SANTALUCÍA digitalizes user experience with Red Hat for greater business efficiency and faster time to innovation

Red Hat announced this week that SANTALUCÍA Group is embracing Red Hat’s agile integration and open hybrid cloud technologies as part of its ongoing strategic plan for digital transformation.

With Red Hat’s unified integration portfolio delivering the core integration, messaging and API management functionality, and Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, serving as a common platform to run containerized applications across its infrastructure, SANTALUCÍA has gained greater flexibility and scalability, with automated operations optimized for developer productivity and innovation as it builds out its hybrid cloud strategy going forward.

SANTALUCÍA can now benefit from an accelerated software development process. One of the first services it has since built and launched is its API Portal for developers, which is helping the business to increase consistency and interoperability between applications, and facilitate the sharing and provision of services between group companies and with third parties. It has also redesigned its digital contracting strategy to enable automation and an improved user experience during the sign up process for customers. 

This is powering its new cross-platform application for home insurance, among others. Being able to push out improvements to the customer journey and launch new services more frequently than before helps the organization to gain deeper and broader relationships with customers.

Through this initiative, the Spanish insurer is aiming to better meet the changing needs and preferences of its customers, reinforce its relevance and core business leadership in the digital age, and open new areas for growth by accelerating the time to market for new customer channels and services.

To support its transformation efforts, SANTALUCÍA adopted an agile integration approach that harnesses open APIs (application programming interfaces), microservices and containers to build, connect and manage new cloud-native applications faster and more easily, as well as more efficiently connect and manage heterogeneous applications, data and devices that have proliferated throughout the organization in recent decades.

"SANTALUCÍA recognised that keeping up with market disruption requires excellence in meeting customer expectations. The challenges of achieving agility and dynamism, as well as reducing release cycles for new products and services, can be addressed with the help of hybrid cloud architectures and modern software processes,” said Julia Bernal, country manager, Spain and Portugal, Red Hat. “Red Hat is proud to support SANTALUCÍA along its digital transformation journey, helping it to be more technologically efficient and to innovate to meet the evolving needs of customers using our agile integration blueprint for enterprise architecture."

"As SANTALUCÍA approaches its 100th year, our focus on customer experience remains steady, while our business continues to transform. The agile integration approach that we are enacting with Red Hat is helping us become a faster, more efficient and more adaptable organization, in terms of IT and digitalization,” said Javier Sanchis Bonilla, director arquitectura, SANTALUCÍA. “Combining open source innovation and flexibility with features designed for security and reliability, Red Hat technology and expertise is enabling us to create new opportunities with our partners and build stronger relationships with our customers."

Zadara enhances SQL Server database migration to the cloud, removes complexity, hidden risks and expenses

Zadara Storage announced a new solution that enables enterprises to migrate SQL Server database apps to the cloud – in a phased manner. 

High availability (HA) is imperative to a well-architected SQL Server environment and modernizing business-critical applications. 

While Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition provides a mechanism for doing so, it is costly for organizations that only need its HA features. But according to Zadara, it doesn’t have to be this way. Zadara’s hybrid cloud storage platform is available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

Zadara’s service offering allows users to meet their high-availability requirements using SQL Standard Edition within the AWS environment – providing them with the ability to maintain HA without the cost of SQL Enterprise Edition. In addition, applications can be migrated to AWS without any code changes.

“Our newest offering is the latest example of Zadara’s ability to deliver real business value,” said Oded Kellner, vice president, product management at Zadara. “We are helping customers navigate the hidden risks and unnecessary expenses that have plagued so many SQL Server migrations to public clouds – with greater reliability, faster performance and increased security capabilities.”

NetApp, ENS-Inc secure California Data Center Modernization Contract to deliver data center modernization, hybrid cloud infrastructure

NetApp announced on Wednesday that Enterprise Networking Solutions (ENS-Inc) has been awarded an exclusive three-year contract by the State of California Department of General Services (DGS) to deliver NetApp’s data center modernization and hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions to the State of California.

ENS-Inc is a State of California IT solutions provider, delivering proven and scalable technology solutions since 1999. With expertise in virtualization, cloud integration, and business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR), ENS-Inc partners with clients to build vital and secure IT infrastructures that empower the mobility and agility today’s business requires. 

ENS-Inc enables clients to securely manage their IT infrastructures from anywhere, at any time, from a variety of mobile devices, while delivering maximum uptime of the crucial IT services businesses and agencies depend on. 

For this contract, ENS-Inc serves as the sole provider of a complete catalog of all NetApp enterprise technology to the State of California, including data center equipment and associated data center hardware (for example, servers, storage, converged and hyperconverged systems, on-campus networking, and fabric).

State and local government agencies are moving to the cloud, but on-premises infrastructure is needed for workloads that cannot be migrated to the public cloud. ENS-Inc can now deliver NetApp’s open and scalable on-premises hybrid cloud infrastructure to the State of California, while also enabling California agencies and departments to use their data fabric to control, integrate, move, and consistently manage their data across their public cloud and on-premises data center environments. This flexibility will allow California to design its data fabric to deliver information where, when, and how it is needed for citizen services.

Check Point brings to market its serverless security technology for cloud workload protection

Check Point announces on Monday a new serverless security technology for cloud workload protection (CWPP) and security posture management (CSPM), delivering continuous serverless security with improved run time protection and application hardening.

Protego, an Israeli startup, provides a serverless security technology that prevents malicious attacks on serverless functions in run time, and prevents vulnerable code from being deployed into production.

Check Point will be integrating serverless security technology into the Infinity architecture, its consolidated security solution to support networks, mobile, endpoint, IoT and cloud environments.

The rapid adoption of serverless computing technologies such as AWS Lambda, is challenging existing cloud and application security paradigms. The move to cloud native applications, bears many inherent vulnerabilities and potential misconfigurations that require extending security solution to protect functions and code.

The Check Point CloudGuard platform provides consistent and comprehensive cloud security for all assets in public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. The solution is now extended with serverless security providing the CISO with full visibility, control and complete security coverage of all serverless estate with a click of a button. 

Protego’s technology integrates out-of-the-box with the broadest set of CI/CD frameworks so DevOps teams ensure that only compliant functions are deployed to production. In addition, customers rave the new technology for its innovative IAM hardening capabilities and minimal performance impact in protecting serverless run time environments.

 “On their journey to cloud transformation, organizations require a new security paradigm to protect against 5th and 6th generation of cyber attacks” said Dr. Dorit Dor, Check Point’s VP Products. “By incorporating serverless security into our market leading CloudGuard portfolio, and leveraging our comprehensive platform for cloud security and compliance, we deliver unprecedented protection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments”

The transaction is expected to close by this year, and the technology will be integrated into the Infinity architecture in the first quarter of next year.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise introduces Kubernetes-based platform for bare-metal and edge to cloud deployments

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced the HPE Container Platform, its enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. 

With the HPE Container Platform, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.

The new platform addresses requirements for large-scale enterprise Kubernetes deployments across a range of use cases, from machine learning and edge analytics to CI/CD pipelines and application modernization. 

IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. Developers have secure on-demand access to their environments so they can develop apps and release code faster, with the portability of containers to build once and deploy anywhere.

The HPE Container Platform is built on proven innovations from HPE’s acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, together with 100 percent open source Kubernetes. This next-generation solution dramatically reduces cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal, while providing the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. Customers benefit from greater efficiency, higher utilization, and improved performance by “collapsing the stack” and eliminating the need for virtualization.

The HPE Container Platform is a turnkey solution that uniquely addresses these challenges, with BlueData software as the control plane for container management, the MapR distributed file system for persistent data with containers, and Kubernetes for container orchestration. 

This approach extends benefits of containers beyond cloud-native microservices-architected applications, providing the ability to containerize non cloud-native monolithic applications with persistent data storage.

The HPE Container Platform modernizes non cloud-native monolithic applications without re-architecting them, elevating the experience to modern cloud standards; provides the ability to build applications once and run them anywhere, bridging the gap between on-premises, public clouds and the edge; improves productivity for developers and delivers new code releases faster, with simplified Kubernetes deployment and multi-cluster management; and ensures enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability at lower cost, with bare-metal containers and data persistence.

This offering complements existing HPE services to assist customers with container strategies, application modernization, and hybrid cloud deployments. HPE Pointnext provides advisory and consulting services built upon experience from over one thousand hybrid cloud engagements, with expertise and best practices from the acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

HPE Container Platform software can be ordered early next year, along with advisory, consulting, deployment and support services from HPE.

NetApp and Google Cloud help customers unlock the power of data with enterprise-class data services and solutions

NetApp and Google Cloud announced general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud, and support for Anthos on NetApp HCI to help organizations focus on innovation across any hybrid environments.

As enterprises seek to take advantage of the agility and efficiency benefits of the cloud, they need to know that their data is secure and in the right place, for the right cost, at scale. 

To achieve these goals, they are building data fabrics that provide maximum flexibility as they move to hybrid multi-cloud environments. With NetApp and Google Cloud, customers can unlock the power of their data with integrated, enterprise-class data solutions that are optimized and validated for Google Cloud.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is a cloud-native, Google Cloud integrated file service with the performance, availability, and security required to efficiently run business-critical applications. Additionally, customers can run production workloads in Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud is also now available in the United Kingdom region.

Also, now globally generally available, NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP for Google Cloud is a data management solution that accelerates the enterprise cloud journey by bringing enhanced data protection, storage efficiencies, and mobility to Google Cloud and hybrid multicloud environments.

NetApp HCI is a scalable, on-premises hybrid cloud infrastructure that transforms private clouds into a deployable region of a multicloud. NetApp HCI is now validated to work with Google Cloud’s Anthos, giving customers the peace of mind of a true enterprise-class platform validated with Anthos to reliably deploy and run their applications.

With NetApp Trident, a fully supported open source project, organizations can orchestrate a complex hybrid cloud environment that ties together Google Cloud, Anthos, and NetApp HCI on the premises. Enterprises can scale on demand and add compute or capacity as needed to meet business requirements, and choose from a range of application platforms, including Anthos, Kubernetes, VMware, and NetApp Kubernetes Service.

HPE Container Platform boosts application development for bare-metal and edge to cloud deployments

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Monday its HPE Container Platform, an enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. With the HPE Container Platform, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.

The HPE Container Platform is built on proven innovations from HPE’s acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, together with 100 percent open source Kubernetes. This next-generation solution dramatically reduces cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal – while providing the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. 

Customers benefit from greater efficiency, higher utilization, and improved performance by “collapsing the stack” and eliminating the need for virtualization.

The platform addresses the requirements for large-scale enterprise Kubernetes deployments across a wide range of use cases, from machine learning and edge analytics to CI/CD pipelines and application modernization. 

IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. Developers have secure on-demand access to their environments so they can develop apps and release code faster, with the portability of containers to build once and deploy anywhere.

The HPE Container Platform modernizes non cloud-native monolithic applications without re-architecting them, elevating the experience to modern cloud standards; provides the ability to build applications once and run them anywhere, bridging the gap between on-premises, public clouds and the edge; and improves productivity for developers and delivers new code releases faster, with simplified Kubernetes deployment and multi-cluster management.

It also ensures enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability at lower cost, with bare-metal containers and data persistence. 

This new solution complements existing HPE services to assist customers with container strategies, application modernization, and hybrid cloud deployments. HPE Pointnext provides advisory and consulting services built upon experience from over one thousand hybrid cloud engagements, with expertise and best practices from the acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

HPE Container Platform software will be orderable in early next year along with advisory, consulting, deployment, and support services from HPE.

New Striim release 3.9.7 works on Google Spanner, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL, MariaDB environments

Striim announced on Wednesday general availability of Striim version 3.9.7 that introduces a robust solution for bi-directional data flows for phased database migrations to the cloud. Building on version 3.9.6, Striim also added new streaming data ingestion and delivery capabilities, providing additional cloud endpoints for real-time data movement from on-premises and hybrid cloud sources.

Striim 3.9.7 adds real-time bi-directional data flows for phased, live cloud migrations, as well as maintaining hybrid cloud architectures in support of data modernization initiatives. 

Not only is Striim able to continuously move data from legacy systems to cloud data stores in real time, but now, this new bi-directional replication – with advanced features for flow identification, loop detection, and smart filtering – allow companies to orchestrate a phased migration to the cloud at their desired pace, significantly minimizing downtime and risks. Striim version 3.9.7 offers bi-directional replication for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB databases.

In addition to bi-directional replication, Striim continues to bolster its cloud adoption solutions, including support for Azure Synapse Analytics, support for the Cassandra API for real-time data delivery to Azure, Cosmos DB to enable more options for connecting Cosmos DB with other services, and certification for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. 

It also provides the ability to capture low-latency data from Google Cloud Spanner incrementally, enhanced security configurations for Azure Event Hubs Writer and Amazon S3 Writer, enhancement of Google Cloud Pub/Sub Writer’s throttling capabilities to support extreme data volumes, and the ability to read change data from, and write to MariaDB Galera cluster environments in real time.

“We have seen a significant uptick in hybrid cloud projects recently, especially in the retail industry. Responding to requests from marquee customers who use Striim to enable their hybrid cloud infrastructure, our engineering team has delivered a robust bi-directional data replication offering,” said Alok Pareek, co-founder and EVP of product at Striim. “These enterprise customers finally have a next generation zero-downtime, zero-data-loss solution for online phased database migrations, allowing them to seamlessly run their new cloud environments in parallel with the legacy systems for a gradual transition for their end users.”