Apollo Is Considering IPO of Cloud-Hosting Firm Rackspace

@Apollo Global Management LLC is considering an initial public offering of cloud-computing company @Rackspace Hosting Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said. The private equity firm has held early talks with advisers and may seek to begin the process before the end of the year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Rackspace could have an enterprise value of as much as $10 billion in a U.S. listing, one of the people said. A final decision hasn’t been made and Apollo could elect to keep the business, the people said.  Apollo took Rackspace private in 2016 for $4.3 billion, equivalent to a price of $32 a share, with peer Searchlight Capital Partners also making an investment. Rackspace completed its purchase of Datapipe Inc. last year, raising an additional $800 million in debt to finance the deal. Datapipe’s previous owner, Abry Partners, kept a minority position in the combined business. Rackspace has performed very well over the past two years, one of the people said. A representative for Apollo declined to comment, while Searchlight didn’t immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Rackspace didn’t have an immediate comment. Rackspace, based in San Antonio, Texas, offers services that help companies and public authorities shift their IT operations to cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp., according to the Rackspace website.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-03-27/apollo-is-said-to-consider-ipo-of-cloud-hosting-firm-rackspace#ampshare=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-27/apollo-is-said-to-consider-ipo-of-cloud-hosting-firm-rackspace

Eideticom, IBM, Rackspace and Xilinx Demonstrate World's First PCIe Gen4 NVM Express Production Ready System

CALGARY, March 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - @Eideticom, @IBM, @Rackspace and @Xilinx are pleased to demonstrate the Eideticom NoLoad™ NVM Express ( #NVMe) Computational Storage acceleration platform running the NVMe protocol at PCIe Gen4 speeds in a Rackspace BarrelEye G2 POWER9-equipped system, doubling performance compared to other systems in production today. This announcement enables Rackspace, IBM and other Open Compute and OpenPOWER system vendors to avail of the next generation of storage and compute acceleration performance leveraging the industry-exclusive PCIe Gen4 capabilities of IBM's POWER9 processor, Rackspace's server, Xilinx's FPGA technology and Eideticom's NVMe-based accelerator products. Eideticom, IBM, Rackspace and Xilinx Demonstrate World's First PCIe Gen4 NVM Express Production Ready System (CNW Group/Eidetic Communications Inc) NVMe is the most popular protocol for Solid State Drives (SSDs) in Enterprise, Data-Center and High-Performance Computing markets. It has a broad eco-system and excellent software support in all major operating systems including Linux. NVMe uses PCIe to connect the CPU to the SSDs and IBM's POWER9 is the first production CPU with PCIe Gen4 IO, nearly doubling the data bandwidth of PCIe Gen3, to which x86 remains committed. Eideticom deployed their NVMe-based accelerator, NoLoad™ product on top of Xilinx's FPGA technology on a production ready FPGA acceleration card inside a production ready OpenPOWER server from Rackspace. "We built the POWER9 CPU from the ground-up with the most data-intensive workloads in mind," said IBM VP and Fellow Brad McCredie. "PCIe Gen4 devices are critical components to driving performance across the system stack, and with POWER9 their full potential can be realized." "We are excited to incorporate Eideticom's storage acceleration and PCIe Gen4 technology in our Barreleye G2 server," said Adi Gangidi, system design engineer at Rackspace. "Accelerator IP enablers like Eideticom are helping drive the widespread data center adoption of a new and unmatched class of IO." "Xilinx UltraScale+ All Programmable devices offer unique capabilities to enable the highest performance for demanding Data Center storage and compute acceleration workloads," said Manish Muthal, Vice President of Data Center at Xilinx. "Leveraging leading standards based interfaces including NVM Express and PCIe Gen4 allows application developers to rapidly deploy new solutions into the market." "The POWER9 processor from IBM is the perfect CPU for data-intensive workloads like machine learning and now we can feed that processor with data velocity that other systems simply can't match," said Stephen Bates, Chief Technology Officer, Eideticom. "Customers need this to improve the performance of their applications and can utilize this benefit to reduce PCIe lane count and free up slots for other IO devices. No other CPU in production today can offer this kind of performance improvement. Combining this CPU with the next-generation OpenCompute/OpenPOWER server from RackSpace leads to a solution with storage bandwidth that is second to none." "The OpenPOWER Foundation has been aggressively adopting PCIe Gen4 because we see the need for faster storage, network and compute," said Bryan Talik, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation. "OpenPOWER has already demonstrated PCIe Gen4 support with IBM, Mellanox, and Xilinx and we are delighted that Eideticom can now offer fast storage and compute via NVMe over that PCIe Gen4 ecosystem."

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eideticom-ibm-rackspace-and-xilinx-demonstrate-worlds-first-pcie-gen4-nvm-express-production-ready-system-676532203.html

Rackspace Achieves Real Economic And Service Advantages Using Scality Software-Defined Storage

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- @Scality, a pioneer of #softwaredefined, multi- #cloud #data #storage, today announced that its customer, @Rackspace, having chosen Scality #RING from among 23 software-defined storage solutions that it evaluated, has seen advantages that exceeded their expectations.  In the competitive business of hosting, infrastructure costs—CAPEX and OPEX both—are key to optimizing profitability. So, when Rackspace embarked on an infrastructure refresh project, lowering TCO was a critical goal—second only to that of maintaining the absolute best in service levels. And, because growth comes with success, Rackspace also required a solution that scales without limits, simply and without interruptions. They found it with Scality RING. "We consider software-defined storage to be critical to our strategy for its growth potential, data center efficiency and efficient —and flexible—use of assets," said Dan Shain, Director R&D, Rackspace Cloud Office. Not only has Rackspace seen a 45 percent reduction in TCO due to substantial CAPEX and OPEX savings, but they're seeing significant secondary benefits with their move to Scality RING software-defined storage, including the ability to vacate an entire datacenter, thanks to the compact storage footprint. Software-defined Scality RING object storage turns any standard x86 server into highly expandable storage. It scales without limits and guarantees 100 percent availability—all while reducing cost by as much as 90 percent compared to legacy systems. Scality RING is deployed by more than 170 petabyte-scale customers around the world. It features native file protocols and high-fidelity AWS S3 API, data encryption, volume and bucket data protection, data-restorative versioning, extended location control for data sovereignty, and geo-replication for disaster recovery for customers requiring ironclad data protection.

http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/Rackspace-Achieves-Real-Economic-And-Service-Advantages-Using-Scality-Software-Defined-Storage-1014553578

Cloud Computing: Now A $180 Billion Market

The overall #cloud market expanded by 24 percent last year, powered by revenues from infrastructure and platform services that grew at nearly double that rate. Over the four quarters leading up to September of 2017—essentially Q4 of 2016 to Q3 of 2017—cloud sales, including on all services and all infrastructure products used for building clouds, achieved an overall market of $180 billion, according to a report released Thursday by Synergy research. IaaS and PaaS grew at a 47 percent clip, solidly outperforming Software-as-a-Service revenues which were 31 percent above the previous year. Hosted private cloud service providers saw their industry enjoy 30 percent growth. [Related: Even After An Epic Year For Global Data Center Consolidation, Experts Say Regional Providers Still Stand Out In The Cloud] Back in 2016, the spend on cloud services for the first time surpassed that on hardware and software components for building clouds. The gulf between those two segments dramatically widened in 2017 due to three times faster growth in subscriptions to aggregated services than capital expenditures for directly purchasing infrastructure products. In the four quarters evaluated by Synergy, businesses spent nearly $100 billion on services. [Sponsored Suggested Post: IoTConnex Virtual Conference On Demand Discover new IoT research and insights. Hear solution provider success stories. Find your IoT opportunity.] @Amazon Web Services and @Microsoft saw the most revenue from the #IaaS and #PaaS category, @IBM and @Rackspace from hosted #privatecloud, and @Microsoft and @Salesforce were the dominant enterprise #SaaS vendors. Total purchases of hardware and software products used to build clouds didn't eclipse $80 billion in the same period. #Publiccloud operators accounted for half that spend, outpacing the growth of their private cloud counterparts. @Cisco and @Dell EMC were atop the market in selling infrastructure products to those public cloud providers—a business that expanded by roughly 13 percent for the networking, server and storage giants. While hardware and software investments for building private clouds also amounted to roughly $40 billion in sales, that side of the industry didn't crack 10 percent growth in 2017. Dell EMC and HPE led that category. Also on the services side, Unified Communications-as-a-Service, a much smaller overall market, grew faster than 20 percent, led by RingCentral and Mitel. While UCaaS is "in many ways a different type of market," said Synergy chief analyst John Dinsdale, the report's author, it's "driving some radical changes in business communications." Cloud has gone from becoming mainstream, to dominating IT segments, to being the new normal, Dinsdale noted in the report. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors, and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years," Dinsdale said.

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300097476/cloud-computing-now-a-180-billion-market.htm

HPE and Rackspace Deliver Industry’s First Pay-as-You-Go OpenStack Private Cloud

New joint solution makes private cloud 40 percent less expensive than public cloud1 PALO ALTO, Calif. and SAN ANTONIO, Nov. 13, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- @Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) and @Rackspace® today announced that the two companies have partnered to offer @OpenStack® #PrivateCloud with pay per use infrastructure, the industry’s first pay-as-you-go OpenStack private cloud, delivered as a managed service2. With this solution, enterprises receive the benefits of a public cloud - cloud-like utility pricing, elastic infrastructure and simplified IT – in a private cloud environment located in their datacenter, a colocation facility or a datacenter managed by Rackspace, the private cloud-as-a-service market leader3. “The launch of OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure delivered by Rackspace and HPE marks a pivotal moment in the private cloud market and in the industry at large,” said Antonio Neri, president of HPE. “This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds, and we fully expect this simple pay-per-use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions.” According to IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Datacenter 2017 Predictions, “Pay-as-you-go consumption models will account for 50 percent of on-premises and off-premises Physical IT and datacenter asset spending by 2018.”4 “With this innovative delivery model, Rackspace and HPE are removing the barriers to private cloud adoption, giving customers even more choice of technology platforms that best fit their application needs,” said Scott Crenshaw, executive vice president of private cloud at Rackspace. “We are proud to partner with HPE to continue enabling customer success with private clouds. And, with this common goal in mind, our companies plan to extend this model to Rackspace’s entire managed private cloud portfolio in the future, including VMware and Microsoft Azure Stack technologies.” Leveraging a “pay-as-you-go” model for private cloud means customers pay only for what they use. It enables them to handle unpredictable growth and bursts in workloads without paying for unnecessary fixed capacity. OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure, delivered by Rackspace and HPE, will help enterprises take full advantage of the benefits of managed private cloud, including: Pay-as-you-go pricing: Leveraging HPE Flexible Capacity, customers pay for what they use in an on-demand consumption model for infrastructure. This feature enables private cloud customers to more closely align resources to growth and handle burst capacity and traffic spikes without the need to pay for additional fixed capacity. This flexible capacity model delivers better cost than public cloud1, typically saving customers 40 percent or more versus the leading public cloud. Agility and instant scalability: Customers maintain the performance benefits of a private cloud environment, while instantly scaling their entire private cloud capacity in a public cloud-like manner. Enable enterprise-grade security and reliability: With a single-tenant model, customers can eliminate the performance and “noisy neighbor” issues commonly found in multi-tenant environments, and can more easily meet security, compliance and data sovereignty needs. Managed expertise: Customers consume OpenStack Private Cloud with pay-per-use infrastructure as a managed service with an industry-leading 99.99 percent API uptime guarantee from Rackspace. This helps customers focus on their core business, while eliminating the risk and operational complexities of trying to manage a private cloud on their own. As a creator of OpenStack, Rackspace is the world’s largest and most experienced OpenStack operator5 with more than one billion server hours of OpenStack expertise6. “As enterprise organizations continue to invest in both on-premises and hosted private cloud capabilities, they are increasingly incorporating a richer set of cloud services,” said Michelle Bailey, group vice president, general manager and research fellow at IDC Research. “In a world where digital transformation is rapidly impacting every industry, enterprises need to both modernize their IT and remain agile to maintain competitive advantage. The OpenStack Private Cloud offering from Rackspace and HPE specifically addresses organizations needs to provide security and performance benefits, the cornerstone of a private cloud environment. With Rackspace’s private cloud expertise and service-first culture, they are well positioned to address the needs of HPE’s large installed base of infrastructure customers and help reduce any cloud migration risk. This pay-per-use infrastructure is a new step forward in helping enterprises deploy private clouds with improved flexibility and cost transparency.” OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure, delivered by Rackspace and HPE, will be generally available in all regions on November 28, with additional solutions for Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware® and Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Microsoft® Azure® Stack expected in 2018. For more information on the solution, please visit here. About Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data center to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure. About Rackspace Rackspace, the leading multi-cloud managed services company, helps businesses tap the power of cloud computing without the complexity and cost of managing it all on their own. Rackspace engineers deliver specialized expertise, easy-to-use tools, and Fanatical Support® for leading technologies including AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenStack, Oracle, SAP and VMware. The company serves customers in 150 countries, including more than half of the FORTUNE 100. Rackspace was named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide and has been honored by Fortune, Forbes, and others as one of the best companies to work for. Learn more at www.rackspace.com. Forward-Looking Statement The information included in this press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If the risks or uncertainties ever materialize or the assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Hewlett Packard Enterprise may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the need to address the many challenges facing Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s businesses; the competitive pressures faced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s businesses; risks associated with executing Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s strategy; the development and transition of new products and services and the enhancement of existing products and services to meet customer needs and respond to emerging technological trends; the execution and performance of contracts by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and its suppliers, customers and partners; integration and other risks associated with business combination and investment transactions; and other risks that are described in Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hewlett Packard Enterprise assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/11/13/1185070/0/en/HPE-and-Rackspace-Deliver-Industry-s-First-Pay-as-You-Go-OpenStack-Private-Cloud.html

Alibaba beats Google for IaaS market share, with IBM out of sight

#Google is the world's number four #infrastructureAsAService vendor, according to analyst outfit Gartner's first ever attempt at calculating market share in the field. The infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is growing like a weed: it hauled US$22.1 billion through the door in calendar 2016, up from $16.8 billion in 2015. As the table below shows, that's 31.4 per cent growth across the sector. Gartner predicts that the rise of #Azure, #Google and #Alibaba will see #AWS experience “growth erosion in share … while other IaaS market leaders will see an increase in growth.” Smaller, non-hyperscale providers will “struggle to provide value through their services,” the firm predicts. Here's the tale of the tape. Vendor 2016 Revenue $m 2016 Market Share% 2015 Revenue $m 2015 Market Share% 2016-2015 Growth% Amazon 9,775 44.2 6,698 39.8 45.9 Microsoft 1,579 7.1 980 5.8 61.1 Alibaba 675 3 298 1.8 126.5 Google 500 2.3 250 1.5 100 Rackspace 484 2.2 461 2.7 5 Others 9,147 41.2 8,074 48.4 13.2 Total 22,160 100 16,861 100 31.4 Alibaba's strong showing reflects its dominance in China, Gartner says, adding that the company's recent opening of new data centres in Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Japan should help it to do better beyond the Middle Kingdom. IBM's absence from the top five isn't necessarily terrifying, as the company makes much of its SaaS and PaaS offerings. But missing the top five also means missing growth, because Gartner says it expects IaaS to outpace SaaS and PaaS for the next five years. The firm also says that much of IaaS expected growth will be “coming at the expense of the traditional, noncloud offerings.” Which means the servers, storage and switches on which #DellEMC, #HPE, #Lenovo and #Cisco rely for much of their revenue. ®

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/iaas_market_share/

Rackspace Announces GA Of Private Cloud Powered By VMware

Today #Rackspace announced that its Rackspace #PrivateCloud powered by #VMware in generally available. Aside from being generally available today, the company is also announcing that the solution will now be built on #VMwareCloudFoundation. This new solution can aide customers as they move to the cloud by now enabling them to use the newest VMware capabilities. It will also enable full #softwaredefined #datacenter capabilities such as compute, storage, and networking spanning private and public clouds.  Though I don’t believe we have directly covered it in the past, the VMware Cloud Foundation is designed to accelerate an organization’s time-to-market through a factory-integrated cloud infrastructure stack that is simple to use and includes a complete set of software-defined services for compute, storage, networking and security. Rackspace has taking this one step farther with its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware. This new solution will help companies take their VMware deployments and maximize them by helping to build, operate, and optimize customers’ physical and virtual infrastructure. This in turn will free up IT resources from day-to-day infrastructure management, leaving them to focus on the company’s core business instead. Benefits include: Standardized Architecture: Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware is built on VMware Validated Designs, which are based on best practices, making deployments more predictable and lower risk. Continuous Updates and Lifecycle Management: Continuous updates allow for the most up-to-date VMware capabilities through lifecycle management of VMware components, thereby helping to improve users’ security posture. Leverage Existing VMware Investments: Users leverage the control, flexibility and choice needed to run VMware as easily as they would in their own data center. IT departments can migrate or extend to the VMware cloud with consistent tooling and skills. Consistent infrastructure architecture can be leveraged across multiple locations without the need to refactor code. Mutual customers maintain value of existing investments made in training, VMware technology and familiar tools by accelerating adoption of software-defined infrastructure. Offload Physical and Virtual Infrastructure Operations: Rackspace delivers a hosted model, which eliminates many of the procurement and integration challenges that IT organizations face in their own data centers. Mutual customers also benefit from the ability to scale their solution quickly and as needed without the need for significant upfront capex investments in data centers and hardware. Managed by Rackspace, Powered by VMware: With Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware, customers have access to Fanatical Support provided 24x7x365 from more than 150 VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) to help migrate, architect, secure and operate Rackspace hosted clouds powered by VMware technologies. Rackspace is one of the largest global providers in the VMware Cloud Provider Program and has partnered with VMware for more than 10 years delivering valuable solutions for mutual customers. Availability Rackspace Private Cloud powered by VMware, now built on VMware Cloud Foundation, is generally available now in all regions.

http://www.storagereview.com/rackspace_announces_ga_of_private_cloud_powered_by_vmware

Azure Stack scale limits could delay launch for some enterprises

#AzureStack is nearly ready for public release, with at least one remaining question: Will Azure stack scale to accommodate enterprises with larger-scale requirements?

#Microsoft #AzureStack is designed to run workloads within an enterprise data center in the same way they would run in Azure public cloud, orchestrated through Azure Resource Manager. The technology has been in the works since 2015 with three different technical previews during the past 18 months. It will finally be released as an appliance via hardware partners #DellEMC, #HewlettPackardEnterprise and #Lenovo in September, with appliances from other vendors coming later.

But this early version of Azure Stack will be as one-rack deployments -- companies cannot build a single Azure Stack environment across multiple locations because the code is not ready yet for projects that size, said Jeff DeVerter, CTO of Microsoft technologies at Rackspace.

"The first workloads will stay in the science project category, although I would like to be proven wrong," he said.

DeVerter said he does not know of any current multi-node installations. He does expect multi-rack deployments to be possible in early 2018, which should pave the way for its usage in larger companies.

Appriss Retail In. in Louisville, Ky, provides predictive analytics to large retail companies, many of whom prefer to keep sales transaction data out of the public cloud due to privacy concerns, said David West, the firm's senior vice president for hosting services.

While Appriss is largely virtualized, Azure Stack could reduce the need to buy and provision servers that retail customers don't see. That would allow West and his team to make more strategic use of their time.

"We can see the benefits of Azure Stack by being able to divorce ourselves from the hardware and focus on the applications," he said. "Plus, we could get a lot of the benefits of the public cloud and still maintain the ability to say to our customers the data is not going into the public cloud."

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/450423974/Azure-Stack-scale-limits-could-delay-launch-for-some-enterprises

Global WEB SCALE IT Types Market 2017- VmWare, Nutanix, Rackspace Read more: http://m.digitaljournal.com/pr/3418805#ixzz4nQXVNLaW

Maharashtra, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 07/19/2017 -- Worldwide WEB SCALE IT Types Market report provides the latest market verticals, services offered by WEB SCALE IT Types industry based on geographical regions to help the readers in understanding the driving forces behind the growth, market opportunities, business statistics, and trends, forecast from 2016-2022.The global WEB SCALE IT Types market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 21.1 % during the assessment period from 2016-2022. The Scope of the report: The Worldwide WEB SCALE IT Types Market 2017 report includes WEB SCALE IT Types industry volume, market Share, market Trends, WEB SCALE IT Types Growth aspects, a wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis, manufacturing capacity, WEB SCALE IT Types Price during the Forecast period from 2017 to 2022. Before purchasing the report please do inquire here: https://market.biz/report/global-web-scale-it-market-ihr/20260/#inquiry Firstly the worldwide WEB SCALE IT Types report provides the fundamental industry outlook to the users. The WEB SCALE IT Types industry outlook covers various points like the industry landscape scenario, market development trends, definitions, the scope of the market on large scale. The basic summary of the WEB SCALE IT Types market, the research techniques used for conducting an in-depth analysis of the WEB SCALE IT Types market are offered in this research document. The dominant #WEBSCALE IT Types industry players are as follows: 1) #VmWare 2) #Nutanix 3) #Rackspace Worldwide WEB SCALE IT Types market then covers the key details of the report based on market characteristics, market division, the trends followed by the key players and its global impact. The WEB SCALE IT Types market dynamics, product costs, market constraints, supply and demand scenario, market presence in the key regions and the emerging market segments are covered in this report.

http://m.digitaljournal.com/pr/3418805

Global Cloud Storage Market Key Players - Amazon Web Services (U.S.), IBM Corporation (U.S.), Microsoft Corporation (U.S.) by Forecast to 2023

In this rapidly changing world of technology, cloud storage market is gaining immense popularity owing to its ability to easily integrate with the already existing infrastructure of the enterprise. Cloud storage gateway solution provides features like encryption and compression which adds security to the data. It also allows rapid transfer of data on cloud. As compared to other regions, the cloud storage market in North America is expected to witness a significantly healthy growth is accounted for the highest market share throughout the forecast period. U.S and Canada are anticipated to drive the growth owing to the presence of large number of established players of cloud storage solutions in the cloud storage market. In addition to this, the region also has a well-established infrastructure and higher internet penetration. Moreover, increasing adoption of cloud storage by small and medium enterprises is expected to be a major factor for the growth of cloud storage market. The Cloud Storage Market is growing rapidly over 25% of CAGR and is expected to reach at approx. USD 104 billion by the end of forecast period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 30 market data tables and figures spread over 100 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on “Cloud Storage Market -Forecast to 2023”. Major Key Players: #AmazonWebServices (U.S.) #IBM Corporation (U.S.) #Microsoft Corporation (U.S.) #VMware , Inc. (U.S.) #HPE nterprise Company (U.S.) #Google, Inc. (U.S.) #Oracle Corporation (U.S.) #Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (U.S.) #EMC Corporation (U.S.) #Dropbox, Inc. (U.S.)

http://www.newsmaker.com.au/news/311964/global-cloud-storage-market-key-players-amazon-web-services-us-ibm-corporation-us-microsoft-corporation-us-by-forecast-to-2023#.WTR8vCNOlnE

Enterprise OpenStack adds users and supporters, but criticisms persist

A lack of open source development support adds to enterprise #OpenStack criticism, as the platform inches forward with traditional IT customers and partners.  Managed OpenStack private cloud gains support vs. roll-your-own IT shops map journey from #VMware Cloud Foundation to #IBM Cloud, #AWS #Azure Stack appliance choices widen, as pricing questions linger. OpenStack continues to slowly add enterprise supporters and users, while its critics continue to squawk. OpenStack supporters and partners proclaim the open source infrastructure as a service is a viable private cloud platform for legacy enterprise workloads. At the same time, the latest OpenStack user survey released last month reiterates sluggish enterprise uptake amid persistent concerns around its complexity and costs.  Among #OpenStack 's enterprise supporters is #DellEMC , which has partnered with #Rackspace -- one of OpenStack's founders -- to offer OpenStack #PrivateCloud with Dell EMC compute and storage products. And at the recent Dell EMC World event, mixed views about enterprise OpenStack echoed the market's broad disagreement. As part of a larger organizational directive to move to the cloud, Providence Health and Services is standing up multiple environments in parallel, including OpenStack, along with VMware orchestration tools #vRealize Orchestrator and vRealize Automation. The goal is to request and provision a server in 15 minutes, versus the days it takes now to process through multiple teams, according to Paul Anguiano, a Unix engineer at the company. Anguiano is trying to convince leaders at Providence to move beyond basic orchestration of virtual machines in favor of OpenStack, which he said will give them more power and flexibility. Still, the use of OpenStack and VMware tools is less ambitious than full-on enterprise OpenStack deployment, to make better use of the company's existing tools and skills. "We're not married to OpenStack, it is just up and running," he said.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/450419409/Enterprise-OpenStack-adds-users-and-supporters-but-criticisms-persist

Rackspace and Dell EMC Team to Revolutionize Private Cloud

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - May 08, 2017) - #Rackspace® today announced from the #OpenStack Summit in Boston that it has collaborated with #DellEMC to deliver OpenStack® private clouds with leading compute and storage solutions from Dell® EMC®. This offer combines Rackspace operational expertise with Dell EMC compute and storage solutions to create an easy-to-consume private cloud as-a-service offering. It is the first step in an expanded relationship with Dell EMC in which both companies will help lower the barrier to entry for private clouds and deliver rapid private cloud elasticity through a revolutionary utility-based consumption model. "Dell EMC is committed to providing customers with best in class solutions to simplify their OpenStack deployments while taking advantage of new innovations," said Jay Snyder, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances, Industries and Service Providers at Dell EMC. "One example of this commitment to OpenStack is our latest offering with Rackspace, one of a handful of our global Titanium partners which has unmatched experience in operating OpenStack clouds at scale. The ability to consume Rackspace® OpenStack Private Cloud as-a-Service coupled with Dell EMC compute and storage solutions brings enhanced best-in-class capabilities for customers looking to take advantage of the opportunities offered by private cloud." With this offering, customers will be able to combine Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud with leading Dell EMC compute and storage solutions including VMAX Hybrid, VMAX All Flash and Dell Servers, with future plans to include support for Dell EMC ScaleIO. Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud provides public cloud benefits with the security, control and performance of an enterprise environment. It is delivered as-a-service with an industry-leading 99.99 percent API uptime service level agreement (SLA) and can be deployed in a Rackspace data center, customer data center or third-party location. Dell EMC offers the industry's broadest storage portfolio, providing on-premise and cloud storage for every workload and every company size. This portfolio enables Dell EMC customers to run efficient, high-performance data centers today while enabling companies to meet the scalability and modernization needs of tomorrow. In addition, Rackspace and Dell EMC are working to revolutionize the way businesses consume private cloud through innovative features including: Lowered barrier to entry - A low-cost private cloud as-a-service proof of concept (POC) that makes it easier and more cost-effective for customers to adopt private cloud from Rackspace and Dell EMC. Rapid private cloud elasticity - A utility-based pricing model that allows customers to add and remove capacity in a public cloud-like fashion via an application program interface (API), with the security and performance of a private cloud. "Rackspace has a unique track record of enabling customer success with private clouds by delivering OpenStack as-a-service and leveraging our operational expertise gained from more than one billion server hours managing OpenStack," said Scott Crenshaw, SVP and GM of OpenStack Private Cloud at Rackspace. "This is why 451 Research has said that 'Rackspace is the world's leading OpenStack service provider.'" "As a co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace is committed to innovating OpenStack in a way that makes it easier for customers to consume and benefit from," Crenshaw continued. "Our collaboration with Dell EMC will do just this, combining the best of Rackspace expertise and Dell EMC technologies to allow customers to consume an OpenStack private cloud in a way that is more flexible and removes barriers to entry. Our organizations look forward to sharing more updates later this year." According to 451 Research, the OpenStack private cloud as-a-service market is expected to grow at 42% CAGR to reach $2.5 billion by 2020. 451 Research finds that OpenStack mindshare continues to grow for enterprises interested in deploying cloud-native applications in greenfield private cloud environments and eliminating dependencies on proprietary software. Expanded OpenStack private cloud features including a utility-based pricing model and low cost private cloud as-a-service proof of concept will be available from Rackspace and Dell EMC in Q3 2017.

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/rackspace-and-dell-emc-team-to-revolutionize-private-cloud-2214619.htm

How Rackspace Optimized Red Hat Ceph Storage

Protecting data was dead center of our intention at #Rackspace when we worked with #RedHat to create our Red Hat #Ceph Storage reference architecture. When designing any solution, it is easy to get carried away and only select individual components that are considered best in class. However, that can cause costs to spiral, as would building specific snowflake solutions for every deployment. Being pragmatic and seeking the balance between capacity, performance, operational complexity, support burden, and cost can be tough with competing priorities, but it is critical to building a repeatable and scalable system which is highly optimized and remains affordable. The Rackspace reference architecture for Ceph Storage provides two types of storage nodes — one designed for performance and another for capacity. We deploy a minimum of five of either of those nodes to create a cluster. To gain the greatest density, we like to use servers that support 24 x 2.5” disks. While in terms of performance it could be argued that the node itself becomes a bottleneck, we find this solution provides a great low latency offering, at a reasonable density. Similarly, for our capacity offering, we again use the same chassis, and populate it with a small number of SSDs for performance, and fill the remaining slots with NL-SAS HDDs for high capacity. This provides dense capacity while also providing good throughput, as there are still a large number of spindles available. Typically, we distribute the Ceph monitor daemons either on the management nodes of the cloud, or in larger deployments onto some of the storage nodes themselves. We have found that dedicating physical servers to monitor duties is typically not necessary, except in the largest of clusters.

https://blog.rackspace.com/how-rackspace-optimized-red-hat-ceph-storage

Multi Cloud Management Market Players Analysis: VMware, Dell technologies, Accenture, IBM Corporation, Rackspace, Right scale, Doublehorn, Cliqr Technologies, Jam cracker

Globally the market for multi-cloud management is increasing rapidly. The major factor that drives the growth of multi-cloud management is growing need for agility and automation, growing hybrid cloud adoption and rising need for effective defined governance process in organization among others. Key Players Profiled In this Report #Rackspace, Inc. (U.S.) #Delltechnologies, Inc. (U.S.) #Accenture LLC (Ireland) #Rightscale, Inc. (U.S.) #VMware, Inc. (U.S.) #Doublehorn (U.S.) #Cliqr Technologies Inc. (U.S.) #IBM Corporation (U.S.) #Jamcracker, Inc. (U.S.) #ECManaged SL (U.K.)

http://www.newsmaker.com.au/news/230367/multi-cloud-management-market-players-analysis-vmware-dell-technologies-accenture-ibm-corporation-rackspace-right-scale-doublehorn-cliqr-technologies-jam-cracker#.WIgcjHpMFnE

Bane of Silicon Valley patents sets its sights on Rackspace and NetApp

Cloud host #Rackspace and storage vendor #NetApp are fighting a patent holder who's targeted some of tech's biggest names in the notorious Eastern District of Texas. The duo are standing up to Realtime Data over the firm's claim they violated seven patents it owns, spanning compression and deduplication. Realtime has filed six claims against NetApp or against NetApp and Rackspace jointly, plus a seventh claim solely asserted against Rackspace. NetApp appears the primary target with Realtime citing claimed violations in NetApp's ONTAP, all the company's flash AFF-based series or products and its hybrid disk FAS systems, FlexPod, NetApp Private Storage (NPS) for Cloud, ONTAP Cloud and SolidFire, which NetApp bought in February 2016. Rackspace has been ensnared too, it seems, because it uses NetApp's gear to float its OpenStack cloud. Rackspace's marketing touts its OpenStack-based private cloud and cloud backup as being "powered by NetApp". The Realtime suit filed in June – case number 6:16-cv-961 – seeks damages, costs and expenses before a jury. The suit has been filed in the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division; Realtime Data lodged cases against 21 firms dating as far back 2008 in the region. Eastern Texas has become a major destination for patent cases. The legislative branch hears more patent cases than any other court system in the US – around a quarter have been filed there in one year. The district has attracted litigants because it's known as a "rocket docket" – a court that streamlines filings, cutting the size of documents lawyers can file and reins in their presentations to the court. The majority of Realtime's cases in Eastern Texas, 16, have been filed in just the last two years – against Dell, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Fujitsu, Apple BMC, Dropbox, SAP and Microsoft. Rackspace has dismissed Realtime Data as a patent troll. It says it's contesting the suite because it has learned from experience to fight claims as a matter of principle. East Texas requires all parties to go to trial, unless the judge grants motion for summary judgement, which can make a persuasive case for litigants to settle in order to stem potential losses and contain costs. In patent disputes, defendants typically choose to settle quickly and early to avoid the length and expense of a patent case. The American Intellectual Property Law Association in 2013 said the cost of a case where $1m-$25m is at risk was $4.4m. Associate general counsel Van Lindberg told The Reg: "Since 2012 we have been committed to fighting patent trolls in the public space and court and elsewhere. And as soon as we stood up to these trolls, we started winning. "What's really amazing is that a lot of the things they [Realtime Data] are alleging are mutually incompatible – they claim patent documents they interpret one way then if you believe them they have a second set of documents that don't work." Lindberg was hired in 2013 by Rackspace to stem what he called a tide of patent suits. The Register contacted attorneys for Realtime Data but did not receive a response at the time of writing. NetApp general counsel Matt Fawcett, meanwhile, said in a written statement simply: "NetApp has a long history of vigorously defending ourselves against non-practicing entities, and view the general practice of patent suits like these as hostile to innovation." Linux patent experts sought to assure OpenStackers that Realtime Data's claim does not represent a threat to their chosen cloud just because Rackspace is caught up and because their OpenStack-based cloud employs the context NetApp systems. Keith Bergelt, chief executive of the Open Invention Network (OIN), told The Reg: "We do not view the patents as representing a threat to open source, the kernel or OIN's Linux System. "Rather, these are a set of data compression-related patents that do not bear directly on open source and are not specific to any individual project's core technology. For this reason we do not anticipate that the litigation and/or licensing of such patents will negatively affect the growth of the OpenStack project." OIN opens patents defensively so that individuals and organisations cannot asset claims against Linux or open source. Members of OIN, founded in 2005 initially to shield Linux against claims by the litigious SCO, include Google, IBM, NEC, Red Hat, SUSE and Toyota. Realtime Data owns a portfolio of 30 patents grouped into families that are close together in terms of what they claim to cover. According to Rackspace's Lindberg, Realtime has spread its various assertions so different groups of patents are asserted against different defendants at different times, therefore making it difficult for those charged to co-ordinate a defence. The patents in the Rackspace and NetApp case are: US patent No. 7,161,506 for systems and methods for data compression such as content dependent data compression and granted in January 2007; No. 9,054,728 for data compression systems and methods awarded June 2015; No. 7,358,867 for content independent data compression method and system awarded April 2008; No. 7,378,992 for content independent data compression method and system awarded May 2008; No. 7,415,530 for system and methods for accelerated data storage and retrieval awarded April 2008; No. 8,643,513 for data compression systems and methods granted February 2014; and No. 9,116,908 covering system and methods for accelerated data storage and retrieval from August 2015. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/23/realtime_data_suit_rackspace_netapp/

In storage, 2016 M&A centered on networking, hyper-convergence

#Broadcom 's $5.9 billion deal to buy #Brocade and transactions involving hyper-converged vendors and cloud provider #Rackspace highlight storage mergers and acquisitions in 2016.

All mergers and acquisitions, or M&A, in the #datastorage world may forever pale in comparison to #Dell 's $60 billion-plus deal in 2015 to purchase #EMC. The transaction closed in September 2016 and remained the talk of the industry throughout the year.

But there were other billion-dollar storage acquisitions this year, as well as plenty of smaller deal activity in the hyper-converged market, with 2016 M&A news involving market leader #Nutanix, #Pivot3 and #Gridstore.

In the largest storage deal of 2016, Broadcom Ltd. moved to further consolidate the #FibreChannel (FC) industry with its $5.9 billion agreement in November to purchase Brocade Communications Systems Inc. If the deal passes regulatory muster, it will leave only three major vendors selling FC storage networking products.

#Cisco sells FC switches, like Brocade, but it is noted more for its Ethernet-based networking products.

For years, #Emulex Corp. and #QLogic Corp. dominated the FC host bus adapter market, until semiconductor providers scooped them up in the past two years. Cavium announced plans to buy QLogic in June for about $1 billion, just over a year after #Avago Technologies closed on its deal to purchase Emulex for $609 million, including cash and acquired debt.

Earlier this year, Avago closed on a blockbuster $37 billion deal, announced in May 2015, to acquire another semiconductor specialist, Broadcom Corp. Avago took the Broadcom name when the acquisition closed in February 2016. It is this version of Broadcom that has agreed to the buy Brocade.

The Brocade acquisition would make Broadcom the primary vendor of the two main components of a Fibre Channel infrastructure -- switches and host bus adapters (HBAs). That could open the door to antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad. Broadcom said it expects the transaction to close in mid-2017.

Broadcom plans to divest Brocade's IP business, which includes wireless and campus networking, data center switching and routing, and software. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan explained during a conference call that Brocade's IP networking technology would pose a competitive threat to his company's semiconductor customers. Those customers include OEM system vendors Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM. Many Broadcom OEMs also sell IP switches.

Tan called Brocade's FC SAN switch business "a very sustainable franchise, with phenomenal profitability." Brocade's FC revenue exceeded $1 billion in 2015, according to Dell'Oro Group. But Dell'Oro's market projections show FC product shipments in gradual decline and FC revenue to be roughly flat, at $2.2 billion, in 2016.

Industry analysts said they don't expect the Brocade-Broadcom merger to have a significant effect on the FC SAN market's trajectory. Enterprises with investments in FC are likely to continue to use the time-tested storage networking technology for mission-critical workloads, despite the growing popularity of IP-based networking for storage.

Although FC's growth potential is low, Cavium envisioned enough of an upside with HBAs to attempt its first foray into mainstream storage. Cavium CEO Syed Ali cited the ongoing transition from 8 Gbps to 16 Gbps FC and the expected shift to 32 Gbps in 2017 and 2018 as all-flash arrays grow in popularity as drivers of FC sales. Ali claimed all-flash arrays have an FC attach rate of 70% to 80%.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450409522/In-storage-2016-MA-centered-on-networking-hyper-convergence

Cisco confirms it’s killing Intercloud public cloud in March 2017

#Cisco has confirmed that it will stop offering its #CiscoIntercloud Services #publiccloud infrastructure in March 2017. Cisco will move workloads to other infrastructure, “including in some cases public cloud,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. The spokesperson would not specify which public clouds will be taking the additional workloads. The Register reported the decision earlier today. Cisco first introduced Intercloud in 2014, emphasizing partnerships with cloud providers and the ability to move workloads from cloud to cloud. In October, Cisco announced a timeline for the end of life for its Intercloud software, which organizations could use to move workloads from private clouds to public clouds. Cisco’s Intercloud Services Platform is different — it includes computing, storage, and networking services that bear a resemblance to what you can find from the top public cloud infrastructure providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.  On the compute side, there are virtual machine (VM) instances optimized for general-purpose workloads, as well as instances optimized for compute, memory, and storage, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Windows operating system (OS) options available, atop Cisco UCS servers running Intel Xeon chips. Cisco also offers block and object storage. Intercloud Services is based on the OpenStack open-source cloud software, like the public cloud that HP launched and then killed. Dell mulled launching an OpenStack-based cloud but backed away form the plans. Rackspace, which helped develop OpenStack, decided to stop providing commodity cloud services based on OpenStack and pivot toward managed cloud in 2014. So Cisco’s choice is not unprecedented. What it is another indication of is the power of the biggest cloud providers, particularly AWS.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/12/13/cisco-confirms-its-killing-intercloud-public-cloud-in-march-2017/

Rackspace Announces Support for Red Hat Ceph Storage 2

SAN ANTONIO, TX--(Marketwired - November 15, 2016) - #Rackspace today announced support for #RedHat #Ceph Storage 2, expanding its Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat porftfolio of services. This new version from Red Hat is based on the 10.2 Jewel community version release of Ceph and addresses key stability requirements for enterprise customers. Data storage growth is both a reality and a burden for today's enterprises. With the move to digital and data intensive workloads, enterprises are storing an increasing amount of data. With Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat support for the Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 release, customers can gain the performance benefits of software defined storage, without taking on the burden of having to deploy, operate, monitor and troubleshoot their OpenStack or OpenStack storage environment. This new release is the most stable version yet of Ceph and provides numerous features and benefits to enterprise users including: Exabyte-level scalability Open APIs Security Reliability and availability Multi-Datacenter Support Performance Cost effectiveness

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/rackspace-announces-support-for-red-hat-ceph-storage-2-nyse-rax-2175789.htm

Supermicro and IBM Extend Strategic Relationship to Deliver Choice and Flexibility for the Next Generation Cloud Datacenter

SALT LAKE CITY, UT--(Marketwired - Nov 15, 2016) - SC16 - Today #Supermicro (NASDAQ: SMCI) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have extended their multi-faceted long-term technology relationship. Supermicro has joined the #OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community that leverages the #IBM POWER architecture. Supermicro is joining IBM, #Google, #NVIDIA, #Canonical, #Rackspace and more than 270 other leading technologists working collaboratively on advanced server, storage, and networking acceleration technology as well as industry leading open source software aimed at delivering more choice, control, and flexibility to developers of next-generation heterogeneous cloud datacenters. The group makes POWER-based hardware and software available to open development, along with making POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. Supermicro is working with IBM on a variety of fronts including IBM Cloud, IBM Storage and now IBM POWER. Supermicro will leverage its strength in workload optimized system designs to deliver best in class IBM Power Systems for IBM and the OpenPOWER ecosystem. "Supermicro is extending its strong IBM relationship by working with IBM on OpenPOWER systems that deliver maximum performance and efficiency" said Wally Liaw, co-founder and senior vice president of international sales at Supermicro. "OpenPOWER customers can benefit from Supermicro's industry leading workload optimized system design in combination with IBM's latest POWER processor technology to reach exceptional performance levels." "Supermicro is a strategic IBM collaborator and their membership in the OpenPOWER Foundation will further extend our strong relationship," said Calista Redmond, OpenPOWER Foundation President and IBM Systems Vice President. "Their expertise in server design, development and manufacturing will foster collaboration among members and further support widespread industry innovation."

http://m.marketwired.com/press-release/supermicro-ibm-extend-strategic-relationship-deliver-choice-flexibility-next-generation-nasdaq-smci-2175667.htm

Red Hat and Ericsson sign open source deal

#RedHat is well known as probably the most successful company built entirely on open-source software. Building a business on top of open source is a hard thing, especially so back in the early days of open source when no one had any real idea how the economics of a product that was free would translate into commercial success. But succeed it did, and Red Hat has created a huge business built entirely on offering services on top of open-source products.

The company's initial success was, of course, built around the corresponding wide uptake of the #Linux operating system. Linux services was what Red Hat built its base upon. But time, as they say, never stands still, and Red Hat has deftly jumped on board a huge number of other open-source initiatives to try and emulate its Linux success.

One initiative Red Hat has been “all in” with is OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing initiative created jointly by #Rackspace and #NASA. #OpenStack has grown from an esoteric little science project to a real thing with thousands of contributors, good examples of real-world production workloads, and a growing, if sometimes grudging, acceptance that it is here to stay.

Red Hat, for its part, is well aware that the success of an initiative such as OpenStack relies upon significant, sustainable and real case studies of adoption. It is also hugely predicated on key strategic partnerships. We see moves towards this today with the announcement that Red Hat is partnering with Ericsson to deliver a series of different open-source solutions, all designed to work together and tailored for specific use cases.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3131628/open-source-tools/red-hat-and-ericsson-sign-open-source-deal.html