LOS ALTOS, Calif., April 19, 2018 /@PRNewswire/ -- @Portworx, the best cloud native storage solution for containers, today announced a reference architecture with @Intel® that illustrates how #datacenter and #cloud architects can build enterprise scale #container and #microservices infrastructure using Portworx and Intel technology to achieve unprecedented data performance, high availability and resiliency. As Enterprises adopt containers & microservices as part of their DevOps-led business transformation, they come to a point where deployments stall without a solution for persistent storage since they are unable to containerize their most important, mission critical applications like databases, big data applications, other stateful services. The rapid growth of Portworx, who now counts 14 customers in the Fortune Global 1000 and U.S federal agencies, is fueled by this pent-up demand for containerized stateful services. Now, by leveraging the high-performance Intel Xeon® processor E5-2600 family, large capacity Intel Solid State Drives (Intel SSD), and high-speed Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapters, and Portworx, customers can easily operate highly reliable, elastic data services infrastructure. Portworx PX-Enterprise is a cloud native storage solution purpose-built for enterprise DevOps. PX-Enterprise automates the deployment and operations of data services at scale. With PX-Enterprise, an operator can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler including Kubernetes and Mesosphere DC/OS. PX-Enterprise offers a single data management layer for all stateful services, no matter where they run. "PX-Enterprise eliminates all the data layer pain points with stateful containerized applications enabling managed service providers and enterprises to deploy and scale cloud-native applications rapidly," said Murli Thirumale, CEO, Portworx. "Intel's high-performance architecture combined with Portworx cloud native storage enables applications to run at close to bare-metal performance levels. MSP and Enterprise cloud-native container deployments are expanding even faster with Portworx than I would have predicted a year ago." Using this breakthrough reference architecture can help reduce an enterprise data center's total cost of ownership, while increasing flexibility and scalability with elastic cloud-scale provisioning and data services infrastructure for containerized workloads. This unique Portworx and Intel reference architecture was performance evaluated on representative cloud and on-premises configurations. The test specifications and results can be found on our associated technical blog post. The following benchmarks were completed: Storage benchmarks to demonstrate the raw system performance of PX-Enterprise devices. Application performance suites to demonstrate performance of real-world applications running on a PX-Enterprise storage platform.
Saturday, April 21, 2018
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Mavenir Teams with Dell EMC to Deliver Expanded Cloud-Native NFV Solutions
RICHARDSON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--@Mavenir, a leader in mobile network transformation, today announced its collaboration with @DellEMC OEM Solutions to deliver a broad range of solutions for service providers and enterprises covering #5GCloudRAN, @PacketCore, #IoT, #VoLTE, #VoWiFi and RCS on Mavenir’s cloud-native #OpenStack #NFV and #container @CloudRange™ platform. “We are excited to expand our work together, tapping into our complementary strengths to optimize and enable cloud-native NFV solutions at scale.” Tweet this Communications service providers are under intense pressure to simultaneously drive new revenue streams and aggressively reduce costs as OTTs gain market share in voice and messaging services. This expanded collaboration directly addresses these challenges, bringing together Mavenir’s extensive software stack for mobile network providers and Dell EMC solutions for infrastructure, cloud and IOT to create new offerings and best practices that enable the cost effective and rapid evolution of service provider and enterprise networks. Mavenir and Dell EMC OEM will pursue advanced engineering engagements in Cloud RAN, IOT and Enterprise Private LTE Solutions, including CBRS initiatives. “The service provider market continues to change and evolve at a rapid pace,” said Ron Pugh, vice president and general manager for the Americas, Dell EMC OEM Solutions. “We are excited about expanding our existing OEM Solutions collaboration to address real-world challenges and opportunities of NFV, 5G, Enterprise LTE and IOT.” This expanded collaboration builds on Mavenir’s extensive joint work to date, focused on the delivery of high-scale, expansive NFV solutions on Dell EMC’s networking, compute and storage platforms and Intel ® Skylake technology. Together, Mavenir and Dell EMC OEM have already deployed and certified the full Mavenir application stack for VoLTE/VoWifi/RCS applications, virtualized IMS core, virtualized EPC and are expanding that to include cloud RAN and IOT applications. Mavenir has also certified VMWare NFV 2.0 and have developed carrier-grade integrated solutions and best practices to ensure the rapid introduction of new applications into service provider networks. “Mavenir and Dell EMC OEM have already shown the impact our partnership can have: together, we have deployed the largest NFV open stack mobile service provider network with over 100M subscribers, covering the complete Mavenir application stack,” said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO, Mavenir. “We are excited to expand our work together, tapping into our complementary strengths to optimize and enable cloud-native NFV solutions at scale.”
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
Dell EMC's Chad Sakac Takes New Role At Pivotal Software To Align Dell's Cloud, Software, Hardware
@ChadSakac, one of @DellEMC 's and the storage industry's best-known technologists, has moved on to a new position in the @DellTechnologies family of companies to focus on driving improved integration of the @Pivotal #Container Service and Pivotal Cloud Foundation with the rest of Dell. Sakac, whose original position as president of Dell EMC's Converged Platforms and Solutions Division ended in January when the company split that business between its server and storage teams, on Wednesday wrote in a blog post that the next chapter of his life will be tied to Pivotal. "The job is simple – helping make our aligned Dell Technologies developer platform come together, and make our answer on the 'how' (material = more important) of 'digital transformation' (buzzword = less important) reach more customers," Sakac wrote. [Related: Chad Sakac On Dell EMC's Push To Turn Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Into A Utility] Neither Sakac nor Pivotal Software responded to requests for comment. Sakac started at EMC in late 2004 when his previous company, Allocity, was acquired by EMC. He was one of the leaders arranging the joint engineering and alliance with VMware after it was acquired by EMC. He was president of EMC's global systems engineering for four years before EMC was acquired by Dell, after which he became president of converged platforms and solutions for the combined company. In his blog post, Sakac wrote that while he eventually hopes to be the CEO of his own company, for now he prefers working with a smaller team. And that opportunity came after some downtime during which he started to learn the Go language and working with Kubernetes. Pivotal Container Service is also known by the acronym PKS, where the "K" stands for Kubernetes. PKS was introduced in August by VMware and Pivotal Software in a partnership with Google Cloud. "I would love to be a CEO one day purely from the 'impact' and 'accountability' part of the gig – but frankly titles really are irrelevant except their correlation (not causation!) with what I call 'impact radius,'" he wrote. "I’ve had big teams, small teams - and it doesn’t correlate with what matters to me. What matters to me beyond my family (which always comes first) is: impact, people, learning and joy." Sakac said that Dell Technologies has an emerging aligned technology stack that needs to accelerating. He broke that stack into three parts. The first is the developer abstraction layer that uses Pivotal Cloud Foundry including application platforms in Pivotal Application Service, the PKS containers, functions from Pivotal Function Service, and data abstractions. That layer runs on the software infrastructure abstraction layer which can be on any cloud but which is tightly integrated with VMware for software-defined technologies and cloud-native workloads. The software layer runs on an hardware layer, Sakac said. Most of all, he said, it is tightly integrated and available in turnkey engineered systems from Dell EMC in the form of VxRail and VxRack SDDC." Sakac said he will start his new role in April after some time off, after which he will serve as a bridge between different parts of Dell Technologies. "I will make sure that Pivotal, VMware, and Dell EMC work hand in hand from how we work in the market, and how we bend the roadmaps to be aligned – and deliver on the dream for hundreds and then thousands, and then tens of thousands of customers and partners," he wrote. Continuing as part of Dell Technologies was not a certainty, Sakac wrote. "I explored internal and external options – and was very lucky to have incredible support inside and outside the Dell Technology family," he wrote
Friday, February 9, 2018
Sylabs launches Singularity Pro, a container platform for high-performance computing
@Sylabs, the commercial company behind the open source #Singularity #container engine, announced its first commercial product today, #SingularityPro. Sylabs was launched in 2015 to create a container platform specifically designed for scientific and high performance computing use cases, two areas that founder and CEO @Gregory Kurtzer, says were left behind in the containerization movement over the last several years. (For an explanation of containers, see this article.) @Docker emerged as the container of engine of choice for developers, but Kurtzer says the container solutions developed early on focused on #microservices. He says there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it left out some types of computing that relied on processing jobs instead of services, specifically high performance computing. Kurtzer, who didn’t exactly just fall off the open source turnip truck, had more than 20 years of experience as a high performance computing architect working at the US Department of Energy Lab, where he founded CentOS, an open source enterprise Linux project and Warewulf, which he says has become the most utilized stateless HPC cluster provisioner. He decided to shift his attention to containers when founded Sylabs and launched the first open source version of Singularity in April, 2016. Even then, he had a vision of creating a commercial version of the product. He saw Singularity as a Docker for HPC environments, and would run his company in a similar fashion to Docker, leading with the open source project, then building a commercial business on top of it — just as Docker had done. Kurtzer now wants to bring Singularity to the enterprise with a focus not just on the HPC commercial market, but other high performance computing workloads such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and advanced analytics. “These applications carry data-intensive workloads that demand HPC-like resources, and as more companies leverage data to support their businesses, the need to properly containerize and support those workflows has grown substantially,” Kurtzer wrote in a blog post announcing the enterprise product. Even though Singularity is designed to handle different kinds of workloads, it still works with container orchestration tools, specifically Kubernetes and Mesos, and it is also compatible with Microsoft’s Azure Batch tool and other cloud tools. Kurtzer indicated Sylabs currently has 12 employees, and is operating on an undisclosed amount of seed money. It was funded by RStor, a startup itself currently operating in stealth mode.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/08/sylabs-launches-singularity-pro-a-container-platform-for-high-performance-computing/?ncid=mobilenavtrend
Sunday, January 21, 2018
HPE and Portworx Tap Kubernetes for Stateful Container Storage Config
@Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE) and @Portworx released a reference configuration that uses @Kubernetes to offer enterprises a quick way to deploy and manage #stateful #container workloads. The reference configuration, which refreshingly lacks a catchy name or acronym, combines HPE’s #Synergy composable system as the basis for running Portworx’s #PXEnterprise storage platform using Kubernetes as the container orchestrator and scheduler.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Serverless Framework for Real-Time Apps Emerges
Serverless computing can advance real-time applications by providing developers with access to a framework employing an event-driven architecture. Serverless computing has a lot of potential to advance real-time applications by providing developers with access to a framework employing an event-driven architecture that makes IT infrastructure resources seamlessly available on demand. The trouble is that the existing serverless computing frameworks are too slow to support real-time applications. At the Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2017 conference this week iguazio moved to address that issue by making available a high-speed serverless computing framework as an open source project that it developed in support of the company’s real-time analytics database See also: Why putting #IoT into @Docker containers will unlock it Dubbed nuclio and written in the #Go programming language, iguazio CTO @Yaron Haviv says this #serverlesscomputing framework is unique because it allows developers to employ function within the context of a Docker container running on a @Kubernetes cluster or a software development kit ( #SDK ) that iguazio developed. That approach differs considerably from a proprietary serverless framework such as the @Lambda service developed by @Amazon Web Services ( #AWS), which Haviv also notes requires organizations to also consume a raft of complimentary AWS compute and storage services to work. Supported programing language include supports Golang and Python, with support for Java and Node.js coming soon. Haviv says the high-speed function-as-a-service (FaaS) layer of software iguazio developed for nuclio makes it possible for real-time applications to invoke IT infrastructure in parallel on a truly elastic basis. “Nuclio uses Flash directly,” says Haviv. “In an on-premises environment, it can fit in a 2u box.” In addition, Haviv says nuclio includes tools to enable simple debugging, regression testing and even a multi-versioned continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline to drive DevOps processes. Function images can also be stored in a shared repository.
https://www.rtinsights.com/serverless-framework-for-real-time-apps-emerges/
Thursday, December 28, 2017
iXsystems: 'weird' but profitable NAS vendor
Here’s something you rarely hear from high tech companies today: “We’re a hardware company in our heart and soul.” That is how executive vice president Brett Davis introduced iXsystems during a press tour in early December at the NAS vendor’s San Jose, California headquarters. The company sells open-source based TrueNAS enterprise hardware and FreeNAS desktop systems.
Self-identifying as a hardware company in this software-defined world is only one reason why iXsystems seems out of place in Silicon Valley. The vendor also bootstrapped its financing, turning a profit without accepting outside investment.
“We’re private, profitable and self-funded,” Davis said. “Our heritage goes back to the ‘90s. We’ve just been here. We say we’re unique, but you can say we’re weird.”
But it’s the hardware tag that provides most of the weirdness these days. The iXsystems headquarters includes a manufacturing facility in the back, where Davis said the 130-person company can fulfill 3,000 orders in a day.
The vendor claims more than 4,000 customers, including Sony, NBC, Duke University and NASA.
But the iXsystems strategy of bundling open-source storage software on commodity hardware isn’t that unusual. Plenty of others do that, and label it software-defined storage. But only iXsytems boasts it’s a hardware company even if its value comes from open-source projects.
The company’s roots date to Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), which started in 1991. iXsystems founders founders Mike Lauth and Matt Olander acquired the hardware business from BSDi in 2002. Lauth has been the CEO and Olander the CTO since then. From the start, iXsystems was heavily involved in the FreeBSD project and is the project leader for FreeNAS Storage and TrueOS Desktop open-source operating systems.
Davis said 70% of @iXsystems appliances are custom configurations. The vendor uses @Intel, @AMD and #ARM chips inside. The systems support @VMware, @Microsoft #HyperV, #Citrix, @KVM and @OpenStack #virtualization software, #Hadoop, @Docker and #MySQL data and container platforms, and @FreeNAS, @FreeBSD, @CentOS, @RedHat @Linux and @Ubuntu #opensource software.
“We’ve been doing open source since way before it was cool,” Davis said. “We give away the number one software-defined storage (FreeNAS), but software and hardware are inseparable.”
iXsystems re-sold storage systems from Dot Hill, Infortrend and others in the late 2000s, but had to rely on those vendors for support. Now iXsystems provides end-to-end support for its storage. The company acquired the FreeNAS project in late 2009, and then spent two years re-writing the operating system before making it commercially available. iXsystems ported the OpenZFS open-source enterprise file system to FreeNAS. That gave FreeNAS file, block and object support, triple parity RAID, support for flash and unlimited instant snapshots.
@FreeNAS is file-only storage while @TrueNAS is unified storage with #FibreChannel networking support. TrueNAS competes with the likes of @DellEMC #VNXe and #Unity, @NetApp #FAS, @Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s #MSA2040 and @Nimble arrays, and @Western Digital’s @Tegile platform.
A more souped-up @iXsystems platform is planned for March with #NVMe support, but the vendor is staying quietly publicly about that for now.
Davis said iXsystems is staying out of hyper-convergence, even though it has all the pieces – including FreeBSD’s open-source bhyve hypervisor.
“We can run virtual machines and containers in FreeNAS,” he said. “We have the capabilities to do it, and we have our own hypervisor. But it’s a competitive space, and we have other plans.”
http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/blog/Storage-Soup/iXsystems-weird-but-profitable-NAS-vendor
Red Hat takes different path in app design as enterprise scales out
The year-long embrace of the @Kubernetes container orchestration management system across the enterprise culminated in @Amazon Web Services Inc.’s announcement last month of its @Elastic #Container Service for the #opensource storage platform. The announcement was not a major surprise, given the news in August that AWS would be joining the #CloudNativeComputingFoundation, but it was well received by developers at the recent AWS re:Invent conference in Austin, Texas, nonetheless. One major reason for the positive response is that Kubernetes has increasingly become a significant element in the design and deployment of applications. For open-source companies like Red Hat Inc., this will be a key focus as the container revolution marches boldly into 2018. “Kubernetes has been the single biggest driving force to shift all enterprise architecture from scale up to scale out. That has created a whole number of ripple effects in how applications are designed within the enterprise,” said Steve Watt (pictured), chief architect of emerging technologies at Red Hat.
Saturday, December 23, 2017
Making container technology work for persistent microservices
In the technology realm, #containers are an approach to running a #compute environment, a bit like #virtualmachines (VM). Users typically prefer containers because they use resources more efficiently, start and stop much faster, and are less expensive to maintain. @IBM Research co-developed @Ubiquity with the #IBMCloudStorageSolutions team with the objective of providing a container-persistence service and a code base to develop enterprise and provider-grade storage plugins for different #blockstorage or #filestorage systems quickly and inexpensively for the most common container orchestrators.  Companies have been using containers primarily to run #microservices and applications that do not directly store data. Despite the inherent benefits, containers have one drawback: Unlike a VM they cannot attach or mount persistent, enterprise storage by themselves in production environments. This problem is exacerbated by container orchestrators, such as Kubernetes, that can create and "kill" containers at a very fast rate in large data centers to dynamically manage compute workloads, e.g., for machine learning or microservices. Container orchestrators have enjoyed rapid adoption in enterprises, both in-house and in the cloud. They help realize the cost and elasticity benefits of container workloads at large scale. Ubiquity is an open-source framework for enabling containers to provide persistent microservices efficiently and at scale for different container orchestrators. Ubiquity helps to move persistent microservices to containers and thereby realize the same cost and elasticity benefits that other microservices already enjoy. It saves operating costs for these services and makes them respond better to market demand. It is ideal because it provides properties that an enterprise needs such as security, availability management, and the integration with storage management in a framework. This makes Ubiquity quite secure and stable for our enterprise customers, but also gives the open-source community the opportunity to develop enterprise-grade container support for another storage product such as an open-source file system without much effort. Machine learning systems are an example of an application that can benefit from this type of system. While machine learning frameworks, such as Tensorflow, have become faster using GPUs to process data—and are often deployed in containers—the full processor speed often cannot be utilized because data has to be retrieved from a data service, which can result in processing delays. Mounting storage with training data directly to containers can help with parallel machine learning processes, avoiding idle time of expensive GPUs. Recently, IBM announced a new product for container orchestrators, that facilitates access to persistent storage, including all IBM block storage products, from container orchestrators such as Kubernetes. It allows block storage to be created and attached dynamically to containers wherever they are placed in a container cluster, combining the advantages of high-end storage products regarding performance and manageability with the dynamics of container orchestrators. The open-source Ubiquity framework can be downloaded and used directly from Github (GitHub.com/IBM/ubiquity). The IBM Research – Almaden team, including Mohamed Mohamed, Amit Warke, and Robert Engel, encourage extensions to other storage systems and orchestrator frameworks as well as any feedback through Github.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-12-technology-persistent-microservices.html
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Researchers Advance User-Level Container Solution for HPC
Most scientific computing facilities, such us #HPC or #gridinfrastructures, are shared among different research disciplines, and thus the system software environment needs to be generic enough to accommodate different user and applications profiles; they are multi-user environments. Because of managerial and technical constraints, such infrastructures cannot afford offering every research project a tailored environment in their machines. Therefore the interest of exploring the applicability of containers technology on such systems is rather evident from the end-user point of view. Researchers need then to customize their applications software to fit the computing center environment at the level of system software and batch system. #Containers provide a way to pack and deploy software including all the dependencies in a way that can be executed in a seamless way, independently of the underlying #Linux Operating System and environment. The main benefit of integrating the execution of containers in #HPC systems would then be to provide a way to execute applications homogeneously across different resource centers. The flagship container software, @Docker, cannot be used in a satisfactory way on HPC systems, grids and in general multi-user oriented infrastructures. Deploying Docker on such facilities presents a number of problems related to the fact that within the container, processes are executed with the root id. This raises security concerns among system managers, as the Docker root might be able to gain access to root privileges in the host machine. Also, when executed as root, the processes escape from the usual managerial limits on resource consumption or accounting, imposed on regular users at shared facilities. User-level tools The user-level tool udocker provides a layer for users to execute Docker containers, that by definition, does not require the intervention of the system administrators. Udocker combines the pulling, extraction and execution of Docker containers without requiring privileges. The Docker image is extracted on a user-space filesystem area, and from there on, it is executed in an chroot-like environment. udocker provides a command line interface that mimics Docker, providing a subset of its commands to be able to handle Docker images at the level of pulling, extracting and execute containers “á la Docker”. Processes are run without privileges under the regular user id, under the same process tree, thus facilitating the enforcement of the managerial limits imposed to regular users in HPC or grid resource centers. udocker provides several ways, depending on the application and host environment, to execute containerized applications. It is also possible to access specialized hardware like Infiniband for MPI jobs, or GPGPUs, making it adequate to execute containers in batch systems and HPC infrastructures. udocker enables the execution of Docker containers with different engines based on intercepting system calls. Depending on the application requirements the user may choose to run in one execution mode or another. For instance CPU-intensive applications may use udocker in the ptrace execution mode, to intercept and modify pathnames; if the application is I/O intensive the interception of system calls via library pre-loading using the Fakechroot execution mode is a more adequate way to run the container. All the tools and libraries required by udocker and its execution modes are provided with udocker itself. The udocker execution mode RunC employs the technology of user namespaces to run the containers in rootless mode. This feature can be used with modern Linux distributions with kernels from 3.9 on. However most HPC systems are conservative environments and it will take some time until they will be able to support this execution mode. Regarding impact in performance, in the figure presented below we have plotted the weak scaling performance of openQCD, a comprehensive software package to run Lattice QCD simulations (a CPU-intensive application) from 8 to 256 cores. As we see, the performance of the containerized version of openQCD is slightly higher than the one on the host itself. This is especially so when the execution takes place within a single node (the test machine has 24-core nodes). This behavior has been reported consistently by container users across different hardware and system software settings, and it is related to the better libraries available in the more advanced versions of the operating systems inside the container. Clearly this feature opens the door to container exploitation in HPC mainframes since there the software system is by necessity very conservative.  Figure Caption: Weak Scaling performance of openQCD with a local lattice of Volume=32^4. The tests have been performed on the Finisterrae-II HPC system at CESGA (Spain). Since its first release in June 2016 udocker expanded quickly in the open source community. It is being used in large international collaborations like the case of MasterCode, a leading particle physics phenomenology collaboration, which uses udocker to handle the library complexity of the set of codes included in the MasterCode. It has also been adopted by a number of software projects to complement Docker. Among them openmole, bioconda, Common Workflow Language or SCAR. System Administration level Beyond the user level, several solutions have been developed in recent times to support system administrators in deploying customized containers for their users. These solutions rely on the installation of system software by the system administrator, which also is in charge of preparing the containers that the users are authorized to run on the system. The most popular of these tools is Singularity. Singularity can be downloaded and installed from source or binaries, and must be installed by root for the software to have all the functionalities. Singularity binaries are therefore installed with SUID and need be deployed in a filesystem that allows SUID. Given the security concerns on network filesystems regarding SUID, Singularity is normally installed in a directory locally accessible to the users (i.e., not network-mounted). Singularity offers its own containers registry, the Singularity Hub, and its own specification to create containers, the Singularity Recipe (i.e., the Singularity equivalent of the Dockerfile specification). The default container format is squashfs, which is a compressed read-only Linux file system, where the images need to be created by root. It also supports a sandbox format, in which the container is deployed inside a standard Unix directory, much like udocker. In particular, executing udocker in Singularity execution mode will cause the container to be executed via Singularity if installed in the system. In order to do this udocker exploits the sandbox mode. The container building environment of Singularity belongs to root. Containers may be built either from a Singularity recipe, from a previous container coming from the Singularity Hub, or importing a container from the Docker repository. Notice that the Singularity format for containers is not compatible with Docker; therefore, in the latter case the container needs to be converted to the Singularity format. Once the container exists, it can be executed by a regular user in a way analogous to Docker. These containers can also be checked at the binary level, at the level of sensitive content of the filesystem for example, or even for particular features defined by the system administrator. The comparison of the most popular tools, udocker and Singularity, shows that they have a completely different scope, and the selection of one solution or another depends on the priorities at the user level and the computing center management policies. Singularity is a system administration level tool, to be installed at this level, giving the managers of the infrastructure full control of which containers are run into the system or not. Udocker however is a user tool that acts as a layer over different execution methods, enabling regular users to run containers in their own user space, much in the philosophy of the jailed systems.
https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/12/18/researchers-advance-user-level-container-solution-hpc/
Thursday, December 14, 2017
VMware's Big Vision: Deliver Any Application, On Any Device On Any Cloud
Maintaining a tradition of innovation, @VMware has extended its technology from the #datacenter into #publicclouds, #hyperconvergedinfrastructure, and #edgedevices, @MuneybMinhazuddin, VMware's vice president of solutions product marketing, told attendees of The NexGen 2017 Conference & Technology Expo. "Our vision is to deliver any application on any device on any cloud," Minhazuddin said Wednesday at the conference in Los Angeles. VMware has been disrupting technology since it released the hypervisor that first virtualized compute, then expanded that product into a broad private cloud solution. But the current portfolio stretches across a broad range of environments, with security embedded throughout, he said. "For VMware, innovation has been the core of how we've gone to market. We've disrupted the market in everything we do," Minhazuddin told NexGen attendees. The company's public cloud strategy goes beyond partners currently offering VMware environments—most notably Amazon Web Services and IBM. "Our cloud strategy has gone from building my own cloud to really consistent infrastructure across as many clouds as possible and consistent operations across all the clouds out there," he said. The inclusive, multi-cloud approach is driven by the monumental change that's taking place across all verticals in what businesses expect from their technology. "Tech used to be a support system for the business. Now, across all industries, tech is actually becoming a business," Minhazuddin said, adding companies not leveraging technology to run their businesses are being left behind. That imperative for digital transformation is focusing attention at the top of the stack. "What we see is it's all about the app. Your customer experience comes down to those applications," Minhazuddin said. Enterprises want more cloud-native applications, developed fast with DevOps-oriented methodologies. "The barrier to entry is as simple as, I have an idea, I spin up an app, I host it in the cloud," Minhazuddin said. VMware's comprehensive strategy starts with the company's bread and butter—private cloud. Newly developed products make private clouds easier to deploy, manage and secure, he said. With VMware Cloud Foundation, the company bundled all the elements of hybrid cloud, including NSX virtualized networking and vSAN storage, and added lifecycle automation to tackle mundane infrastructure maintenance. That makes the on-premises environment start looking like a cloud, with the "data center running on auto-pilot," freeing IT teams to focus on delivering applications for the business. VMware also extended vSAN into Dell-EMC hyper-converged appliances VxRack and VxRail—a common request from CIOs looking to leverage hyper-converged infrastructure. The platform then "landed into AWS," Minhazuddin said. While the deal struck with Amazon to offer VMware environments in the public cloud was game-changing as far as facilitating hybrid environments, it was only a part of VMware's grand vision. "What we realized is there's not going to be a single destination," he said. The strategy was to provide consistent infrastructure in the #datacenter and to public cloud partners like @AWS, @IBM, @Microsoft #Azure for Desktop-as-a-Service, @Google Cloud Platform for a managed @Kubernetes #container service, and thousands of MSPs running @VMware environments. But where the company didn't have a partnership that could yield consistent infrastructure, it looked to still enable consistent operations, he said. To that end, VMware Cloud Services delivers a host of management capabilities across private and all public clouds embedded into offerings like NSX, the Wavefront monitoring and analytics platform, the new AppDefense security platform, Workspace One user management, AirWatch device management, and more. The broad scope of its products helps customers transform their approach to cybersecurity, Minhazuddin said, an area where scale really starts to cause uncertainty for customers. "We're here to transform and lead the industry in secure infrastructure," he told NexGen attendees. VMware built "cyber hygiene" security principles directly into its infrastructure to deliver an integrated ecosystem that always implements the "fundamental things you do to keep a state of good." The five pillars of that approach are least privilege, segmenting networks and data, end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and patching. All the high-profile attacks in 2017 resulted from failures in at least one of those fronts, he said. Sourena Amini, a principal engineer at Sage Software who attended the NexGen session, told CRN VMware is wisely looking to solve one of the most significant problems in cloud computing—the difficulty in moving workloads between providers. "He was talking about how we can abstract the unit of business with unit of computing, storage and networking," Amini said. "The holy grail is to have common standards to go to any vendor. These guys are trying to make that happen at a smaller scale within their own ecosystem." Ubiquitous standards based on APIs are still years off, Amini said, but VMware is achieving something resembling that goal on a smaller scale. And security is an essential component of that vision. "You have to apply [security] to all, not just one vendor," he said.
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Latest Version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Joins Infrastructure and Services Across Hybrid Cloud Environments
RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- #RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: #RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today launched @RedHat #OpenShift #Container Platform 3.7, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade #Kubernetes container application platform. As application complexity and cloud incompatibility loom, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps IT organizations to build and manage applications that use services from the datacenter to the public cloud. The newest iteration of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform includes native integrations with @Amazon Web Services ( #AWS ) Service Brokers that enable developers to bind services across AWS and on-premise resources to create modern applications while providing a consistent, open standards-based foundation to drive business evolution. #RedHat @OpenShift #Container Platform 3.7 joins #infrastructure & services across #hybridcloud environments Tweet this Cloud-native enterprise applications can consume services from multiple locations, including from the data center and multiple public clouds. Also, according to 451 Research, more than 60 percent of enterprises implementing cloud strategies are using two (or more) different cloud environments -- on-premises private clouds, hosted private cloud, and multiple public clouds. Increasingly, modern applications built for digital transformation rely on a mesh of loosely-coupled component and microservices, making consistency across cloud providers a significant challenge, but one that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to address. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications consistently across hybrid cloud infrastructures. This helps businesses achieve greater value by delivering modern and traditional applications with shorter development cycles and increased efficiencies. The platform is built on open source innovation and industry standards, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kubernetes, and is trusted by many companies around the world. Bringing hybrid cloud applications to life With modern applications reliant upon disparate services and components from on-premise and cloud-based resources, being able to effectively stitch these pieces together in a consistent manner can be critical to delivering business innovation. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 helps to answer this need with the OpenShift Service Catalog, a fully-supported feature that enables IT organizations to connect any application running on the OpenShift platform to a wide variety of services, regardless of where that service runs. The OpenShift Service Catalog helps users search for, provision, and bind application services to OpenShift applications while providing a more secure and consistent way for administrators to provide new services to end users. This helps to free development teams from having to deeply understand service creation or consumption, and places more emphasis on building applications to deliver business value rather than sourcing services. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 will ship with OpenShift Template Broker, which turns any OpenShift Template into a discoverable service for application developers using OpenShift. OpenShift Templates are lists of OpenShift objects that can be implemented within specific parameters, making it easier for IT organizations to deploy reusable, composite applications comprised of microservices. Also included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 is OpenShift Ansible Broker for provisioning and managing services through the OpenShift Service Catalog by using Ansible to define OpenShift Services. OpenShift Ansible Broker enables users to provision services both on and off the OpenShift platform, helping to simplify and automate complex workflows involving varied services and applications across on-premise and cloud-based resources. Production support for Service Catalog in OpenShift Container Platform builds upon Red Hat’s strong hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes: Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, a collection of supported runtimes to lower the entry barrier for building and deploying cloud-native applications (now in beta). Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, an enterprise-grade software-defined storage solution built from Red Hat Gluster Storage that serves storage out of containers, both on-premises and in the cloud. AWS Service integration First announced at Red Hat Summit 2017, Red Hat now makes popular AWS services accessible directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This integration enables AWS users to configure and deploy these services from OpenShift, and provides a single path of enterprise-grade support for customer needs. At launch, accessible AWS services through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 include: Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) Amazon Route 53 Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Amazon ElastiCache Amazon Redshift Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Additional features Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 also adds additional features and capabilities to help improve user experience and enhance platform security. These features include: Network Policy is now out of Technology Preview and generally supported, enabling project administrators to apply network rules and policies to inbound traffic for specific OpenShift pods. Prometheus (Tech Preview) is being introduced for monitoring and alerting in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7, building the popular monitoring solution (and CNCF project) directly into the OpenShift platform. Supporting Quotes Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift, Red Hat “Modern, cloud-native applications are not monolithic stacks with clear-cut needs and resources; to more effectively embrace modern applications, IT organizations need to re-imagine how their developers find, provision and consume critical services and resources across a hybrid architecture. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7 addresses these needs head-on by providing hybrid access to services through its service catalog, enabling developers to more easily find and bind necessary services to their business-critical applications--no matter where these services exist--and adding close integration with AWS to further streamline cloud-native development and deployment.” Matt Yanchyshyn, director, Partner Solution Architecture, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “We are excited about our collaboration with Red Hat and the general availability of the first AWS Service Brokers in Red Hat OpenShift. The ability to seamlessly configure and deploy a range of AWS services from within OpenShift will allow our customers to benefit from AWS’s rapid pace of innovation, both on-premises and in the cloud.”
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171116005274/en/Latest-Version-Red-Hat-OpenShift-Container-Platform
Sunday, October 8, 2017
Red Hat Debuts Versatile Software-Defined Storage for Cloud-Native Applications in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- @RedHat, Inc. (NYSE: #RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced #RedHat Container-Native Storage 3.6, with support for containerized applications and infrastructure in Red Hat #OpenShift Container Platform clusters. Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 comes on the heels of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.6, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform, announced in August. #RedHat Container-Native #Storage 3.6 adds support for containerized apps & infra in @OpenShift. #containers Tweet this Red Hat Container-Native Storage, built upon Red Hat Gluster Storage, is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and uniquely serves storage out of containers. Red Hat Gluster Storage is enterprise-grade, durable, more secure and well-suited for the hybrid cloud as it supports both on-premise or public cloud deployments. These attributes make it ideally suited to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform deployments. Red Hat Container-Native Storage can eliminate the need to have an independent storage platform, enabling customers to achieve one integrated container platform that can span the hybrid cloud with greater efficiency and cost savings, a streamlined user experience, single control plane and a single point of support. Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6 The move to container-based applications can bring challenges to existing traditional storage architectures, holding back the drive for innovation and progress. Software-defined container-native storage addresses the challenges with the ability to merge the storage services with the container platform like any other container service and runs on physical, virtual, public cloud and even on top of traditional storage appliances. Existing traditional storage architectures do not always offer this level of inherent scale and flexibility and, as a result, can fall short of unlocking the full potential of container application platforms like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. With Red Hat Container-Native Storage 3.6, Red Hat demonstrates its leadership as a provider of native storage for container platforms with the following new features: Versatile storage platform for containers enabling customers to manage, scale, and upgrade their storage needs using a single control plane helping customers to achieve greater storage efficiency and cost savings. Red Hat Container-Native Storage now offers support for file, block, and object interfaces, enabling container applications portability to the container platform without change. The addition of block storage (via iSCSI) provides support for distributed databases and other low-latency workloads like Elasticsearch, while the addition of object storage (under Technology Preview) provides an embedded object store within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for cloud-native applications needing Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) like protocol support. Support for all core infrastructure elements of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, including its registry, logging, and metrics. Support for these core components enables storage administrators to have Red Hat Container-Native Storage for infrastructure out-of-the-box, without needing to use disparate storage systems for different infrastructure aspects and have one integrated platform with simplified management, procurement, and support. Three-fold increase in the number of applications and microservices deployed on a single storage cluster.1 Increased persistent volume density offers customers greater resource utilization. Test Drive Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform with Container-Native Storage Red Hat is also rolling out a new OpenShift Container Platform with Container-Native Storage Test Drive, enabling customers to simulate Red Hat OpenShift deployments via the public cloud. This Test Drive aims to provide an inquiring administrator with a full multi-node Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster, running in the cloud. Customers will be able to explore lab exercises designed to expose them to different administrative and operational tasks with both Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Container-Native Storage.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Mesosphere Joins Dell EMC's Reseller Program to Provide Open, Scalable Platform for Hybrid Cloud
Using Mesosphere DC/OS, Dell EMC customers can quickly and easily deploy data-intensive, microservices and containerized applications while reducing cost and optimizing compute resources SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- #Mesosphere — the creators of DC/OS, the premier platform for building and running data-rich, containerized applications — today extended its existing strategic relationship with #DellEMC by becoming part of Dell EMC's formal reseller program. Under this agreement, joint customers can now purchase Mesosphere DC/OS licenses, services and training directly from Dell EMC and its reseller partners globally. By collaborating with Mesosphere, Dell EMC customers can now orchestrate containerized applications and data services between their on-premise and public cloud implementations, thus maximizing efficiencies, reducing cost and optimizing compute resources. Mesosphere and Dell EMC have a history of collaborating on behalf of customers. Earlier this year, the companies delivered a reference architecture for deployment of DC/OS across Dell EMC compute and storage infrastructure. Additionally, #Mesosphere integrated #REXRay, an #opensource #container storage #orchestrationengine developed by {code} — #DellTechnologies' open source organization — to manage storage from multiple platforms, in DC/OS. This announcement illustrates the continued collaboration by Mesosphere with leaders in the server industry. By partnering with a leading hardware and software provider like Dell EMC, Mesosphere is better able to provide enterprises with a unique hybrid cloud solution, allowing them to maintain control of valuable proprietary applications and data while still unlocking the full potential of digital transformation. "We're incredibly proud to extend our relationship with Mesosphere and provide our joint customers a unique hybrid cloud solution," said Joshua Bernstein, vice president of technology, Dell Technologies. "Customers are increasingly seeking solutions that offer public cloud-style services without the threat of cloud vendor lock-in; combining DC/OS with Dell EMC hardware fulfills that need. In addition, DC/OS has a unique architecture that allows it to orchestrate both containerized microservices and modern data services using its application-aware scheduling, making it an ideal platform for the kind of applications that are transforming businesses today." "At Royal Caribbean, we're building complex and groundbreaking software systems that need to be quickly and easily deployed, scaled and maintained across dozens of ships at sea," said Michael Delgado, chief technology officer at Royal Caribbean. "We're excited to see Mesosphere and Dell EMC more closely aligned and working toward cloud-native solutions that provide ease of use, control and the ability to deploy within our own data centers." "Mesosphere is helping businesses deliver personalized and seamless customer experiences, by powering data-intensive applications on hybrid and edge cloud infrastructures," said William Freiberg, chief operating officer, Mesosphere. "With this collaboration, we're empowering joint customers to deliver next-generation customer service with the flexibility to choose on which infrastructure to deploy, whether that's on-premise or in the cloud. That's why I'm pleased to build on our relationship with Dell EMC." Availability Mesosphere DC/OS and related services are available now through Dell EMC and worldwide channel partners. Interested customers can contact either company for more details, or begin the journey to Mesosphere DC/OS today. About Mesosphere Mesosphere is leading the enterprise transformation toward distributed computing and hybrid cloud. Mesosphere DC/OS is the premier platform for building, deploying, and elastically scaling modern applications and big data. DC/OS makes running containers, data services, and microservices easy across your own hardware and cloud instances. Mesosphere was founded in 2013 by the architects of hyperscale infrastructures at Airbnb and Twitter and the co-creator of Apache Mesos. Mesosphere is headquartered in San Francisco with additional offices in New York and Hamburg, Germany. Mesosphere's investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Microsoft.
Monday, September 11, 2017
Dell Technologies' {code} Goes All In on Container Interfaces with Latest REX-Ray Release
#DellTechnologies' open source organization, today releases #REXRay v0.10, the first project to support the #ContainerStorageInterface ( #CSI ) specification, a proposed new industry standard for container orchestrators and volume plugins designed to accelerate container technology adoption REX-Ray, an established #opensource #containerorchestration engine that enables persistence for cloud-native workloads, now includes plugins for 15 storage integrations, with the addition of NFS, local block services and VFS, immediately making those storage platforms CSI-compatible {code} by #DellEMC is now {code}, a group of passionate open source engineers and advocates building community through contribution and engagement in emerging technologies. The group also provides assistance internally, from individuals to large business units, to help bring projects to the open source community, adhering to best practices. Dell Technologies announced the latest version of REX-Ray, the open source container orchestration engine that enables persistent storage for cloud-native workloads, reached a new milestone. Created by {code}, formerly {code} by Dell EMC, REX-Ray v0.10 offers the first-ever plugins enabled by the Container Storage Interface (CSI) that implement a pre-release of the CSI 0.1 specification. As a result, major cloud providers and software-based platforms are immediately interoperable through CSI. REX-Ray is the first CSI plugin implementation to stand as an early validation of the CSI specification to help progress towards industry acceptance and container orchestrator implementations. CSI is a universal storage interface, effectively an API, between container orchestrators and storage providers that will allow predictable interoperability between the two. It is an iteration from existing integrations with lessons learned from the community and major container platforms including Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker, and Cloud Foundry. Container orchestrators adopting CSI can leverage any storage provider, cloud or otherwise, while enabling storage providers to work with any container orchestrator that implements the specification. The end result is that CSI adoption will provide applications with portability across infrastructures, helping bring choice to users, while containers become more applicable to a broader range of applications. {code} has a history of developing integrations for container platforms and is dedicated to supporting CSI to make cloud native computing ubiquitous, and to ensure storage is first-class and interoperable on behalf of applications. "With REX-Ray, {code} is doing some important work to validate the Container Storage Interface standard we've been collaborating on to unlock the potential of the cloud-native ecosystem," said Benjamin Hindman, chief architect and co-founder, Mesosphere. "REX-Ray provides a vital service for some of the largest users on Mesosphere DC/OS, enabling them to simplify the management and allocation of persistent storage for stateful workloads across any infrastructure." To meet the needs of enterprise users, in addition to supporting CSI, REX-Ray v0.10 offers new features and functionality, including: Industry-first, introduction of three native CSI storage plugins: This work represents the first three native CSI storage drivers, opening the market for more storage platform support, while also functioning as a blueprint for contributors looking to create CSI drivers. The NFS plugin opens the market for storage platforms that do not have direct CSI support. A block devices plugin introduces new capabilities for on-premises applications that can optimally make use of logical or physical devices local to a host. Finally a VFS (virtual file system) driver that allows end-to-end CI verification of the CSI specification without the need of a separate storage provider. Immediate wide applicability of storage providers to CSI: Through REX-Ray's existing collection of current storage drivers (plus the three new native CSI plugins), 15 plugins are now immediately available to work with container orchestrators that adopt the CSI specification. Merging libStorage into REX-Ray:libStorage, an open source vendor and platform-agnostic storage framework from {code}, was absorbed into REX-Ray to simplify the process for end-user support and simplifies development of future storage drivers. "We're in a catch-22 with containers, where adoption needs to increase to drive innovation, and innovation needs to continue to drive adoption," said Josh Bernstein, vice president of technology, Dell Technologies. "But this innovation can't exist in a vacuum—industry standards are critical to ensuring that containers are evolving, and container orchestrators are able to easily meet storage demands through a single protocol. REX-Ray's support for CSI demonstrates both our commitment to open source tools and our commitment to furthering container adoption." {code} is the open source organization of Dell Technologies, dedicated to executing projects with complete transparency and openness. The mission of {code} is to contribute to and create open source projects, act in the interest of building a community and driving awareness of emerging technologies. The {code} Community currently has more than 4,300 members and the {code} team has shepherded 100 open source projects to date. REX-Ray is recognized by Docker as an approved, verified persistent storage solution for Docker containers and ships with Mesosphere DC/OS as the default persistent storage mechanism. Availability REX-Ray v0.10 is available on GitHub Additional Resources View all of the {code} open source projects at thecodeteam.com Follow {code} on Twitter Join the {code} Community on Slack Dell Technologies Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. The company services customers of all sizes – ranging from 98 percent of the Fortune 500 to individual consumers – with the industry's broadest and most innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
How to Put Docker into Production with Persistent Storage
As the adoption of application containers, including #Docker and #Kubernetes, continues to experience explosive growth, the need for effectively providing persistent storage to run stateful applications in production has developers and IT departments looking for answers. Typically, applications and data are kept separate: server-side applications can be horizontally-scaled easily to increase performance, cloned in the case of a failure, or removed if no longer needed. Storage resources are decoupled from the application, and its lifecycle is independent. While many application components can be designed to be stateless, this is almost never true for an entire application. The main example being a database, an application that may not be on the bleeding edge of application delivery, but still may be run in Docker containers. So, Docker for example, needs to have a way to allow applications to store and manage persistent data.  One solution for adding persistent storage of data to an application is leveraging object storage like S3. However, S3 does not support all data types — for example, a typical database is placed on a file system, and doesn’t fit the S3 model. To solve the problem, Docker volumes were introduced. Docker volumes add a data directory into an ephemeral container. Ephemerality means that an application running in a Docker container can be removed or redeployed at any time. In practice, the Docker storage volume is attached to a container upon start up with either the -v option or via Dockerfile's VOLUME instruction. The volume is managed independently from the container, ensuring that the volume isn’t deleted automatically when the container it is attached to goes away. While Docker volumes are a native feature of Docker, native implementations are very limited. The most important thing to know about Docker volumes is that out-of-the-box, Docker only supports local volumes (stored on the file system of the server where a container is deployed). This may be acceptable for development and testing environments, but it’s a show-stopper for production environments. This is because: Storage coupled with the original host will be lost if the server is rebuilt. Management and data protection are hard to implement with local volumes. In a multi-server environment (with Swarm or Kubernetes), the application owner has little control over which server will be chosen to deploy a new container. For many, relying on local storage is not a viable solution. Attaching an NFS share as a mount point for a container can be a solution for Swarm/Kubernetes clusters initially, but when production scaling begins, a flexible, manageable storage solution is required. For Docker users, there are alternatives. A good solution can come in the form of software-defined storage which runs on the same host as the application container and addresses all storage needs required by Docker. For example, you can connect a solution like Virtuozzo Storage with a Docker-certified plug-in, which provides an effective, high performance alternative (to native local volumes) storage backend for Docker volumes. The plug-in approach adds the much-desired flexibility in storage options for Docker users, who can pick a storage solution that is most appropriate for their needs. When leveraging a more complete software-defined storage to solve persistent storage needs, you gain a lot more in terms of how you can re-imagine the way your company manages its storage resources. Below are just some of the higher-level benefits of using software-define storage solution: High performance: faster than CEPH Extremely cost efficient: Works with commodity off-the-shelf hardware Massively scalable: Store petabytes of data. Easy to manage: Stay in control with an easy-to-use web-based management interface. When it comes to persistent storage for app containers, success is based on two key technologies: SSD caching and journaling provide a significant performance increase to the storage cluster with only 1 SSD per 4 HDD, and automated load balancing to keep "hot" data cached by moving it to less utilized disks, or local disks, or SSD disks – all to maximize utilization of all storage resources. After the Docker volume plug-in implementation, all the benefits of software-defined storage can be realized, in addition to getting persistent storage for application containers. Docker Swarm users can get a production-ready solution that combines storage and compute, eliminating the need for dedicated storage hardware. At the same time, storage performance grows linearly with deployment size and its capacity and performance demands, ensuring that storage is never a bottleneck in the container orchestration platform.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Sphere 3D Introduces New HVE HyperConverged Open Architecture with Support for Glassware 2.0 Containers and V3 Desktop Cloud Orchestrator
SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 28, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sphere 3D Corp. (NASDAQ:ANY), a containerization, virtualization, and data management solutions provider, is pleased to announce the introduction of a new HVE branded HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI) Open Architecture (“OA”). HVE’s HCI OA provides a small 2-node footprint for converged compute and storage, scales to 64 nodes, and is delivered on HVE appliances with all flash and/or NVMe configurations. Customers can deploy HCI OA faster, with a reduced initial financial commitment, a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and with greater flexibility to scale compute or storage separately than traditional HCI. HCI OA was developed to enable an open software defined datacenter approach that empowers customers to introduce new technologies into their data center ecosystem, and marks a paradigm shift from traditional HCI logic. Traditional HCI solutions force vendor lock-in for customers, tightly couple compute and storage, and require scaling of these resources in a closed and predefined correlation of capacity and capability. HCI OA can start with just two nodes, and then expand as needs dictate. The HVE HCI OA architectural advantage allows customers to deploy HCI technology much faster, provides scale out options individually for either compute or storage, and provides high-availability HCI clustering. The HVE solution also utilizes high-performance advanced technologies, and introduces an open architecture for software defined storage and overall software defined data center solutions. #HVE #HCI OA supports #VMWare #vSphere and #Microsoft #HyperV virtualization architectures, #Sphere3D #Glassware2.0® #containers, #DesktopCloudOrchestrator™ ( #DCO ) and #SnapServer 's #GuardianOperatingSystem™ ( #GOS ); yet it integrates into traditional storage environments. Starting from a blank canvas and building from the ground up based on customer feedback, HVE’s HCI OA design is made possible by a number of technology advancements in compute, data transmission, and storage. The HVE HCI OA hardware platform includes the HVE “Business In A Box” (BIX) converged servers that can be configured from 3TB-20TB usable storage per appliance, the HVE-STACK 2U 4 blade system supporting 3TB-12TB per blade, and HVE VDI Appliances. Dave Harmon, VP of Virtualization, stated, “Our engineering team has been observing the changes in technology and listening to customers’ needs. As such, we realized the need for a Hyper Converged makeover of today’s current architectures. Sphere 3D’s HVE, SnapServer, and Glassware teams of engineers have come together to position our HCI OA to meet the rapidly changing market for HCI.” “Being able to leverage adaptive software defined solutions with legacy application support through containers on next generation platforms has taken some significant engineering expertise. The engineering effort and investment were well worth it, as we believe that our new HCI OA architecture really opens up our HCI vision to our customers,” said Peter Tassiopoulos, President of Sphere 3D. “Industry analysts agree that HCI architecture is game changing, and we believe our new HCI 2.0 approach puts Sphere 3D on the forefront of this change.”
Sunday, August 27, 2017
Hedvig Announces Its Distributed Storage Platform 3.0
Today #Hedvig announced the latest release of its software-defined storage ( #SDS ) platform, Hedvig #DistributedStoragePlatform version 3.0. The latest update contains innovations including end-to-end integrations, advanced security capabilities, and enhancements to the platfrom’s comprehensive suite of caching technologies. According to Hevig, these new capabilities will enable customers to store and protect virtualized, containerized, and backup workloads from a single platform.  More and more companies are looking to both SDS and multi-cloud platforms to store both their primary and secondary data. However, these new technologies requires new certifications, plugins, encryption, auditing, multitenancy, and flash-caching capabilities all of which can be found in the new Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform 3.0. The newly updated platform does this through new #CloudScale Plugins, #Hedvig #Encrypt360, and Hedvig #FlashFabric. The company has added new plugins to its existing #Docker and #OpenStack #CloudScale Plugins. CloudScale Plugins provide pretested, validated options that aim to make #SDS easier to use and operate. CloudScale Plugins now include: #Veritas #OpenStorage Technology ( #OST ) plugin. Hedvig’s new OST plugin ensures existing Veritas customers can seamlessly connect #NetBackup to Hedvig as a deduplicating backup target. Enhanced #VMware plugin. The existing Hedvig VMware #vSphereWebClient plugin has achieved VMware-ready storage certification and adds new security, backup, and data protection capabilities. #RedHat Certified #container. A Hedvig Storage Proxy container is now Red Hat certified for customer production use and published in the Red Hat Container Catalog. This certified container supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift featuring docker and Kubernetes. Cyberattacks, including mal- and ransomware, seem to be in the news every other week. To this end, Hedvig is introducing its new Encrypt360 that will deliver native, in-software approach to protecting data throughout its entire lifecycle. Encrypt360 can encrypt data that’s in-use, in-flight, and at-rest, encryption starts at the host level and carries all the way through the backend, distributed cluster nodes. This new security feature supports AWS and allows for a 256-bit AES encryption policy on a per-volume basis. Encrypt360 can be combined with other new features announced today, advanced auditing and multitenancy access control mechanisms, allowing customers to meet compliance and regulations while staying secure in hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. On the flash-caching front, Hedvig is introducing a comprehensive suite of flash caching technologies that optimize performance in Hedvig clusters, FlashFabric. The company has added improvements such as advanced auto-tiering and read cache capabilities. The improvements also allow customers to take advantage of NVMe, 3D Xpoint and other flash innovations that may be announced soon without having to add complex, proprietary hardware.
http://www.storagereview.com/hedvig_announces_its_distributed_storage_platform_30
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Google updates its Container Engine with a focus on security
#Google today announced the latest updates to its Google #Container Engine, its service for running #Kubernetes-based software containers in its cloud. Like with previous releases, this update brings the #ContainerEngine, or #GKE, as Google calls it (where the ‘K’ stands for #Kubernetes ), up to date with the latest updates from the Kubernetes project. Now at version 1.7, the Kubernetes project is quickly establishing itself as the de facto standard for orchestrating software containers in both private and public clouds. Indeed, it’s probably not unfair to say that if #AzureStack is #Microsoft’s way to allow its users to bring their workloads to their private clouds and enable hybrid cloud deployments, then Kubernetes, which was originally conceived at Google, is Google’s way of helping enterprises run hybrid deployments. With this update, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on security. As more and more companies adopt GKE, their needs have obviously changed. Enterprises, especially, tend to have some pretty strict security requirements. The GKE team argues that its service is one of the most secure offering of Kubernetes on the market. The reason for this, Google argues, is that it controls the operating system that runs on all of the various nodes that make up a container deployment. What’s running there is an operating system that’s based on Chromium OS (which also forms the basis of Chrome OS). The version that runs in the cloud is a very minimal system that offers very little in terms of an attack surface and that’s managed and proactively patched by Google itself. With this update, Google is profiting both from new security features in Kubernetes itself (like a new API for enforcing rules about how different pods can talk to each other) and new features in its data centers. Google now, for example, re-encrypts data as it hits its Google Cloud Load Balancing service to ensure that a customer’s data isn’t only encrypted on the way to Google’s data centers but also after it hits Google’s network. As the Google team told me, enterprises are also looking for more extensibility and the ability to extend Kubernetes with third-party applications, including service meshes like Istio. Now that API aggregation is available in Kubernetes 1.7, Google, too, is able to offer this feature to its users. Another new feature worth highlighting is the addition of support for GPU-based machines that run Nvidia’s K80 GPUs (with support for more powerful machines coming later). This feature, which is now available in alpha, is geared toward users who want to run machine learning workloads. As always, there are plenty of other updates here, too, and you can find a full list in Google’s blog post. The main takeaway from today’s launch, however, is that both the Kubernetes community and Google are taking security very seriously — and that they are aware that if they want enterprises to use GKE for even more of their workloads, they’ll have to continue to expand on this work.
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Penguin Computing Announces Support for Singularity Containers on POD HPC Cloud and Scyld ClusterWare
FREMONT, Calif., May 15, 2017 — #PenguinComputing, provider of high performance computing, enterprise data center and cloud solutions, today announced support for #Singularity #containers on its Penguin Computing On-Demand ( #POD ) #HPC Cloud and #Scyld #ClusterWare HPC management software. “Our researchers are excited about using Singularity on POD,” said Jon McNally, Chief HPC Architect at ASU Research Computing. “Portability and the ability to reproduce an environment is key to peer reviewed research. Unlike other container technologies, Singularity allows them to run at speed and scale.” “We’ve long desired to support containers in our public HPC cloud, but the most adopted technology of our users was Docker,” said Will Cottay, Director of Cloud Solutions at Penguin Computing. “For loosely coupled applications in a virtual or private environment Docker is great, but it doesn’t scale up to supercomputers. Singularity provides the flexibility of containers with the security and scalability needed for tightly coupled HPC workflows. We’re very grateful to Greg Kurtzer with the High Performance Computing Services group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for inventing and developing Singularity.” Penguin Computing customers are able to build and run Singularity containers on their in-house HPC resources and run the same container on POD, ensuring the same application and OS environment. Entire workflows can be built into a container enabling both bursting and replication for disaster recovery. Since Singularity supports the import or direct execution of Docker images, users can use their existing Docker assets, or leverage other’s work. A single command will download and run an image from a Docker Hub repository. Penguin’s POD team is maintaining a public GitHub repository of specification files to make it easy for users to build containers tuned for HPC clusters. Penguin Computing also now ships Singularity with Scyld ClusterWare 7 HPC management software. Earlier this year Penguin Computing announced Scyld ClusterWare 7 as the company’s latest version of its HPC provisioning software, enabling support of large scale clusters with enhanced functionality for clusters ranging to thousands of nodes.
