Cloud Computing

Intralinks recently announced its new collaboration platform Intralinks VIA.  Traditionally focused in secure deal rooms for M&A in regulated industries, Intralinks is the most recent vendor making the shift to include OFS in its briefcase of offerings– and why not?  In Intralinks' case it makes perfect sense. 

Get a quick insight on what my ESG colleagues and I took away as our first impressions from EMC World last week, in easy-to-consume video format.

Arista announces significant upgrades for its flagship 7500 core data center switch heading into the Interop show in Las Vegas this week. Not merely content to double its capabilities, Arista’s first major upgrade since its inception triples capabilities. While SDN has been all the buzz, Arista wants to remind organizations that hardware still matters and cloud scale environments will certainly take notice.

This ESG Lab review documents hands-on testing of the ExaGrid backup appliance using Veeam Backup & Replication software, and demonstrates the ability to execute Veeam Instant VM Recovery alongside ExaGrid’s capacity- and cost-saving deduplication.

So you’re going to fix all your company’s virtualization woes with your new architecture. You’re going to be the IT hero. The parts for the new solution show up on your loading dock and you start putting the pieces together, only to find out that the NIC cards you ordered don’t support a required protocol. Or worse yet, the expensive network gear you already ordered is missing a critical feature your users depend on. You persevere, scaling back your design, and exchanging components. It never seems to be an even exchange, but at least you are still within budget.

Infrastructure Deployment for 100 Virtual Machines

This ESG Lab Validation report documents hands-on testing of the EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure with Brocade networking for supporting 100 virtual machines (VMs). The report is focused on ease of use, performance, and high-availability networking.

The OFS Market is moving at a lightening fast pace with seemingly new entrants and new features added every week. Dropbox’s latest announcements around its business updates are an example of the ongoing feature enhancements that are released so quickly that I can barely keep up!

WOW! 3,000 people in the main events (users) and a full on analyst day with exclusive time with Keynotes, founders, and key partners. Rackspace also had a private analyst dinner where we sat and chatted with the key cloud people and founders of OpenStack from Rackspace. My biggest impression: This is real, it’s serious, and there are a lot of BIG players putting a lot behind it.

I have been speaking about ICPs during a series of events across the country and received a fantastic question: “What do I do if it breaks?”

This video captures the state of server virtualization and the impact it is having in adjacent IT initiatives. I also step through desktop virtualization, network virtualization, and storage virtualization and the potential economic impact these strategies have on the business.

Virtualizing Tier-1 Application Workloads with Confidence

This ESG Lab report documents the results of independent, hands-on testing of Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with improved Hyper-V virtualization. Testing was focused on the performance scalability of Exchange Server 2013 in a Hyper-V virtualized environment, as well as the ease of deployment and manageability.

ESG’s research has shown that online file sharing (OFS) adoption is rising rapidly. However, many organizations are reluctant to trust their files to an OFS provider’s platform because of security concerns. One possible solution to these security concerns is a hybrid cloud model of OFS. In the hybrid cloud model, some of the organization’s files are stored in the OFS provider’s environment, while others remain within the organization’s own premises.

A hybrid cloud implementation can be an attractive deployment model for a corporate online file sharing (OFS) solution. Hybrid cloud benefits may include greater security and control for the customer organization. An ESG survey of nearly 500 IT professionals working at organizations of all sizes, with varying levels of interest (or disinterest) in OFS, revealed how much of an  impact hybrid cloud offerings will have on the OFS market.

This video blog highlights some of the possibilities when a company make the transformation to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS).

Jonathan Bryce and Mark Collier started off the day talking about the impressive changes in interest and contributions to the OpenStack software. Just quarter over quarter stats from Q4’12 to Q1’13 when they went from 148 member companies to 189 and 175 developers to 252. Also just this past week Juniper and Erikson joined as Gold members with Juniper’s code seeing adoption already through their partnership with CloudScaling. Jonathan and Mark presented their strategic vision that includes three focuses for the OpenStack platform ecosystem – tech, users, and innovation.

Microsoft Cloud OS strategy consists of on-prem, Azure, and the service provider revolving around the consistency of experience and services across each of the consumption models. Microsoft is additionally taking an aggressive stance by maintaining lock step pricing with Amazon.