MapR Converged Data Platform Now Available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace

MapR Technologies, Inc. has announced that the MapR Converged Data Platform is now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace bringing a modern data system to Oracle Cloud customers. A silver level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), MapR Data Technologies enables a unified operational and analytic data service for Oracle Cloud customers.

“In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, organizations moving to the cloud are looking for increased flexibility and the quickest time to value,” said Sanjay Sinha, vice president cloud platform products, Oracle. “With Oracle Cloud, MapR can quickly and efficiently address the growing needs of its customers with support for Oracle’s state-of-the-art cloud platform.”

The MapR Converged Data Platform enables global access to a wide variety of data sources including big data workloads such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark, POSIX compliant file systems, NFS-enabled file systems, multi-model databases, and streaming data. The MapR Platform enables customers to collect data in the Oracle Cloud as well as any number of other data sources – on-premise, hybrid cloud and even other public clouds – supporting analytics, deep learning, machine learning, artificial intelligence and edge computing.

“The MapR Platform is designed to better leverage public clouds with the recent introduction of MapR Orbit Cloud Suite. Joint customers will be able to run big data workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with cloud-native operations and cloud storage integration,” said Tom Fisher, CTO, MapR. “Our participation in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of harnessing value from all of their data. We look forward to leveraging the power of the Oracle Cloud to help us achieve our business goals.”

The Oracle Cloud Marketplace is a one-stop shop for Oracle customers seeking trusted business applications and service providers offering unique business solutions, including ones that extend Oracle Cloud Applications. Oracle Cloud is the industry’s broadest and most complete public cloud, delivering enterprise-grade services at every level of the cloud technology stack including software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and data as a service (DaaS).

Source: CloudStrategyMag

QTS Releases Cloud-Based FedRAMP-Compliant System

Responding to increasing Government demand for outsourced cloud and hybrid data center solutions, QTS Realty Trust has announced deployment of the nation’s first multi-tenant unemployment insurance and single state tax system in the cloud.

The Mississippi Department of Employment Security (MDES), a consortium of Mississippi, Rhode Island, Maine, and Connecticut, are the first states to go live on the system that supports the U.S. Department of Labor’s mandate to identify and develop promising repeatable practices that reduce costs throughout the workforce system.

QTS was chosen to develop and host a compliant, cloud-based solution that could accommodate multiple states with the expectation of achieving high levels of commonality. QTS provided a VMware-centric, hybrid IT solution that integrates QTS’ FedRAMP-compliant Government cloud and colocation services from QTS’ Dulles, VA, and Phoenix data centers.

“We are one step closer to creating the future for delivery of unemployment solutions in a cost-effective manner, while being conscientious stewards of our state workforce funds,” said Dale Smith, chief operating officer, MDES. “QTS has been a trusted partner in developing the innovative multi-tenant hybrid IT solution that will be utilized by many states for years to come.”

The new system is expected to attract the attention of states that may be struggling to meet their obligations to pay unemployment benefits to their customers. In Mississippi, the expected cost of operating the consortium system over the on-premise single state system will be reduced by approximately 40%, leaving much needed funding to meet the needs of Mississippi’s unemployed.

“We are pleased to support MDES and the U.S. Department of Labor in their mission to transform State and Local government processes,” said David McOmber, executive vice president, public sector & federal, QTS. “QTS’ Government Solutions is committed to providing the Federal marketplace with innovative and highly secure hybrid data center solutions.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

NTT Com Launches Enterprise Cloud For ERP

NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) has announced the global launch of its Enterprise Cloud for ERP, a multi-tenant cloud platform service for SAP installations, in collaboration with Dell Technologies Group’s Virtustream, Inc. and EMC Japan K.K., effective immediately.

Incorporating managed services, the new solution will deliver a cloud-based packaged SAP platform to customers in Japan, the Americas, Europe, and Australia, giving them the ability on a global basis to access and run mission-critical core SAP systems in the cloud.

The Enterprise Cloud for ERP service has an option for virtual HANA (offering up to 2.9TB of memory) and physical HANA (up to 8.0TB of memory), which will be available as a multi-tenant cloud platform supporting SAP HANA’s in-memory database architecture. In addition to the base service, a “high availability” option will be available, offering enhanced resilience and disaster recovery via the use of diverse routing and duplicate data centers in Tokyo and Osaka. The service will also include pay-as-you-go options that leverage μVM resource-management technology to regulate CPU & memory usage, enabling customers to enjoy the flexibility and reliability of a cloud environment combining virtual and physical HANA environments. The service aims to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 65% compared to on-premise systems.

In addition to an SAP cloud-based platform, the new solution will deliver a managed service for OS, SAP Basis, SAP HANA, as well as a system monitoring service and a support offering that includes access to a technical account manager. The latter will provide ITIL-based operational support, operational status analysis and best-practice consultancy services. Customers will be able to easily and efficiently operate the platform by selecting from a wide choice of menus, allowing them to focus on design of their own work processes and application development.

Outside Japan, NTT Com will offer a total SAP solution in the Americas, Europe, and Australia incorporating the same onboarding services and managed services. This will enable customers to seamlessly use one-stop globally standardized SAP infrastructures and managed services in a cloud environment.

NTT Com plans to expand the functionality of enterprise cloud for ERP and the number of regions where it will be available in collaboration with Virtustream and EMC Japan. The company also plans to offer a cloud management platform offering integrated management of multiple cloud environments which will facilitate connectivity with Virtustream’s overseas cloud; they will also offer cloud platform connecting services by means of NTT Com’s Software-Defined Exchange Service.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Cisco Introduces Management Platform and Strategy For UCS And HyperFlex

Cisco has unveiled Cisco Intersight,™ a management and automation platform for Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) and Cisco HyperFlex™ Systems, marking the start of a multi-year strategic program to provide customers with clear IT advantages that support their competitive business goals. Cisco Intersight simplifies data center operations by delivering systems management as-a-service, alleviating the need to maintain islands of on-premise management infrastructure. Complete system lifecycle management is delivered by Cisco Intersight through machine learning, analytics and automation. 

Today, most IT organizations are adopting a multicloud strategy, and as a result customers need a scalable and consistent management environment across their data centers, private clouds and public clouds deployments. Customers also seek consistent management and policy enforcement across bare metal server environments, converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure. Cisco Intersight will deliver the unique ability to connect and manage all of these comprehensively.

Application architectures are also transforming with scale-out and multi-site deployment models, delivered by containers and micro-services. In addition, DevOps accelerates the rate of application development and continuous feature delivery. Cisco Intersight addresses these challenges, helping IT staff optimize operations while enjoying a more intuitive user experience.

According to Gartner, “The growing large quantity of configuration data points and connections aggregated from data center deployments, edge, cloud and IoT will increase IT ops complexity, countering trends in software-defined simplicity.”1  

Cisco has invested years of research and development into software innovations to bridge these gaps. With the cost of an unplanned data center outage estimated at thousands of dollars per minute, and the extraordinary costs of corporate security breaches, often due to human error, IT leaders welcome new advances in intelligent automation. Customers are already participating in an engineering preview of the Intersight platform, connecting thousands of UCS and HyperFlex systems for testing and feedback. 

It’s about the Management, not the Machines

“Organizations that move to cloud-based systems management platforms will find that service delivery quality is significantly improved, the overall risk to the business goes down, and IT staff productivity is increased,” said Matt Eastwood, Senior Vice President, IDC. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) –infused cloud-based management tools can offer deep insights into the state of the infrastructure, identify troubles before they become major issues, and enable quicker ‘root cause’ identification and analysis of issues.”

Intersight is designed to deliver a new, higher level of simplicity and intelligence that is intuitive from the start and continues to learn and evolve over time:

• Pervasive Simplicity: Cisco Intersight features a dynamic user interface that can be customized by user role. As a cloud-based service, new functionality is delivered via portal updates without burdening customers with upgrades, and the experience scales seamlessly as customers directly connect new systems for management. The platform is designed to constantly learn to help make daily IT operations easier. Analytics combined with tight integration with the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) constantly improve the assistance provided through the recommendation engine.
• Expertise: tight Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) integration and insights from Cisco and the UCS Community provide recommendations and best practices.
• Continuous Optimization: The ability for the Intersight platform to provide actionable intelligence will grow stronger over time from the power of cloud-based machine learning. It can learn from the collective experience of the UCS user community, as well as the best practices of Cisco experts and peers. This will enable better predictive analytics and resource utilization to be provided through the recommendation engine.
• Agile Delivery: IT can rapidly respond to business demands and frequent changes while maintaining the policy enforcement designed to implement safe and reliable business services Cisco Intersight is API-driven and Cisco UCS and HyperFlex are fully programmable systems, supporting development and operations tool chains for continuous integration and delivery.
• Constant Protection: The Cisco Intersight service adheres to the stringent security standards of Cisco InfoSec, and helps enable secure communication between the Cisco Intersight SaaS platform and managed endpoints, allowing applications to be deployed and updated securely.

Cisco Intersight will be available in Q4 2017 and is integrated and designed to coexist with existing UCS and HyperFlex management tools, so customers can adopt Cisco Intersight as they desire without added complexity. Cisco Intersight will be available in an on-premise deployment model in the future. Cisco Intersight is built on an extensible architecture with OData standards-based RESTful APIs and connector framework simplifying third party software and hardware integrations. 

The Cisco Intersight Base Edition will be available at no charge. It includes global health monitoring and inventory, a customizable dashboard, the HyperFlex Installer to quickly deploy clusters, and the ability to context-launch the UCS Manager, IMC and HyperFlex Connect element managers.

The Cisco Intersight Essentials Edition includes all the functionality of the Base edition as well as policy-based configuration with service profiles, firmware management with scheduled updates, Hardware Compatibility Listing (HCL) compliance checks and upgrade recommendations, and other features.

Bringing Next Generation Systems Management to Over 60,000 UCS, HyperFlex and Converged Infrastructure Customers

Cisco recently announced fifth generation UCS Servers with the high-performance UCS M5 series and an accompanying release of UCS Manager that provides connector support to Cisco Intersight. UCS M5 systems are also now available in Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure  solution with the new Cisco HyperFlex M5 nodes, including HyperFlex Edge, with Cisco Intersight providing cloud-based cluster deployment capability in the Base Edition. Cisco leads the industry with the most comprehensive portfolio of converged infrastructure solutions; Cisco Intersight creates opportunities for deeper partner integrations and even greater operational simplicity.

As customers include Cisco UCS, HyperFlex and Intersight in their IT modernization initiatives, Cisco offers a comprehensive lifecycle of data center services from advisory through optimization, managed technical and learning services to improve cost-efficiency and reduce risk. Cisco’s portfolio of services leverages global expertise, proven processes, and innovative methodologies to help customers accelerate and simplify operations.

1. Gartner, New Generations of Integrated Systems Will Apply AI and Emerge as Self-Organizing Systems of Intelligence, Aug 2017

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Report: Public Cloud Market Is Growing

New Q2 data from Synergy Research Group shows that over the last 24 months, quarterly spend on all data center hardware and software has grown by just 5%, while spending on the public cloud portion of that has grown by 35%. The private cloud infrastructure market has also grown, though not as strongly as public cloud, while spending on traditional, non-cloud data center hardware and software has dropped by 18%. ODMs in aggregate account for the largest portion of the public cloud market, with Cisco being the leading individual vendor, flowed by Dell EMC and HPE. The Q2 market leader in private cloud was Dell EMC, followed by HPE and Microsoft. The same three vendors led in the non-cloud data center market, though with a different ranking.

Total data center infrastructure equipment revenues, including both cloud and non-cloud, hardware and software, were over $30 billion in the second quarter, with public cloud infrastructure accounting for over 30% of the total. Private cloud or cloud-enabled infrastructure accounted for over a third of the total. Servers, OS, storage, networking and virtualization software combined accounted for 96% of the Q2 data center infrastructure market, with the balance comprising network security and management software. By segment, HPE is the leader in server revenues, while Dell EMC has a strong lead in storage and Cisco is dominant in the networking segment. Microsoft features heavily in the rankings due to its position in server OS and virtualization applications. Outside of these four, the other leading vendors in the market are IBM, VMware, Huawei, Lenovo, Oracle, and NetApp.

“With cloud service revenues continuing to grow by over 40% per year, enterprise SaaS revenue growing by over 30%, and search/social networking revenues growing by over 20%, it is little wonder that this is all pulling through continued strong growth in spending on public cloud infrastructure,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “While some of this is essentially spend resulting from new services and applications, a lot of the increase also comes at the expense of enterprises investing in their own data centers. One outcome is that public cloud build is enabling strong growth in ODMs and white box solutions, so the data center infrastructure market is becoming ever more competitive.”

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Arista Introduces Any Cloud Platform For Hybrid Cloud Networking

Arista Networks has released its Arista Any Cloud software platform, reducing operational costs and complexity for enterprises by simplifying integration and management of hybrid clouds across private cloud datacenters and public cloud providers. The new virtualized offering, Arista vEOS™ Router, combined with CloudVision® and new Cloud Tracer™ functionality, provides consistent operations, orchestration, security and telemetry across multi-cloud environments.

“Arista’s Any Cloud platform transcends public and private clouds, radically changing the on-premises enterprise data center. We are helping customers realize their hybrid-cloud transformation by extending Arista EOS and CloudVision across network boundaries,” said Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO for Arista Networks.

Cloud Principles Migrate Enterprise from PINs to PICs

Arista’s Universal Cloud Networking (UCN) delivers common cloud principles for simplified networking topologies and architecture across use-cases. As siloed Places-In-the-Network (PINs) of the legacy enterprise are normalized to become standardized Places-In-the-Cloud (PICs), Arista’s UCN provides a consistent experience and simplifies the model for enterprise customers to extend workloads from their own datacenters into the public cloud.

Arista EOS® (Extensible Operating System), deployed and proven in the world’s largest datacenters and cloud-scale networks, is the center of the Arista Any Cloud platform. With vEOS Router, Arista EOS is now supported across multiple hypervisor and cloud deployment platforms. The same proven single EOS software image that runs across all of Arista’s products, vEOS Router extends a consistent operational model of the customer’s existing Arista data center network deployments. The vEOS Router leverages the existing cloud-grade routing stack and includes new enhancements, such as IPSEC VPN tunnels, to securely interconnect workloads across multi-cloud deployments. In addition, vEOS Router is integrated with cloud provider APIs to enable seamless deployment, automation, analytics and end-to-end visibility.

“Disparate places in the network are evolving to an inclusive software-defined cloud. Aiming to simplify hybrid and multi-cloud adoption for its customers, Arista’s approach to Any Cloud is compelling in extending cloud networking with operational consistency across a wide range of use cases,” said Brad Casemore, Research Director, Datacenter Networks for IDC.

Cloud Tracer for Hybrid Cloud Visibility

Arista CloudVision also supports these new hybrid cloud use-cases, with a turnkey approach to automation, telemetry and orchestration services needed to support multi-cloud inter-connectivity in a single cloud experience. Network-wide upgrades and rollbacks can be automated at scale, reducing downtime and disruptions caused by manual error. Hybrid cloud troubleshooting time is reduced with historical event correlation across use-cases, driven by EOS real-time state streaming combined with CloudVision analytic engines and visualization apps. In addition, Arista’s new Cloud Tracer assures that visibility and availability metrics are tracked consistently across the entire hybrid cloud environment, including public cloud direct connections, remote datacenter connections and cloud exchange points.

Arista Any Cloud Ecosystem

The Arista Any Cloud platform is designed to support any public or hybrid cloud environment, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, Microsoft Azure Stack, an extension of Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Support in each environment is coupled with validation and registration of these solutions in the cloud marketplace infrastructure provided by each cloud provider, thus making deployment simple for the enterprise customer.

This platform will be further enhanced by integration with the Equinix Cloud Exchange™, which provides direct high-performance connections to 70+ cloud providers. With Arista EOS and CloudVision platforms integration, Equinix customers will leverage the same consistent cloud networking tool set in yet another cloud network use-case.

With the Arista Any Cloud solution, enterprise customers can now deploy a reliable and secure multi-cloud experience with a common Universal Cloud Network approach across all of the places in the cloud. This enables IT organizations to harness dispersed cloud resources anywhere for better availability of services and applications across any cloud, any workload and any location.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

IBM Expands Certified Public Cloud Infrastructure For SAP HANA®

IBM has announced the availability of new SAP-certified bare metal servers for SAP HANA® platform deployments in the IBM Cloud and new configurations for VMware environments. The new cloud infrastructure-as-a-service solutions are designed to give enterprises the power and performance they need to manage their mission-critical applications running on SAP HANA.

Each day more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. Enterprises are rapidly adopting cloud so they can turn this increasing volume of structured and unstructured data into valuable business intelligence and leverage AI and analytics technology to gain new insights from their core business applications.

IBM’s newest cloud infrastructure for SAP HANA solutions on the IBM Cloud is designed to provide clients with larger and more powerful infrastructure to run memory-intensive applications running on SAP HANA. Specifically designed for larger workloads running on SAP HANA, the new solutions are certified by SAP to reassure clients that their production and test systems are running optimally in IBM Cloud and are backed by both IBM and SAP support teams. The new solutions include:

New SAP-Certified Bare Metal Servers for SAP HANA deployment on IBM Cloud: SAP has tested and certified new IBM Cloud bare metal servers with 4 and 8-socket Intel® Xeon® Processors and up to 8TB of memory to help enterprises run larger and more data-intensive in-memory workloads like those in SAP S/4HANA® efficiently. The solutions will be available globally in the IBM Cloud.

SAP-Certified Solutions for Deploying SAP HANA on VMware on IBM Cloud: Enterprises can provision an SAP-certified bare metal server configured with VMware. This helps clients currently running application workloads on SAP HANA in a private VMware environment to more easily transition to the public cloud without having to retool or refactor their application. The solutions will be available globally in the IBM Cloud.

“To win in this arena, enterprises need a cloud platform that can help them maximize their core business applications and gain new insights from increasing volumes of data,” said John Considine, general manager for cloud infrastructure services, IBM. “IBM is building more powerful and cost-effective solutions for SAP HANA applications in the cloud so that enterprises can focus on business innovation instead of underlying infrastructure.”

With IBM’s global network of nearly 60 cloud data centers in 19 countries and six continents, clients can scale globally to run their workloads on SAP HANA on IBM’s public cloud infrastructure when and where they need. IBM Cloud also provides access to more than 150 APIs and services including IBM Watson and analytics. The new solutions are designed to help clients co-locate their development, test, and production environments for applications running on SAP HANA, speed deployments and increase utilization.

IBM provides a full spectrum of cloud solutions to support SAP HANA applications including fully managed services and infrastructure-as-a-service certified by SAP. SAP HANA solutions are rapidly gaining momentum on the IBM Cloud with enterprises in a variety of industries around the world such as PeroxyChem.

PeroxyChem had only 12 months after divesting from its parent company to migrate its mission-critical SAP business systems to a new platform — or face significant out-of-contract hosting fees. By working with IBM to set up and host the company’s new cloud environment for SAP and non-SAP business applications, PeroxyChem is realizing significant cost savings and global growth opportunities.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

Dell EMC And IBM To Offer VMware Solutions On The IBM Cloud

IBM and Dell EMC has announced an agreement to help accelerate cloud adoption by providing Dell EMC’s commercial customers access to VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud. As part of the relationship, IBM has added Dell EMC infrastructure products into the IBM Cloud, and expands VMware solutions. Customers can now move workloads to the cloud while continuing to leverage the benefits of Dell EMC infrastructure and the VMware platform.

This news builds on IBM’s long-term partnership with VMware, which helps organizations extend existing workloads to the cloud in hours, vs. weeks or months. The partnership is seeing rapid adoption with more than 1,400 clients such as Telstra already leveraging IBM Cloud for VMware solutions which are available across IBM’s global network of nearly 60 cloud data centers in 19 countries.

As part of the agreement, Dell EMC will begin by offering VMware vCenter Server® on the IBM Cloud to its customers later this year, which will make it possible for them to rapidly extend on-premises data center capacity into the public cloud, while taking advantage of their existing investments in VMware tooling and scripts, and training. This will give VMware users a familiar, predictable and valuable experience so they can move their on-premises and public cloud workloads to the IBM Cloud with ease.

“Dell EMC is laser-focused on helping customers quickly and successfully embrace their digital transformations. Dell EMC and IBM realize many customers will approach the challenge differently, but all are interested in realizing the benefits of cloud-like efficiencies. Our relationship with IBM allows Dell’s commercial customers the ability to quickly and easily extend their VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud,” said Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president & general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC. “Customers will now be able to easily migrate enterprise applications to the single-tenant, IBM-hosted environment, and maintain the same level of control and visibility as if it were part of their own data center.”

“Through the resale of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Dell EMC can offer their commercial customers a hybrid cloud choice with VMware offerings ‘as-a-Service’ as they make the cloud transition,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit, VMware. “VMware Cloud Infrastructure enables customers to run, manage, connect and secure their applications across common operating environment, empowering them with a new level of IT agility and better economics.”

“Companies in every industry need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads to the cloud while not compromising security,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, general manager, IBM Cloud. “This agreement makes it easier than ever for Dell’s thriving channel of commercial customers to access VMware’s capabilities on IBM Cloud. Now, these organizations can rapidly deploy and scale pre-configured solutions that optimize their existing IT investments, while using the public cloud to extract new insights and value.”

IBM Cloud for VMware solutions targets commercial customers looking for enhanced security. Customers will be able to choose to run VMware solutions on dedicated bare metal servers, encrypt data at rest on attached storage and connect on-premises environments to IBM’s global network of cloud data centers across 19 countries.

Dell EMC will offer its customers choice for their VMware environments — on-premises or in the IBM Cloud — to help central IT more quickly meet the increasing demands from their businesses and access IBM’s cloud-native services including cognitive and analytics.

The speed of deployment and capacity expansion in the IBM Cloud helps IT deliver new services to lines of business more quickly and drive their company’s growth.  Customers will be positioned to easily manage workloads in the cloud using the same familiar VMware-compatible tools while maintaining control with full administration access to the VMware ESXi™ hosts. In addition to the expanded relationship with Dell EMC, IBM and VMware today announced momentum for their strategic partnership, which began in 2016, aimed at accelerating enterprise cloud adoption.

Dell EMC will begin reselling VMware solutions on IBM Cloud to commercial customers beginning in Q4 2017.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

CloudGenix Partners With Telarus

CloudGenix has announced it has become a supplier partner with leading Utah-based technology-driven master agent Telarus. Telarus is well-known for their comprehensive portfolio of leading products and technologies that enable partners to provide a wealth of powerful and flexible services to their customers. The addition of SD-WAN to their list of products and services offered helps further extend their value proposition to partners and thus to customers.

CloudGenix SD-WAN evolves the customer WAN to securely take advantage of any transport including broadband internet, improve application performance and experience, reduce dependency on expensive multi-protocol label-switched (MPLS) private WANs, and reduce remote office infrastructure and cost. CloudGenix SD-WAN is powered by CloudGenix AppFabric, which continually monitors granular transactional performance metrics for each application and WAN link. It also enforces policies for those applications based on user-defined requirements for performance, security, and compliance. CloudGenix focuses on metrics related to application sessions to better understand and enforce policy based on actual application performance, user experience, and business requirements for performance, compliance, and security.

“Telarus is very selective about products and technologies we provide to our partners. We do this to ensure that they are able to provide their customers with the best possible experience and the most robust telecom solutions,” said Amy Bailey, Telarus vice president of marketing. “By partnering with CloudGenix, our partners can now provide their customers with a leading SD-WAN solution to help customers realize the benefits of SD-WAN. AppFabric allows for use of business terms when defining WAN policy and reduces the burden of configuring a buffet of low-level networking rules. With CloudGenix, our partners and their customers can get out of the weeds and focus on their business goals.”

Regarding the partnership with Telarus, Robert Sexton, vice president of channels at CloudGenix said, “We are thrilled to work with Telarus. Adding AppFabric SD-WAN to their portfolio of services and technologies that they provide their partners allows us to collectively transform the way businesses design, implement, and manage their WAN. With CloudGenix, Telarus partners will be able to enable their customers to think about their WAN using business policies rather than technical policies, integrate cloud and SaaS seamlessly, and reduce costs across the board.”

The SD-WAN movement has forced the partner community to come up to speed quickly with this technology. CloudGenix is perfectly positioned to help Telarus partners bring SD-WAN to their customers.

Source: CloudStrategyMag

BMJ Relies On Datapipe For Chinese Expansion With Alibaba Cloud

Datapipe has announced that BMJ, a global health care knowledge provider, has used Datapipe’s expertise to launch its hybrid multi-cloud environment and enter the Chinese market using Alibaba Cloud. The announcement follows last year’s partnership in which BMJ implemented a DevOps culture and virtualized its IT infrastructure with Datapipe’s private cloud.

In 2016, Datapipe announced it was named a global managed service provider (MSP) partner of Alibaba Cloud. Later that year, it was named Asia Pacific Managed Cloud Company of the Year by Frost & Sullivan. BMJ opened a local Beijing office in 2015, and its attraction to engaging Datapipe’s services at the outset was due to Datapipe’s on-the-ground support in China and knowledge of the local Chinese market.

“We see the People’s Republic of China as a key part of our growing international network. Therefore, we needed the technical expertise to be able to expand our services into China, and a partner to help us navigate the complex frameworks required to build services there. Datapipe, with its on-the-ground support in China and knowledge of the market has delivered local public-cloud infrastructure utilizing Alibaba Cloud,” said Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer, BMJ.

Last year, BMJ used Datapipe’s expertise to move to a new, agile way of working. BMJ fully virtualized its infrastructure and automated its release cycle using Datapipe’s private cloud environment. Now, it has implemented a hybrid multi-cloud solution using both AWS and Alibaba Cloud, fully realizing the strategy it started working towards two years ago.

 “It is exciting to be working with a company that has both a long, distinguished history and is also forward-thinking in embracing the cloud,” said Tony Connor, head of EMEA Marketing, Datapipe. “Datapipe partnered with Alibaba Cloud last year in order to better support our clients’ global growth both in and out of China. We are delighted to continue to deliver for BMJ, building upon our private cloud foundations, and taking them to China with public cloud infrastructure through our relationship with AliCloud.”

“We have now fully realized the strategy that we first mapped out two years ago, when we started our cloud journey. In the first year, we were able to fully virtualise our infrastructure using Datapipe’s private cloud, and in the process, move to a new, agile way of working. In this second year, we have embraced public cloud and taken our services over to China,” said Alex Hooper, head of operations, BMJ.

“Previously, we could only offer stand-alone software products in China, which are delivered on physical media and require quarterly updates to be installed by the end-user. With Datapipe’s help, we now have the capability to offer BMJ’s cloud-based services to Chinese businesses,” Hooper added.

This has been made possible by utilizing data centers located in China, using Alibaba Cloud, which links to BMJ’s core infrastructure and gives BMJ all the benefits of public cloud infrastructure, but located within China to satisfy the requirements of the Chinese authorities.

“With Datapipe’s help, it was surprisingly easy to run our services in China and link them to our core infrastructure here in the UK, Datapipe has done an exemplary job,” Hooper said.



BMJ has seen extraordinary change in its time. Within its recent history, it has transitioned from traditional print media to becoming a digital content provider. With Datapipe’s help it now has the infrastructure and culture in place to cement its position as a premier global digital publisher and educator.

Source: CloudStrategyMag