CloudFounders is targeting enterprise customers with a software-defined storage platform that is claimed to accelerate virtual machine performance while also cutting costs by enabling greater storage flexibility, including the ability to extend to cloud-based storage such as Amazon S3.

Open vStorage, set for full release in the third quarter of this year, is designed to boost performance of virtualised infrastructure in the data centre, with support for VMware and Microsoft’s hypervisors plus the open-source KVM.

The platform creates a distributed storage platform across the data centre, taking in existing storage resources such as local disks, SAN and NAS hardware. It also calls for flash or solid-state drives (SSDs) in each server node to act as a local cache, delivering performance of 100,000IOPS per host, according to CloudFounders.

“What we’re trying to do is create a new software-defined storage layer that combines the best of both worlds,” said Kurt Glazemakers, chief technology officer of CloudFounders, referring to the two current trends for cloud-based big data storage and the growing use of SSDs to accelerate server workloads.

Key features of Open vStorage are that it provides each virtual machine (VM) with its own virtual disk. The core part of the platform, the Cloud Storage Router (CSR) can also link up with cloud-based storage services such as Amazon S3.

“The VM-centric approach means we can deploy and roll back snapshots on a single VM basis,” said Glazemakers. Traditional storage arrays provision capacity in such a way that multiple VMs are deployed in the same place, which complicates the roll-back process if just a single one of the VMs needs it, he claimed.

Support for cloud storage also turns Open vStorage into a hybrid storage platform that spans both local and cloud-based infrastructure, according to the firm, and takes advantage of the falling cost of cloud storage.

“By sizing the flash or SSD, we can leverage much slower back-ends, allowing you to use Amazon S3, for example. You need to do much more caching to avoid writes because of the object-based storage and the latency of the reads,” said Glazemakers.

Open vStorage is currently in beta, and the firm is opening it up to further testers with today’s announcement. Licensing details will be disclosed with the full release, according to CloudFounders.

Las Vegas: The blurring of the lines between enterprise, telecoms and consumers is spurring EMC to move towards shedding its status as an enterprise-only vendor.

Chief Technology Officer and senior vice president John Roese told reporters that as the needs of customers change, his company will have an opportunity to move into areas traditionally thought to be outside of its realm.

Roese explained that the migration of firms towards traditional on-premise systems to consumer devices, cloud computing and mobile applications has caused a blurring of the line between what had traditionally been considered carrier services.

With problems such as unstructured data management and subscriber turnover from unhappy consumers dogging companies, the firm believes that its storage, virtualisation and big data platforms can appeal to carriers struggling to keep up with the competition.

“I have a firm belief there is a lot more opportunity for EMC technology beyond serving the enterprise ecosystem,” Roese said.

“As the industry is changing and as this convergence is happening, we are finding our technology is incredibly useful in solving problems that are not historically associated with enterprise.”

The EMC senior VP laid out a plan for the company which will see the EMC flash memory hardware platform combined with the recently-unveiled ViPR storage platforms and Pivotal spin-offs will help to create an ecosystem perfectly-suited to serve new industries and changing markets in the communications, healthcare and network management spaces.

With the shift, the company believes it can seize an opportunity to add some of the world’s largest mobile network operators and service providers to its client ranks.

“The technology that is being developed is becoming much more horizontally applicable,” Roese noted.

“There is a tremendous opportunity for EMC to expand the application of our technology.”

Las Vegas: EMC is hoping that its ViPR storage platform will catch the attention of third-party vendors who want to integrate their products.

Speaking to V3 at the EMC World conference, president of advanced software Amitabh Srivastava said that the company was seeking to build an ecosystem around ViPR rather than keep the platform closed off as an entirely proprietary offering. The company is seeking to balance its open approach while still offering a focused enterprise platform.

“The public cloud did try to solve this problem but they simplified it substantially, they homogenised,” said.

“If you are really going to build a system for the enterprise, you have to go and really tackle the hard problems of storage.”

Unveiled by the company earlier in the day, ViPR aims to provide a software-defined storage platform which can manage storage clouds both on-premise and remotely. The platform will support both EMC’s own storage appliances and those offered by outside vendors.

Srivastava said that the company also hopes its offering will catch the imaginations of firms who will find new ways to integrate with their own products.

“We are going to open up the APIs,” he said,”anyone can build the adaptor, you are not at our mercy in any way.

“We want to really build an ecosystem where anyone can do it.”

In addition to supporting storage appliances, the company is also working to get ViPR on emerging platforms, such as HDFS and cloud computing initiatives with OpenStack integration. While service providers are the obvious early target for ViPR. Srivastava noted that the platform could also help some of the smallest vendors bring their own products to market.

“It is a great tool for startups, because startups have all these cool ideas, but now they don’t have to worry about all the grungy details of how you manage these arrays,” he explained.

“These startups can come in and build right on top of ViPR.”

Las Vegas: EMC has launched ViPR, a software-defined storage platform aimed at helping firms better manage virtualised storage.

The company said that the ViPR platform would allow firms to pool multiple hardware units and appliances into a single system which can be centrally controlled. In doing so, the company believes it can better enable firms to manage private clouds.

“What we are essentially doing is providing a layer of software that is going to allow you to manage our existing arrays, third-party arrays and, increasingly, commodity storage,” EMC executive vice president for product operations and marketing Jeremy Burton told attendees at the company’s annual EMC World conference.

The company said that ViPR would operate with two different ‘planes’ for storage management. The control plane will handle high-level management and automation, allowing administrators to perform basic management tasks.

Additionally, ViPR will provide customers with a second, lower-level management layer known as the data plane The company said that the plane would allow for interaction with individual blocks of data, giving a more granular control for administration and management of databases.

Burton said that as applications have changed their approach to handling and utilising object storage, a new system such as the data plane is needed to adapt.

“We think a lot of the new apps that are going to be developed are gong to be built in a different way,” he said.

“We need new controillers for these new content types.”

ViPR is currently undergoing closed tests with customers and is set for general availability in the second half of the year.

Central to the company’s philosophy with ViPR is a push for horizontal integration and the ability to combine multiple platforms from multiple vendors. Chief executive Joe Tucci said that EMC is looking to present its platforms as a counter to the vertical integration approach of rivals such as Oracle.

“Some companies say; use my applications, my operating system, my middleware, right down to the hardware. We are doing it very differently,” Tucci said.

“Yes, we re going to put those technologies together, but you can also piece-pick, you can partner in any place on the chain.”

The government has officially adopted a “cloud-first” policy at both a central department level and among the wider public sector as part of the ongoing overhaul of the government’s use of IT to drive savings and improve efficiencies.

The government had announced its intention to do this back in March but has now made this a central tenet of its strategy. Whitehall will expect departments to purchase from the G-Cloud as the main resource, with departments having to make a case for any non-cloud deployments.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said: “Many government departments already use G-Cloud, but IT costs are still too high. One way we can reduce them is to accelerate the adoption of cloud across the public sector to maximise its benefits. The cloud-first policy will embed the skills a modern civil service needs to meet the demands of 21st-century digital government and help us get ahead in the global race.”

As part of the announcement, the government has also launched the third version of the G-Cloud framework, adding 368 new firms to the programme, bringing the total number accredited to sell services to the public sector to 708, of which over 80 percent are SMEs.

The government is hoping to use the G-Cloud to boost spending with SMEs after years of public sector IT being dominated by large firms on hugely expensive contracts. G-Cloud programme director Denise McDonagh said the to date the majority of the £18m spend on the CloudStore has been with SMEs, and hopes are that this will continue to rise.
 
“This is still small relative to overall government IT spend, and the transition to widespread purchasing of IT services as a commodity won’t happen overnight,” she said.

“The adoption of a cloud-first policy will give added impetus for Whitehall and the wider public sector to move in this direction – complementing our ongoing work to encourage cloud adoption and to help buyers adapt to this way of purchasing IT, which is already showing results.”

Earlier this year the government celebrated the one-year anniversary of G-Cloud’s launch, although industry watchers said uptake on the platform remains minimal. The government will be hoping its new policy changes that.

Remote support specialist iYogi is launching a cloud computing platform designed to let companies and service providers deliver their own remote management services.

The company said that its Digital Services Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) offering would allow customers to utilise the iYogi support network in their own services. Based on the Yogi support network, the service will allow enterprise and home service providers to offer in-house branded support for end-user PCs.

Larry Gordon, iYogi president of global channel sales, told V3 that the cloud service is a response to demand the company has seen from its partners to open up various components of the iYogi support network, which utilises a combination on locally-installed software and a remote support network to allow technicians to diagnose and repair systems through the cloud.

“The platform we run our comp on has been improving over the last five years,” Gordon explained.

“Some customers want to just buy that for less.”

Though Digital Services Cloud will technically be part of a cloud CRM space dominated by Salesforce.com, the company hopes that the service will become a more specialised platform, fine-tuned specifically for the process of remotely managing PC maintenance. Service providers would be able to increase revenues by offering their support services using the iYogi platform and network.

“What we layer on top of that is this enormous knowledge base built on particular analysis of what tech support is,” Gordon said.

“It layers in that entire layer of big data we have collected on how to monitor these technology problems.”

The company also plans to remain flexible with its pricing. Gordon said that in addition to the traditional cloud subscription offering, customers can opt to purchase access to platform with a one-time fee or pay based on number of users or a portion of the revenues they draw from their own deployments.

VMware sees the hybrid cloud as a key step towards the holy grail of delivering IT as a service (ITaas) for its customers, but organisations must fully automate their own data centres before they can make that step.

At the VMware Forum in London, chief technologist Joe Baguley outlined VMware’s view of the hybrid cloud, and how it proposes to take customers on the journey towards implementing an ITaaS strategy.

Baguley said: “IT is struggling to keep up in the modern era. There’s a growing chasm between the line of business that wants to be agile and the IT department that wants to keep control of everything.”

The solution to this is not only to fully automate the data centre to make it easier to deploy new services, according to VMware, but also to exploit publicly available cloud computing services and integrate these with your on-premise IT.

“We think you should be looking at using public cloud as a natural extension of your own data centre. It should be free and easy to move workloads between those clouds as it is to move them from one rack to another in your data centre,” Baguley said.

However, as Baguley conceded, many firms are a long way from realising this vision, and are still using VMware technology for server consolidation, if they have even got that far.

“The journey to ITaaS is one that many are just beginning. I still get IT guys coming up to me and asking how to virtualise their servers,” he said.

However, if organisations need a good reason to start down this path, VMware can give it to them; its customers have so far saved an estimated total of $10 billion through server virtualisation, Baguley claimed.

“And as you continue to build out the software-defined data centre, we believe you can turn those cost savings back into investments in the business,” he said.

The software-defined data centre is VMware’s existing cloud computing pitch to customers; virtualise everything and then build policy-based automation and orchestration layers so that departmental users do not have to wait for weeks to get a new service provisioned.

VMware customers can get there gradually by incrementally adding layers on top of vSphere, according to Baguley. “Or for those who can’t wait, you can jump straight in with vCloud suite as a single managed package,” he said.

Meanwhile VMware is set to launch on May 21st its vCloud Hybrid Service, which will see partners offer public cloud services based on VMware’s platform.

This will enable VMware customers to realise the hybrid cloud, as they should then be able to move workloads seamlessly between their on-premise vCloud infrastructure and the public cloud operated by providers such as Savvis.

“What we’re doing with partners is enabling a rentable extension to your data centre,” explained Baguley.

However, as Gartner analyst Chris Wolf warned at the time of the vCloud Hybrid Service announcement, VMware could be seen as trying to restrict the public cloud choices its customers can make.

This is a charge that VMware denies, of course, with Baguley stating that it has to be open to keep its customers happy.

“Technology has to be non-disruptive to the customer, but disruptive to the market. It has to be open to everything, even OpenStack,” he said.

Microsoft has wrapped up its massive Hotmail user migration programme.

The company said that it has now transferred all of the user accounts from Hotmail to its Outlook.com service, ending a data transfer campaign which shifted some 150 petabytes of user data.

“When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts,” wrote Outlook.com group program manager Dick Craddock

“However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented.”

With the migration complete, Microsoft now estimates that Outlook.com boasts more than 400 million active users. The milestone comes some two months after the company reported that the service was over 60 million users.

Additionally, Microsoft reported that some 125 million of Outlook.com users also use the Exchange ActiveSync service.

To mark the occasion, Microsoft is posting an update for the Outlook.com service. The features will include a new interface option, the ability to send messages from other accounts without an ‘on behalf of’ notification and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

Craddock said that with the new SkyDrive integration, users will be able to more efficiently select and attach files and images from SkyDrve directly into messages.

“When you’re sending an email message, you can select files from your SkyDrive and we’ll automatically turn those into the right thumbnails with links that have the right permissions tied to people that receive the email,” he explained,

“When you insert pictures from SkyDrive, you automatically get a beautiful photo mail. And it’s easy to edit the message, and add or remove files and pictures right from the new message compose experience.”

Businesses moving to the cloud are facing tough challenges around data protection and data use, according to tech giants Philips and insurance firm JLT.

The chief information officer of JLT, Ian Cohen, said the boom of cloud computing services has left the company facing a number of data protection challenges, both with suppliers and customers.

“We operate in a highly regulated environment and trust is vitally important to us,” he said, speaking at a Salesforce customer event on Thursday.

“Not just the implied trust in our brand, but the implied trust that exists between us and our client when we handle their data. And in today’s world increasingly, we are challenged to be explicit about how and where data is accessed.”

Philips vice president Wim Van Gils agreed with this, explaining that the issue of data privacy is particularly relevant to firms using sensitive data.

“We see similar issues with our healthcare business where we’re hit with compliance and a set of security requirements that are enforced by law. When we look at our relationship with consumers we want to be a trusted brand because we’re in the health sector and we never want to compromise that,” he said.

Gils said that many companies’ unwillingness to ask for aid from cloud service providers has caused them to take a misguided, tick-box legal approach to data collection and privacy.

“We want to be very explicit about what information we’re collecting and how we’re using it. Not in some 15-page legal [document] showing what they agree to, we want to bring it up front because we believe it’s one of the foundations of becoming a digital company,” he said. “We need all the help we can get because this is quite new. Most companies are very implicit about it and I think we’re entering an age where we need to be explicit about it.”

Cloud service provider Salesforce’s chief scientist JP Rangaswami said the company is aware of the challenge and is working to create solutions for the privacy problem facing cloud users.

“Data protection is a core concept,” he said. “The phrase people use is informed consent. To get informed consent people need to know what is being collected and how it is being used. The customer needs to be aware of that, they need to know what is being collected.

“This is because it’s not our information. The best we can do is ensure what we hold is solid and that we give our customers the ability to communicate back to their customers.”

However, JLT’s Cohen said that even with the help of bespoke cloud service experts like Salesforce, data privacy issues will continue. “It’s a big issue and Salesforce are helping us but I think there’s more to be done. We need to be even more transparent and to be even more supportive around data privacy, data allocation and data residency and all of these issues.”

The news comes just after Salesforce announced plans to open a new data centre in the UK. The centre will open is Slough in 2014 and is designed to extend the company’s European cloud services.

Oracle has announced an update to its Oracle Secure Global Desktop platform, which enables workers with an iPad or other mobile device to access applications running on Exalogic Elastic Cloud infrastructure.

Available now, Secure Global Desktop 5.0 extends the platform’s back-end support to provide certified access to Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and web-based Oracle applications, including Oracle CRM, the firm said.

In particular, this version has the capability to deliver applications to an HTML5-compliant browser, so users do not need to download and install a software client. This is currently supported only in the Safari browser on the iPad, however.

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president for Linux and virtualisation engineering, said: “Enterprise users expect increasingly more mobile access to applications which are often designed to run on desktop PCs. Oracle Secure Global Desktop provides IT with a highly secure remote access solution for such applications, and even full desktop environments, from tablets.”

Oracle Secure Global Desktop is based on technology that Sun Microsystems acquired from Tarantella. It serves up applications or entire virtual desktops hosted in the datacentre to remote users, with Windows PCs, Macs and Oracle Sun Ray Clients already supported as endpoints.

This version also adds support at the back end for servers running Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Linux 6.4, the firm said.

New support on the client side includes Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion. Supported browsers now include Internet Explorer 10, Chrome, and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR).