)

Lightower offers direct, fiber connectivity to Amazon Web Services at the following locations:

32 Avenue of the Americas, New York City, NY

21715 Filigree Court, Ashburn, VA

Ethernet, wavelength, or Internet-based connectivity

Bandwidth options from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps

Lightower also offers direct, fiber connectivity to Microsoft Azure via the Equinix Cloud Exchange at the following locations:

60 Hudson Street, New York City, NY

21715 Filigree Court, Ashburn, VA

Ethernet, wavelength, or Internet-based connectivity

Bandwidth options range from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps

“The cloud is becoming an essential resource for more and more organizations of all types. Businesses, governments, and educational organizations are all adopting cloud platforms for applications that require very high levels of network performance,” explains Doug Dalissandro, chief revenue officer, Lightower. “Lightower Cloud Connect offers superior network performance for all types of cloud applications. For added resiliency, Cloud Connect solutions can be designed with redundancy and diversity. Of course, all of this is backed up by Lightower’s industry-leading customer support.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Three Companies Lead Cloud Infrastructure Market

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that in the burgeoning market for technology to build clouds, HPE, Cisco, and Microsoft continue to lead in the three main segments — private cloud hardware, public cloud hardware, and cloud infrastructure software respectively. Across all segments HPE led Cisco in Q1 and slightly widened the gap between the two, though both vendors gained market share in the quarter. They were followed by Microsoft, Dell, IBM, EMC, VMware, Lenovo, and Huawei. The total cloud infrastructure market has been growing at comfortably over 20% per year, though the growth rate dropped off to 13% in Q1 as a typically soft quarter followed the end-of-year Q4 peak.

For the last eight quarters total spend on data center infrastructure — which includes servers, server OS, storage, networking, network security, and virtualization software — has been running at an average $29 billion, with the market being increasingly driven by the cloud. Cloud deployments or shipments of systems that are cloud enabled now account for well over half of the total data center infrastructure market.

“With spend on cloud services growing by over 50% per year and spend on SaaS growing by over 30%, there is little surprise that cloud operator capex continues to drive strong growth in public cloud infrastructure,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst. “But on the enterprise data center side too we continue to see a big swing towards spend on private cloud infrastructure as companies seek to benefit from more flexible and agile IT technology. The transition to cloud still has a long way to go.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Accelerite Releases CloudSense

Accelerite has unveiled Accelerite CloudSense (powered by Apache CloudStack™), the cloud appliance that takes enterprises from crate-to-cloud in 60 minutes or less. Engineered for enterprises wanting to quickly and cost-effectively deploy a full-featured open source private or public cloud infrastructure, the Accelerite CloudSense appliance is a complete turnkey cloud-in-a box solution.

The Accelerite CloudSense private or public cloud offers:

• Ability to use your existing compatible storage and server hardware to simplify deployment and maximize return on investment
• Built on highly scalable and proven cloud orchestration software with over 250+ production public and private cloud implementations using thousands of servers
• Self-service portal for the cloud users to provision their virtual private clouds as well as strong APIs to meet developers’ needs
• Options for elastic load-balancing, SDN, firewalls, backup and disaster recovery, auto-scaling, monitoring and other features
• Strong roadmap of “as-a-service” catalog that includes databases, Hadoop, analytics, IoT, PaaS, and Containers
• Pay-as-you-go subscription payment model
• Pre-verified and pre-integrated hardware compatibility means no vendor lock-in
• Includes both an administrator’s user interface, as well as a customer portal with self-sign-up, self-service. Usage is tracked to integrate with billing systems

“Today’s enterprises realize they must migrate to the cloud. While private clouds are highly economical compared to public clouds for deployments of scale, the IT departments often struggle with the challenges involved in designing and deploying a cloud with the ease of use as well as the strong feature-set available in today’s public clouds,” said Nara Rajagopalan, CEO of Accelerite. “Instead of days, weeks or even months, CloudSense is designed to help businesses accelerate to a cost effective, full-featured cloud experience within minutes.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

CloudCodes Releases New Security Product

CloudCodes announces the availability of their next generation cloud security product SSO1. It is an advanced version of their existing product gControl. The SaaS based gControl helped to secure Google For Work customers whereas SSO1 provides support for multiple enterprise cloud applications such SalesForce, Zoho, DropBox, FreshDesk etc-etc.

SSO1 is a Single Sign On(SSO) solution and supports out of the box integration with Google For Work. SSO1 can be integrated with organisation Active Directory or can itself act as an Identity Provider(IdP). The solution is designed ground up keeping security in mind. The solutions provides the capabilities of IdP such as password management, self-password and multi-factor authentication(MFA).

The MFA comes with support for biometric through a smartphone and OTP. Mostly all the advanced smartphones now available with support for fingerprint scan. It leverages the fingerprint scanner available in the smartphones to act as an additional factor for authentication.

The new SSO1 comes with support of anti-phishing control. The solution enables the administrator to restrict access to the login page based on the country or the IP address. This ensures that only internal users have access to the login page. This allows the administrator to control access to the applications from countries which are known for hacking or phishing attacks.

Another important aspect of the new SSO1 is its additional capabilities to control access to organisation’s cloud application based on perimeter. The cloud security solution enables the administrator to control the access of the application based on the IP address, Geo Fencing, Time and Browser. This brings a tighter control based on compliance and regulatory requirements.

SSO1 supports integration with multiple cloud based applications. It uses the standard SAML based integration to integrate with the various cloud applications. Currently SSO1 supports integration with Google For Work, SalesForce,Zoho, DropBox and Freshdesk. The roadmap expects to cover most of the popular cloud applications within the next three months. Another important feature is mapping of multiple users to single account of the cloud application.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Egenera Partners With Portland Europe To Distribute Xterity Cloud Services

Egenera has announced it has signed a strategic partnership with Portland Europe, a leader in providing high-quality, easy-to-use software and cloud solutions for business use. Portland will deliver Egenera’s Xterity wholesale managed cloud services to its SME customers in the Benelux region.

Portland Europe is one of the leading distributors for value-added resellers and IT managed services providers in the Benelux countries and specializes in delivering IT services and cloud and managed services. Portland provides an extensive toolbox of on-premise and cloud solutions to partners with thousands of endusers. The distribution partnership with Egenera comes as Portland Europe continues to help companies embrace the full potential of the cloud.

“The cloud is the way forward for SMEs to take advantage of hosting applications, disaster recovery, backup, and more,” said Kim van Brugge, managing director, Portland Europe. “We are happy to be teaming with Egenera and to continue to strengthen our network of suppliers to ensure we provide the most state-of-the-art technology to enable seamless cloud migrations.”

Egenera’s Xterity Cloud Services deliver a full range of dedicated, managed, private and public cloud services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), and CloudMigrate? exclusively through the channel. Xterity’s business continuity services deliver on-premise server-to-cloud or cloud-to-cloud backup and disaster recovery. With Xterity, resellers can quickly enter the cloud services market with no up-front capital or ongoing maintenance costs.  Unlike reselling cloud services from large, commodity cloud vendors, Xterity delivers the margins resellers need to develop a profitable cloud services business.

“To say that we are happy to see Xterity offered in the Benelux region is an understatement. Our new partnership with Portland is a key milestone in the adoption of Xterity worldwide,” said Till Brennan, vice president, EMEA, Egenera. “We’re excited about working with Portland to deliver our full range of cloud services to its SME customers.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

LATAS is the air traffic controller for drones
It’a likely that hundreds of drones will be flying in our skies over the next couple of year. So how do we keep track of them?

I caught up with Vice President of Airspace Services at PrecisionHawk to talk about LATAS, the company’s new drone communication service.

Question 1: What is LATAS?
Latas is our technology…our platform of essentially different data layers of what’s around the drone that I need to know to be able to fly the drone safely. We are taking lots of satellite data that we collect via satellites and we are processing that data into a very high resolution, 3D map of the Earth. So now I know what’s on the ground. I know where the buildings are, I know where the trees are, where the power lines are. So that I can take that data in conjunction with airspace data and manned air traffic data so that I can understand what’s around the drone. And if I can understand what’s around the drone, I can understand what that risk is.

Question 2: How does it work?
All the software we’re using to process this data has been developed in-house. We’re working with a number of our partners, such as Digital Globe, who owns a number of satellites, and what we’re actually doing is we’re pulling in satellite data, we’re processing that satellite data and turning that 2D image into a 3D model. And we can see where the buildings are, how tall the buildings are, where the trees are. So now we are taking that data from the satellites and using it in a new way.

Question 3: Why do this?
From our company’s background, traditionally we work with large enterprise companies. In the agriculture space, in the energy space, insurance space. That they wanna roll out very large fleets of drones. They wanna put them in the hands of agronomists, they wanna put them in the hands of insurance adjusters, who may not be pilots. So we’re developing technologies, and we were pushed by those partners to develop technologies like LATAS to help them mitigate their own risks so that they could understand how to fly safely. So when they put a drone in the hand of an agronomist, we would know that that drone won’t run into things on the ground and won’t run into things in the air because we know where those things are.

Question 4: What’s next for LATAS?
Our theme is ‘just fly.’ You should be able to have the technology in the drone itself to allow you to go out and fly that drone safely from day one. Whether you’re an amateur or a professional going out and doing a commercial job. So we’re working with a number of different drone manufacturers today, to integrate this technology into their drones, from the recreational drones, all the way up to the expensive commercial drones because everybody needs the same data. We understand what’s around us, so that we don’t run into things. And we mitigate that risk and make flying the drone safer.

Source: InfoWorld Big Data

HTBase Named A Cool Vendor In Hyperconvergence By Gartner

HTBase has announced it has been included in the list of “Cool Vendors” in the April 27, 2016 report by Gartner, Inc., Cool Vendors in Hyperconvergence, 2016. 

Enterprises are modernizing their data center and cloud practices with HTBase. 

“We are the only platform that allows organizations to easily build and deploy a modern Cloud Enterprise Infrastructure — consisting of containers, multiple virtualization technologies, storage, network, real-time analytics, sef-service and more — on a single platform. We are proud to have been selected as a Gartner Cool Vendor,” said Louis Smith, partner manager, HTBase.

HTBase differentiates itself in the hyperconvergence space by delivering on the concept of a true software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure, while enabling IT to retain existing infrastructure or develop new hardware platforms in greenfields. I&O leaders and decision makers can, therefore, retain and adapt their existing x86 hardware and storage for hybrid cloud solutions, while delivering IT as a service (ITaaS) to their business units. 

HyperTask, the base of our Hyperconvergence platform, centrally manages multiple hypervisors, including open-source kernel-based virtual machine (KVM), ESXi, HyperV and Xen; enables existing VMs to migrate between different hypervisors; and supports Docker, bare metal, and integration to AWS and Azure. It also manages storage, network and compute resources, with capacity management, storage resilience, high availability, striping, deduplication, snapshot/replication (with resulting disaster recovery) and automation tools through REST APIs. 

Since launching, HTBase has helped CIOs and I&O leaders designing infrastructure as a service with a strong cloud strategy. Moreover, our platform has helped I&O leaders to migrate from legacy environments (regardless of hypervisor or bare metal) to a centrally managed — but independently run — business units, controlling their own resource allocation by either conventional VMs or by containers.

Source: CloudStrategyMag