QTS deploys Ciena’s Waveserver Ai platform for multi-use interconnection; supports software-defined interconnection platform

QTS Realty Trust announced on Wednesday that it will deploy Ciena's Waveserver Ai platform to support growing bandwidth demand and meet wire-speed encryption requirements for highly secure in-flight data protection.

This deployment will also support QTS’ recently announced Switchboard interconnection platform. Switchboard enables self-service ordering and fast, one-to-many provisioning of local, metro, carrier, long-haul, and cloud services via a single port. This innovative platform offers rapid and secure connectivity for QTS’ 1,100 enterprise and government customers and serves nearly all network use cases.

As a provider of data center solutions, QTS leverages its software-defined technology platform (SDP) on which Switchboard resides to deliver secure and compliant colocation and hyperscale data center solutions, robust connectivity, and premium customer service to technology companies, enterprises, and government entities.

Ciena’s Waveserver Ai will provide up to 2.4Tb/s of capacity with high-speed connectivity and scalability. QTS customers will be able to transport workloads to data centers and access bandwidth-hungry content, applications, and services.

Waveserver Ai will also improve the performance of QTS’ network and deliver higher capacity wavelengths while reducing power consumption and increasing efficiency of operations.

This deployment also positions QTS to offer Layer 1 encryption capabilities with Ciena’s FIPS-compliant encryption module, which is offered on the Waveserver Ai platform. These services will enable opportunities for QTS to attract new federal government and other high security-sensitive customers.

“Our customers require quick access to network capacity and flexible interconnection services that are cost-effective and capable of protecting sensitive information,” said Clint Heiden, Chief Revenue Officer, QTS. “Ciena’s Waveserver Ai platform solidifies our mission to serve the current and future needs of our hybrid colocation and hyperscale customers while protecting their critical assets.”

“As QTS continues to advance its connectivity strategy through the Switchboard platform, Waveserver Ai’s ability to meet evolving network use cases will support current and future interconnection requirements,” said Jason Phipps, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Ciena.

Site24x7 introduces CloudSpend cost analytics platform for public cloud environments

Site24x7 announced on Wednesday general availability of Site24x7 CloudSpend, its cost analytics solution for public cloud platforms. The new solution is aimed at bridging the gap between capacity planning and cost optimization for resources running in Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

CloudSpend's business intelligence (BI) insights enable businesses to visualize runaway expenditures and implement effective budget controls, while reducing operational expenditure across multiple accounts.

Site24x7 empowers IT operations and DevOps with AI-powered performance monitoring and cloud spend optimization. Its capabilities help troubleshoot problems with end-user experience, applications, servers, public clouds, and network infrastructure. Site24x7 is a cloud offering from Zoho, which has offices worldwide, including the Netherlands, United States, India, Singapore, Japan, and China.

Site24x7's CloudSpend addresses these cost optimization issues with a holistic view of cloud expenditures across multiple accounts from a single console. CloudSpend also provides IT teams (IT financial planners and cloud service providers) BI insights for addressing cloud cost adjustments that achieve priority-based resource allocation, and thus helps in reducing overall operating expenditure.

Public cloud adoption has witnessed exponential growth in recent years, and according to IDC, spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $210-billion in 2019, an increase of 23.8 percent over 2018. The market is forecast to achieve a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.5 percent with public cloud services spending reaching $370-billion in 2022.

With public cloud being cost effective and easy to set up, businesses tend to leverage them to digitize their services and achieve their business goals faster. This often leads to complexities that arise due to unmonitored, underused or idle cloud resources on various platforms in multiple accounts, resulting in overspend. To eliminate these undesired expenses, organizations need a solution that can help monitor and optimize their cloud costs without impacting their services.

The new addition, along with the existing full stack monitoring insights, reiterate the company's commitment to help customers run more efficiently in the cloud. The company also plans to extend the Site24x7 CloudSpend capabilities to other cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, in the near future.

"With pay-as-you-go pricing models, public cloud platforms are strategic drivers for digital transformation. Since digital transformation is largely a process and not the end goal, businesses not only want to embark on their digital transformation journey, but also want to optimize it to reap greater results," said Srinivasa Raghavan, product manager, Site24x7. "CloudSpend's addition to our AI-driven monitoring capabilities not only streamline and enhance performance of their applications on AWS but maintain an equilibrium when it comes to cloud spending, thus creating a win-win situation for DevOps and IT teams."

For all customers and managed service partners looking to optimize their AWS costs, Site24x7 CloudSpend is available at online, free of cost for AWS bills less than $3,000 per month. Site24x7 CloudSpend is planned to be priced at 0.5% of AWS bill amounts greater than $100,000, and 0.8% of AWS bill amounts between $3,000-$100,000.

New Code42 data loss protection offerings helps speed detection and response to insider threats

Code42 announced on Wednesday its Code42 next-gen data loss protection solution that now includes advanced data exfiltration detection. A policy-free alternative to traditional data loss prevention (DLP), Code42’s enhanced solution offers security teams even more visibility into file movement. The file focus makes it quicker and easier to detect unauthorized or accidental data exfiltration and insider threats.

Designed for scalability, in seconds the solution can search an entire organization for file movement across common data loss vectors, including cloud and non-cloud locations such as employee computers and desktops. It monitors files in folders that are synchronized with cloud services, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and Microsoft OneDrive; file activity on external devices, including hard drives or removable media, such as flash drives; and files that are opened in apps commonly used for uploading, including web browsers, chat clients, FTP clients and Slack.

Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection helped one customer save $9 million in a lawsuit, apart from helping another customer detect 90 gigabytes of sales data leaving its network via an external drive.

According to the “2018 Insider Threat Report” by Cybersecurity Insiders, two-thirds of organizations consider malicious insider attacks or accidental breaches more likely than external attacks. The longer it takes to detect these insider threats, the greater the risk and cost to the company. 

According to The Ponemon Institute’s report, “2018 Cost of Insider Threats: Global Organizations,” the average cost of an insider threat annually is $8.76 million.

Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection enables security teams to more quickly and easily protect their cloud and endpoint data from loss, leak, misuse and theft. Unlike traditional DLP, Code42’s cloud native solution works without requiring the strict prevention policies that can block employee productivity. Instead, the solution clears the way for innovation and collaboration by providing visibility to every version of every file. 

Backed by this file focus, the solution quickly lets security teams see where data lives and moves, when it leaves their organization, and who has access to it. This approach allows them to monitor, detect, investigate and respond to suspicious file activity in near real-time.

“Valuable data is leaving companies every day — proof that traditional DLP is not working. With its hyper focus on policies and blocking, legacy DLP is overwhelming to manage, and encourages shadow IT, making it slower and virtually impossible to effectively detect risk to IP,” said Vijay Ramanathan, Code42’s senior vice president of product management. “Code42 Next-Gen Data Loss Protection offers a simpler policy-free way to secure cloud and non-cloud data. By providing visibility to every version of every file, we are making it quicker and easier to detect and respond to data exfiltration and insider threats.”

“From Google to USB drives, digital transformation is moving unstructured, sensitive data beyond an organization’s servers. And the proprietary data that gives your organization a competitive edge is often the most difficult data to protect,” said David Chiang, IT system engineer at MACOM, the Massachusetts-based analog semiconductor company. “Code42 has given us unified visibility into where our data lives and moves. Their data loss protection solution has become a key component of our security program.”

VMware Cloud portfolio updates extend infrastructure and operations across private cloud, public cloud and edge environments

VMware announced on Tuesday advancements to VMware Cloud that further the company’s vision for delivering the essential, ubiquitous Digital Foundation to support customers’ and partners’ digital transformation. These advancements include updates to VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vCloud Director, and CloudHealth by VMware, and increased access to Cloud Foundation-based services via new VMware Cloud on AWS regions in Canada, Paris, and Singapore, and more VMware Cloud Verified partners globally.

Every organization is on a multi-cloud journey. According to Gartner, “by 2020, 75 percent of organizations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model.” This journey is being supported by two primary cloud strategies: hybrid cloud and native public cloud. While each approach is unique, they are complementary, and most often exist simultaneously within the same customer. Each path is intended to open new opportunities for a business in a way that is differentiating, and to deliver tangible business outcomes.

Looking for the best path forward on this multi-cloud journey, VMware’s research shows that 83 percent of cloud buyers are seeking consistent infrastructure and operations from the datacenter to the cloud.

VMware Cloud Foundation enables hybrid cloud to expand the definition of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) by unifying the essential cloud infrastructure capabilities of compute, storage, networking and integrated cloud management.

Cloud Foundation is a full-stack solution delivering consistent infrastructure and operations to help customers modernize their data centers; rapidly migrate applications and entire data centers to the cloud; scale on demand for disaster recovery, global expansion and seasonal spikes; and deploy next-generation applications in modern data center environments.

VMware also announced VMware Cloud Foundation 3.7, which  is expected to be available on Dell EMC VxRail in VMware’s Q1FY20, offering customers jointly engineered, hybrid cloud infrastructure stack integrated with VMware’s flexible, full stack HCI architecture, ready for line-of-business applications.

Cloud Foundation on VxRail demonstrates the tight integration between Dell EMC and VMware, incorporating unique, jointly-engineered features that simplify and streamline operations, and deliver full stack, end-to-end lifecycle management, through an automated hardware-through-software management experience.

Optimized for performance, scalability, user experience and TCO savings, Cloud Foundation on VxRail can lower capital and operational costs while providing unrivaled resiliency, predictability and ease of deployment. New networking flexibility and integration, as well as deployment options including appliance and integrated rack offerings give customers flexibility when choosing Cloud Foundation on VxRail.

“VMware is helping customers leverage the cloud to build, deploy and deliver the applications that drive their business, and no other vendor spans the cloud industry as broadly or as comprehensively as VMware,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit, VMware. “VMware provides customers the ability to operate in this multi-cloud reality, providing consistent infrastructure and operations to help them match the needs of applications to the best resources available, without compromise.”

“Demonstrating the strength of Dell Technologies, this unique integration between Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation builds on the history of co-engineering to offer our customers an experience unlike any other infrastructure running VMware Cloud Foundation,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC VxRail, “With this combination, we have enabled the fastest, simplest and most seamless way to deploy and operate a hybrid cloud with VMware.”

Additionally, the new Cloud Foundation 3.7 release supports fully automated deployment of VMware Horizon 7 virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). Cloud Foundation accelerates the delivery of Horizon 7 benefits by providing complete infrastructure automation for Horizon 7 environments, including the installation of Horizon 7, App Volumes, User Environment Manager, and Unified Access Gateway. Cloud Foundation couples ready-to-use infrastructure with line-of-business application deployment, enabling customers to deliver infrastructure and applications to business customers at the speed of cloud.

The VMware vCloud Director 9.7 release will allow cloud providers to further differentiate their hybrid cloud offerings and deliver new services through centralized global cloud management, expanded scalability, and an enhanced extensibility framework. The vCloud Director platform will unify private and multi-tenant cloud management across a cloud provider’s global footprint of VMware-based environments, simplifying monitoring and management from on-premises vSphere environments to multi-tenant provider clouds.

The updated extensibility framework will enable cloud providers to offer new, differentiated services on their multi-tenant platform from industry-leading third-party solutions from ecosystem partners such as Cohesity, Dell EMC and Rubrik.

The VMware vCloud Availability 3.0 will unify onboarding, migration and disaster recovery services to and between multi-tenant clouds, helping cloud providers offer new availability services with compelling economics. The native integration with vCloud Director and a modern user interface will provide a simple customer experience for rapid service delivery and management.

Enterprises turn to the cloud for its promise of agility, security and faster time to market, but all too often cost challenges derail these efforts and prevent businesses from capitalizing on the cloud’s full potential for transformation. With more than 4,000 customers, CloudHealth by VMware enables customers to manage, operate and better secure their multi-cloud environments.

With CloudHealth, customers collaborate across lines of business to make intelligent decisions related to cost management, security, and governance while scaling their multi-cloud environments. CloudHealth delivers next-generation cost management capabilities that can increase return on investment in cloud by showing customers where budgets are spent, which applications consume the most resources, and how to right size their environments – even as they rapidly scale.

New features in CloudHealth will expand on the platform’s cost management functionality, and will include enhanced multi-cloud reporting, multidimensional reporting, workspaces reporting, enhanced amortization, convertible Reserved Instance (RI) exchanger automation, container cluster visibility, and cross-family rightsizing for Amazon EC2. Additionally, the CloudHealth platform now integrates with the Wavefront by VMware cloud analytics and monitoring platform.

Through this integration, CloudHealth customers can access Wavefront cloud performance metrics via their CloudHealth platform for rightsizing and performance optimization via a business lens. By using CloudHealth and Wavefront together, CloudHealth takes advantage of Wavefront’s vast real-time, highly granular, multi-cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) infrastructure usage metrics, and provides effective recommendations for cost savings to customers.

SUSE moves to independence, reaffirms commitment to users, partners, open source communities

SUSE announced creation of independent open source company following the completion of SUSE's acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. The newly independent SUSE has expanded its executive team, adding new leadership roles and experience to foster its continued momentum into this next stage of corporate development.

With its ongoing momentum, portfolio expansion and successful execution in the marketplace, as a standalone business SUSE is better positioned to focus on the needs of customers and partners as a provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that enable customer workloads anywhere – on premise, hybrid and multi-cloud – with exceptional service, value and flexibility.

Enrica Angelone has been named to the new post of chief financial officer, and Sander Huyts is SUSE's new chief operations officer. Thomas Di Giacomo, formerly chief technology officer for SUSE, is now president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. All three report to SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann.

SUSE's expanded leadership team led by CEO Brauckmann will build on the rapid growth of the past eight years as the company continues to deliver and innovate based on current and future market requirements. As it has for more than 25 years, SUSE remains committed to an open source development and business model and to actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise as high-quality, reliable and usable solutions.

This open source model refers to the flexibility and freedom of choice provided to customers and partners to create solutions that combine SUSE technologies with other products and technologies in their IT landscape through open standards and at different levels in their architecture, without forcing a locked-in stack. This focus on openness is embedded in SUSE's culture, differentiates it in the marketplace and has been key to its success.

SUSE's transition is timely as containers are enabling new levels of agility and the need for digital transformation built on open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery technologies is growing. SUSE's heritage in open source software, strong brand and array of solutions, including container management, ideally position it to capitalize on this market dynamic, creating tremendous value for customers and partners.

EQT's backing and SUSE's independent status will enable the company's continued expansion as advanced innovation drives growth in SUSE's core business as well as in emerging technologies, both organically and through add-on acquisitions.

"Current IT trends make it clear that open source has become more important in the enterprise than ever before," Brauckmann said. "We believe that makes our status as a truly independent open source company more important than ever. Our genuinely open, open source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them. Our ability to consistently meet these market demands creates a cycle of success, momentum and growth that allows SUSE to continue to deliver the innovation customers need to achieve their digital transformation goals and realize the hybrid and multi-cloud workload management they require to power their own continuous innovation, competitiveness and growth."

"SUSE's return to the role of an independent open source software company comes at a pivotal point in the industry. Open source software is the favored way to build new solutions today and is irreplaceable as the foundation for most public cloud services,” said Al Gillen, group vice president, Software Development and Open Source, IDC. “As one of the industry's largest purely open source software companies, SUSE's independence will benefit customers as the company builds on its heritage of technical excellence, value-driven partnerships and community engagement to deliver timely technology solutions to the market."

Samsung SDS invests in Iguazio to boost cloud services; adopts Iguazio’s Nuclio serverless PaaS for real-time intelligent applications

Iguazio, provider of the high performance platform for serverless and machine learning applications, announced this week that it is partnering with Samsung SDS to accelerate and streamline the delivery of intelligent applications.

Samsung SDS has invested in Iguazio and will incorporate its platform into Samsung’s cloud services portfolio, powering serverless agility and data science operations for cloud native and AI-driven applications.

Iguazio’s platform includes data services and AI tools, empowering end-to-end serverless agility in the enterprise and real-time applications to improve performance, security, collaboration and the scalability of machine learning. Iguazio’s Nuclio is the leading open source serverless framework, enabling the development of modern applications over Kubernetes without having to manage infrastructure.

"Samsung SDS is excited to invest in Iguazio. We look forward to providing our customers with intelligent, serverless applications by implementing Iguazio's technology to our cloud's PaaS," said Dr. Shim Yoon, Executive Vice President, Cloud Business Division Leader of Samsung SDS.

“Iguazio welcomes Samsung SDS as a strategic Investor,” said Asaf Somekh, CEO, Iguazio. “We’re already working with different Samsung SDS groups on financial services and manufacturing deployments and are excited about the value Iguazio has created by powering Samsung’s cloud with serverless and machine learning.”

IDC reports that global enterprise storage systems market revenue grew 7.4 percent during the fourth quarter of last year

Research firm IDC released on Friday through its Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, vendor revenue in the worldwide enterprise storage systems market increased 7.4 percent year over year to $14.5 billion during the fourth quarter of 2018. Total capacity shipments were up 1.7 percent year over year to 92.5 exabytes during the quarter.

Revenue generated by the group of original design manufacturers (ODMs) selling directly to hyperscale data centers declined 1.5 percent year over year in the fourth quarter of 2018 to $2.7 billion. This represents 18.8 percent of total enterprise storage investments during the quarter. 

Sales of server-based storage increased 4.7 percent year over year to just under $4.1 billion in revenue. This represents 28.1 percent of total enterprise storage investments.

The external storage systems market was worth roughly $7.7 billion during the quarter, up 12.5 percent from the fourth quarter of 2017.

Dell emerged as the largest supplier for the quarter, accounting for 20.6 percent of total worldwide enterprise storage systems revenue and growing 14.8 percent year over year.

HPE/New H3C Group was the second largest supplier with an 18.0 percent share of revenue on year-to-year growth of 0.6 percent.

NetApp generated a 5.8 percent share of total revenue, statistically tying for the number three spot during the quarter with IBM, which captured 4.8 percent market share.

Huawei, Lenovo and Hitachi all statistically tied for the fifth position with shares of 4.0 percent, 3.5 percent, and 3.3 percent respectively.

As a single group, storage systems sales by ODMs directly to hyperscale datacenter customers accounted for 18.8 percent of global spending during the quarter, down 1.5 percent against the fourth quarter of 2017.

Dell was the largest external enterprise storage systems supplier during the quarter, accounting for 30.3 percent of worldwide revenue. NetApp and HPE/New H3C Group finished statistically tied for the second position with a 10.9 percent and 10.6 percent share of revenue during the quarter respectively. 

IBM was the fourth largest with 8.9 percent share, while Hitachi and Huawei rounded out the top 5 in a statistical tie with 6.0 percent and 5.7 percent market share.

The total All Flash Array (AFA) market generated over $2.73 billion in revenue during the quarter, up 37.6 percent year over year. The Hybrid Flash Array (HFA) market was worth slightly more than $3.06 billion in revenue, up 13.4 percent from the fourth quarter.

"The fourth quarter results represent a slight shift from trends realized during the first three quarters of 2018, most notably the revenue decline for the ODM group of vendors as cloud providers slow their investment due to significant existing capacity," said Sebastian Lagana, research manager, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies. "That considered, OEM vendors selling dedicated storage arrays are addressing demand from businesses investing in both on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. Ensuring storage systems support both a hybrid cloud model as well as increasingly data thirsty on-premises compute platforms is a high priority for enterprise customers."