The government is celebrating the one year anniversary of its G-Cloud programme, as public sector purchases of such services have shot up by £2m in the past month.

The G-Cloud programme is aimed at driving the uptake of cloud computing in the public sector.

The online system allows the public sector to rent the use of services as needed and do away with lengthy contracts. The system also allows SMBs to sell to government departments in equal capacity to larger enterprises.

According to the government, G-Cloud suppliers have now made £6m from the programme since its launch, with over 70 percent of this going to SMBs.

At the time the third G-Cloud framework was launched just a month ago, purchases of G-Cloud services stood at £4m, with 61 percent of this spend going to SMBs.

The G-Cloud framework is the backbone to the CloudStore, and is the marketplace where suppliers compete for specific contracts with the Government Procurement Services to offer their services to the public sector. The CloudStore is where suppliers list their services.

The government said today it is about to begin the construction of its third iteration of CloudStore, which will go live in the spring with improved guidance, support and resources for both suppliers and buyers to make use of the framework and the cloud.

Plans are also afoot to allow staff to rate the cloud computing services they buy from the CloudStore.

G-Cloud programme director Denise McDonagh said she remains convinced the G-Cloud is a game changer for the way government buys, manages, delivers and operates IT.

“The move to purchasing IT services as a commodity requires a culture shift for the public sector that won’t happen overnight,” said McDonagh.

“After only a year, though, most big government departments have bought services from the cloud, and there is significant buy-in from local government. Evidence of the benefits of cloud is growing all the time, and we are working with buyers to help them adapt to commodity-based IT purchasing.”

The latest iteration of the framework, launched a month ago in January, offers the public sector a choice of 3,200 services from 459 suppliers, three-quarters of which are small and mid-size businesses.

Rackspace is set to open a new UK datacentre facility based on Open Compute infrastructure in order to meet growing demand for cloud services.

The move will eventually double its UK capacity and create 300 new IT jobs in the South East.

While much of the UK economy is still in the doldrums, the hosting firm said it is planning a large new campus-style data facility near London, comprising five data halls, three of which will be online by the end of 2014.

Each hall will be 2MW in capacity, which will deliver a total of 10MW when all five halls are eventually online, more than doubling Rackspace’s current UK capacity in order to meet growing demand for its cloud computing services, the firm said.

“The thing that is driving this is the adoption of cloud, and the significant expansion we need to do both around open cloud and to support people building privately with Openstack,” Rackspace vice president of technology Nigel Beighton told V3.

“It’s the interest in OpenStack and big public open cloud that is driving all of this.”

Rackspace is also adapting the way it builds extra capacity in order to enable it to respond faster to growing demand, according to Beighton.

To this end, the new UK datacentre is being leased from datacentre specialist Digital Realty rather than being built and owned by Rackspace, and will be outfitted with infrastructure based on the Open Compute specifications.

“The plan going forward is for [Digital Realty] to own and we lease from them. The reason is simply the speed of getting it done. They build it and we concentrate on what goes into it,” Beighton said.

Meanwhile, Open Compute allows the firm to standardise a lot more of the infrastructure.

“One of the key aspects of cloud computing is the ability to scale quickly, because customers can come along at any time and take a huge chunk of capacity,” Beighton explained.

“We have published how we are going to scale using those Open Compute principles, and the design allows us to purchase new components much quicker and drop them in much quicker.”

Open Compute is an initiative started by Facebook to drive more efficient datacentres at lower cost, and now counts Rackspace and many IT vendors among its contributors.

However, the OpenStack cloud platform also plays a key part in Rackspace’s strategy, according to Beighton.

“OpenStack has incredibly good provisioning capability, so we are able to deploy huge swathes of bare metal at short notice and then use OpenStack to configure those dynamically into what we want to make them,” he said.

HP has unveiled a business process outsourcing (BPO) service designed to help firms better integrate and manage finance and strategic planning operations.

The company said that its AutoFlow brand would integrate with conventional ERP platforms and provide companies with tools to manage and track financial transactions, invoicing and account management activities. The service combines HP’s BPO platform with services from partner Newgen Software Technologies.

The service will also integrate with HP’s Document Processing Service for file and records management.

In addition to conventional financial management and modelling tasks, HP is looking to target the AutoFlow platform at areas such as inventory management, human resources and supply chain management.

“Today’s chief financial officers are plagued with diminishing resources and the growing complexity of processes and technology,” said HP vice president for BPO Danila Meirlaen.

“HP AutoFlow builds on our strong history in finance, administration and technology to increase process automation and optimize cost structures, so clients can focus on revenue-generating activities.”

The company said that the service would be available internationally with pricing varying on region and usage case.

BPO has long been at the forefront of the IT service outsourcing field as companies look to save costs over on-premise deployment and management. The services have been hailed with helping to cut capital expenditure costs and bringing overall savings to companies.

With the rise of the public and private cloud computing movement, however, the management and deployment of such systems has grown even more complex.

Vision Solutions has unveiled a version of its Double-Take replication and disaster recovery technology that can be operated as a cloud-based service.

Available immediately, Vision’s Double-Take Cloud Protection and Recovery (CP&R) CloudStack Edition is aimed primarily at service providers in the first instance, enabling them to offer customers a cloud-hosted disaster recovery service.

Vision said it already has one UK-based service provider, Pertechtual, signed up to deliver recovery-as-a-service to business customers using the platform. But that firms can also deploy the service inside their own on-premise private cloud environment, if required, it added.

“Virtualisation is already used for both production systems and disaster recovery, and cloud is set to follow the same trend,” Ian Masters, Vision Solutions sales director for Northern Europe told V3.

Masters said he expects the next logical step will be for companies to adopt the cloud for disaster recovery, rather than moving their entire production environment to the cloud.

The Double-Take CP&R CloudStack Edition integrates with the open-source Apache CloudStack or Citrix CloudPlatform frameworks, enabling service providers to deliver a self-service disaster recovery tool with a pay-per-use pricing model to their customers.

Vision’s technology performs a synchronous, real-time byte-level replication of servers, capturing changes as they happen and sending it across the internet to the repository to provide an up-to-the minute replica of the systems being protected.

The availability of this cloud-based replica allows customers to do a rapid recovery should disaster strike, but it could also be used for cloud migrations, according to Masters.

“It presents customers with a fantastic opportunity to use the same technology to migrate their production infrastructure to the cloud, if they wish. Then you can turn the solution around and re-purpose your on-premise infrastructure as the disaster recovery target,” he said.

Vision Solutions also announced a Double-Take SDK that now provides application programming interfaces (APIs). This enables service providers or enterprise firms to integrate its disaster recovery, high availability or migration tools into their management system or cloud orchestration platform.

As part of the same move, Vision said it was allowing service providers to consume licences for its Double-Take and MIMIX tools under a metered usage scheme.

MIMIX is Vision’s line of high availability and disaster recovery tools aimed at users of IBM”s iSeries systems.

VMware is stepping up efforts to deliver on its vision of the software-defined datacentre with the acquisition of Virsto, a storage virtualisation vendor, while also rolling out automation tools in the shape of vSphere with Operations Management.

The firm said it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Virsto Software, whose storage hypervisor technology is aimed at bringing the same kind of optimisation and flexibility to enterprise storage that VMware has already delivered to servers.

VMware said that the move will fill a gap in its current capabilities, helping to optimise storage alongside its existing technologies for managing server and networking resources.

“Our customers have told us that managing performance and data services for virtual machines can be challenging, especially in I/O-intensive environments like virtual desktops,” said John Gilmartin, vice president of storage and availability, writing on VMware’s blog.

Virsto offers a storage management platform that can accelerate I/O performance on any block-based storage system while providing services such as virtual machine snapshot and cloning capabilities, Gilmartin added.

VMware plans to continue to offer Virsto’s standalone virtual appliance for vSphere in the short term, but is looking to integrate Virsto’s architecture and data management services into future VMware products further down the road.

As part of the same vision, VMWare also unveiled vSphere with Operations Management, integrating the vSphere platfrom with a tool to deliver automated operations for vSphere deployments.

This uses analytic capabilities to peer into the performance, health and efficiency of the virtualised environment, and then use this data to proactively manage performance and capacity.

“Utilising the vSphere health model, vSphere with Operations Management extrapolates and presents data for managing performance and capacity more effectively than any other current or promised solutions,” said Ben Scheerer of VMware’s Cloud and Infrastructure Management product group.

VMware vSphere with Operations Management is set to be available later this quarter in Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, priced from $1,745 per processer with no core, vRAM or virtual machine limits.

VMware also announced VMware vSphere Data Protection Advanced, a backup and recovery tool for business critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server running in virtual environments.

Based on EMC’s Avamar, vSphere Data Protection Advanced will ship this quarter for $1,095 per processor, with no restrictions on the number of protected virtual machines.

An update to Dropbox for Teams aims to give IT administrators more control and visibility options for cloud-hosted files.

Updates include the ability for admins to create downloadable activity reports and set sharing controls for user’s accounts. The move continues Dropbox’s push to gain a foot hold in the enterprise market.

“People at over two million businesses and 95 per cent of Fortune 500 companies are using Dropbox – from law firms working with their clients to international businesses staying in sync across the world,” wrote Dropbox software engineer Emil Ibrishimov in a blog post.

“Today, we’re launching a completely redesigned admin console and new sharing controls to help Dropbox for Teams admins manage their group.”

The updated version of Dropbox for Teams includes the ability for admins to view recent activity, third party app usage and web session information for all members in a given team.

Admins will be able to filter that information by logins, passwords, apps, devices, and members using the revamped admin console. Dropbox’s reworked offering also includes the ability to set a team members access to files on a case-by-case basis.

Security will see a revamp from the update as admins can now require team members to use two-step verification on a member-by-member basis. Dropbox originally released its two-step verification system last year after a password breach occurred late last year.

Dropbox’s updates attempt to put the firm’s service in the same field as competitor’s enterprise solutions. Last year, its cloud storage competitor Box released a slew of security and app integration tools aimed at increasing usability within the IT field.

Dropbox for Teams is currently available to firms for a starting price of $795 a year for up to five team members and 1TB of storage space.

Virtualisation management firm VMTurbo has updated its Operations Manager tool with broader platform support and enhancements to its policy engine.

Available immediately, VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.3 broadens its virtualisation platform support to include VMware’s vCloud 5.1 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2012, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.1, as well as adding CloudStack and Citrix XenServer.

The new version also enhances the usability of the system, giving customers greater visibility of information about their virtual machines and also more flexible control over the timing of any changes the suite recommends.

VMTurbo itself is a relatively new firm, founded with the aim of simplifying the operation of complex virtualised datacentres. Operations Manager takes a radical approach to this, automating as many management tasks as possible and using techniques borrowed from economics to balance resources against demand.

“We call it the Economic Scheduling Engine, as it models the IT environment as buyers and sellers, using supply and demand to drive resource allocation decisions,” VMTurbo’s managing director for Northern Europe, Andrew Mallaband, told V3.

Under this model, applications sell transactions to the business while buying memory, CPU and disk resources from virtual machines, using virtual pricing which varies as resource utilisation fluctuates throughout the datacentre, just like a market-driven ecosystem.

Version 3.3 aims to improve the usability of Operations Manager for service providers and enterprise customers alike by allowing for more customisation, according to Mallaband.

“We deal with lots of enterprises and cloud service providers who are keen to expose information from our system and some of the control functions to their customers,” he said.

Virtualisation tools specialist Veeam has released an add-on for its Backup & Replication 6.5 platform that can automatically copy virtual machine backups to cloud-based storage services.

The tool offers a time-saving alternative for administrators who need to ensure backups are held in an off-site repository to comply with regulations.

Available immediately, Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition enables IT departments to automate the copying of backups to any of 15 different cloud-based storage services, including Amazon’s S3 or Glacier platforms, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or HP Cloud.

However, instead of issuing a major update to its Backup & Replication suite, which provides backup protection for virtual machines and their data in VMware or Hyper-V environments, Veeam is delivering it as a separate add-on to Backup & Replication 6.5 that deals solely with transferring files off-site.

“Backup & Replication Cloud Edition still counts as version 6.5, but we haven’t changed the code. It is implemented as an engine that you can install next to your current 6.5 deployment that offloads your backup files to a location off-premise,” Veeam chief evangelist in EMEA Hans De Leenheer told V3.

He explained that customers had were happy with Backup & Replication 6.5, but that for regulatory reasons some needed a way to get backups to an off-site location, in case their offices should be destroyed.

While not addressing any major technical issue, the tool makes it as easy as possible for an administrator to configure a regular, automatic transfer of backup files to the cloud repository.

Veeam also implemented the feature this way because backing up virtual machines directly to the cloud would have a huge impact on latency, according to De Leenheer.

Likewise, the tool does not enable users to perform a recovery directly from the cloud. Instead, users must use the cloud engine to retrieve the correct off-site archive before kicking off a local recovery, as is the normal procedure for Backup & Replication 6.5.

“It’s just a convenient and affordable alternative to sending tape to a traditional offsite backup vault,” said De Leenheer.

Veeam Backup & Replication Cloud Edition is available under annual subscription licensing. Existing customers can add a Cloud Edition license to their existing Veeam Backup & Replication perpetual licenses, the firm said.

LogMeIn has officially launched Cubby, a cloud-based storage service that lets users synchronise content across PCs and mobile devices, as well as share files with friends and colleagues securely.

Available now, Cubby is being slated as an alternative to Dropbox and as a potential solution for businesses seeking a secure solution for employees using smartphones and tablets to view company documents, as part of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend.

Like other online storage services, Cubby has a free edition – called Basic – that provides 5GB of cloud storage, but a perk is that consumers can earn up to 20GB more if they get others to sign up for the service.

Meanwhile, a paid-for Cubby Pro version includes 100GB storage per user and additionally offers a feature called DirectSync that enables users to synchronise an unlimited amount of data between devices and computers, without it being stored online.

Cubby also allows users to set any folder or folders as shared, rather than having to drop files into a specific folder as with Dropbox, according to LogMeIn.

“Cloud file sharing services too often force people to make choices between personal or business use, simplicity or flexibility, accessibility or security – compromises that don’t reflect the realities of how technology is increasingly adopted and used in today’s mobile workplace,” said LogMeIn chief executive Michael Simon.

“Cubby is designed to deliver the elegance and ease of use individuals enjoy with the security and flexibility businesses demand.”

The service builds on experience LogMeIn has gleaned from its remote access service, and uses 256-bit AES encryption to secure all communications.

Any files added to Cubby through the desktop application are automatically protected using client-side encryption. Meanwhile Cubby Locks, a feature of the Cubby Pro version, lets account owners require a password for access to shared folders and activate another level of protection by encrypting the access keys with their password.

Cubby requires a desktop app for Windows PCs or Macs, with mobile client support for phones or tablets running Android as well as Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices.

The Cubby Pro paid-for version is available on subscription pricing from £4.46 per user per month, or can prepaid at £53.56 per user per year.

LogMeIn offers a range of cloud-based services, including remote access and IT helpdesk tools.

The booming market for cloud services and hosted mobile applications is going to drive phenomenal gain in low-power microserver sales over the coming years.

Research firm IHS said that over the next year sales in microservers will nearly triple, while 2016 will see sales rise as high as 1.2 million units.

The company estimates that 88,000 units were sold in 2012, up from just 19,000 in 2011. For the next year, sales are expected to clock in at 291,000 units, an increase of 230 per cent.

Analysts believe that the growth in microservers has been driven by the rise of both cloud computing services and mobile devices. With users increasingly looking to access hosted applications, demand is growing for the low power consumption and scalability offered by micro server hardware.

“With cloud computing and data centers in high demand in order to serve more smartphones, tablets and mobile PCs online, specific aspects of server design are becoming increasingly important, including maintenance, expandability, energy efficiency and low cost,” said IHS senior analyst for compute platforms Peter Lin.

“Such factors are among the advantages delivered by micro servers compared to higher-end machines like mainframes, supercomputers and enterprise servers—all of which emphasize performance and reliability instead.”

Vendors have also started to take notice of the growth in demand for low-power servers. ARM has made servers the centrepiece on its hardware roadmap, while Intel has sought to introduce its Atom platform into the low-power server market.