Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

Veritas tested and validated for AWS Outposts; will help customers overcome challenges of on-premises and cloud environments

Veritas Technologies announced this week that it has the capabilities to support AWS Outposts, and has tested it and found that it can help to deliver positive customer outcomes at scale through re-architecting complex workloads to run on AWS.

AWS Outposts are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with Amazon Web Services (AWS)-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud. 

AWS and Veritas customers may have certain workloads that need to remain on-premises for several years, such as applications that are latency sensitive and need to be near on-premises assets. These customers want to be able to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, while easily and seamlessly integrating these workloads with the rest of their applications on AWS. 

Until now, customers lacked the same APIs, tools, hardware, and functionality across on-premises and cloud to deliver a truly consistent hybrid experience. 

AWS Outposts solves these challenges by delivering racks of AWS compute and storage—the same hardware used in AWS public region datacenters—to customers, bringing AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises. With AWS Outposts, Veritas can help AWS customers overcome the challenges that exist with managing and supporting infrastructures in both on-premises and cloud environments and deliver positive outcomes at scale.

Veritas worked closely with the AWS Outposts team to be one of the first AWS Partner Network (APN) members to successfully test and validate its solution with AWS Outposts. This included the deployment of a NetBackup Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to AWS Outposts and the backup and recovery of workloads for mission critical applications between AWS Outposts and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). 

Validating Veritas NetBackup on AWS Outposts provides the enterprise scale data protection that Veritas is known for to newly extended on-premises environments.

Cohesity DataPlatform and DataProtect Software now tested and validated for AWS Outposts

Cohesity announced on Tuesday that it has completed validation that its Cohesity DataPlatform and Cohesity DataProtect software have capabilities to support AWS Outposts and are available immediately. 

AWS Outposts delivers fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with Amazon Web Services (AWS)-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.

Cohesity has tested Outposts and will be able to deliver positive customer outcomes at scale through re-architecting complex workloads to run on AWS Outposts. The Cohesity platform is designed to reduce backup costs and simplify data management operations. In order to support hybrid environments with data residing on-premises and in the cloud, the platform provides the customer with the flexibility to develop a data management strategy that supports their unique needs. 

The benefits of the Cohesity platform running on AWS Outposts include a single user interface across hybrid environments provides global visibility, search, and recovery for data across multiple AWS Regions and AWS Outposts. Cohesity supports backup of AWS Outposts workloads with agent or snapshot-based approaches to optimize for app-consistency, speed, and storage footprint.

The platform includes archiving flexibility with backup Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and VMware instances running on Outposts to archive to cloud on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), as well as other workloads outside of Outposts.It also brings down infrastructure costs by backing up entire legacy on-premises environment and archive to Amazon S3 without the need for additional backup infrastructure.

The offering also delivers global deduplication, compression, and direct integration to all Amazon S3 storage classes, including Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive, further reduces storage and data transfer costs over hybrid cloud.

“Cohesity is excited to offer our disruptive data management solutions to AWS Outposts customers. Our design philosophy aligns well with AWS, empowering customers to back up, protect, store, and manage their data wherever they choose — on-premises or in the cloud — through one platform with a single UI,” said Terry Ramos, vice president of alliances, Cohesity. “Cohesity DataProtect and Cohesity DataPlatform offerings are tested and validated to support AWS Outposts and are available today.”

AWS customers that have workloads on-premises want to be able to run AWS compute and storage on-premises, and easily and seamlessly integrate these on-premises workloads with the rest of their applications in the cloud. 

AWS Outposts delivers racks of AWS compute and storage — the same hardware used in AWS public region datacenters — to bring AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models on-premises. As an AWS Outposts Partner, Cohesity is able to help AWS customers overcome challenges that exist due to managing and supporting infrastructures both on-premises and in cloud environments and deliver positive outcomes at scale.

HPE, Cray release comprehensive HPC and AI offerings optimized for exascale computing on premises, in the cloud, or as-a-service

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced Thursday that it will deliver comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) portfolio for the exascale era, which is characterized by explosive data growth and new converged workloads such as HPC, AI, and analytics.

The addition of Cray Inc., which HPE recently acquired, bolsters HPE’s HPC and AI solutions to now encompass an end-to-end supercomputing architecture across compute, interconnect, software, storage and services, delivered on premises, hybrid or as-a-Service. Now every enterprise can leverage the same foundational HPC technologies that power the world’s fastest systems, and integrate them into their data centers to unlock insights and fuel new discovery.

Digital transformation is driving new data-intensive workloads and real-time analytics operating at an unprecedented scale. New software, compute, interconnect, and storage capabilities are required for customers to unlock the potential of their data and accelerate innovation. 

HPE delivers solutions for any experience from single, small systems all the way to exascale-class supercomputers with tailored software, interconnect and storage capabilities. This includes solutions for modeling and simulation in weather forecasting, manufacturing and energy sectors, and AI and big data analytics in precision medicine, autonomous vehicles, geospatial imaging and financial services.

New Supermicro high-performance enterprise-class vSAN offering ideal for hyper-converged infrastructure

Super Micro Computer has introduced another enterprise-class vSAN solution to its broad portfolio of fully configured out-of-the-box systems.  Leveraging Supermicro Ultra SuperServer systems, combined with industry-proven vSAN software-defined storage, target hyper-convergence infrastructure.  

Supermicro 1U and 2U Ultra SuperServers support the highest performance Intel Xeon Scalable processors (up to 205W TDP) with 24 DIMM slots. Ultra platforms can support not only a large number of NVMe drives but also ample PCI-E lanes to accommodate network interface cards (NICs) to provide sufficient bandwidth for external access through fabrics. 

Ultra systems are configurable with support of 20, 10, 4, or 2 hot-swappable NVMe drives that can be optimized for different types of applications The Ultra SuperServers are tuned for power, efficiency, scale, and flexibility. 

Supermicro's solution has passed the rigorous testing to be certified for VMware vSAN ReadyNode, for balance and optimized performance – from the hardware up through the firmware stack to the VMware vSAN software. Native to the VMware vSphere hypervisor, VMware vSAN uses solid-state NVMe drives for high capacity input/output and low latency.

Seamless integration with VMware vSphere and the VMware ecosystem makes the hyperconverged solution optimal for cloud native applications, remote office and branch office implementations, test and development environments, management clusters, security zones, and virtual desktop infrastructure.

Supermicro is also launching the Intel Select Solutions for VMware vSAN. Intel Select Solutions from Supermicro are verified, ready-to-adopt workload-optimized configurations for specific workloads across compute, storage and networks. They help accelerate deployment of complex solutions by reducing the guesswork and in-house evaluation required to achieve excellent performance.

"Supermicro's extensive vSAN hyper-converged solution portfolio delivers to customers the ideal storage platform for business-critical applications," said Charles Liang, president, and CEO of Supermicro. "Supermicro systems and broad line of vSAN ready nodes are highly-configurable to support computational-intensive workloads while offering low total cost of ownership (TCO) for intelligent enterprise deployments."