HP Endorses Openstack

Not to be outdone by Dell, HP have openly come out this week and showed support for the rapidly growing open source cloud platform – Openstack.   Announced yesterday on HP corporate blog they will be joining and supporting OpenStack.

HP is in a unique position to bring together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the point where cloud and connectivity converge.
 
HP recognizes that open and interoperable cloud infrastructure and services are critical in delivering the next generation of cloud-based services to developers, businesses and consumers.  Over the past year, the OpenStack community has been focused on developing open source software for building private and public clouds.  Today, OpenStack has participation from more than 90 organisations with 1200 participants.
 
HP is taking an active role in the OpenStack community and see this as an opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

HP is joining a wide range of tech companies—including such rivals and partners as Citrix Systems, Dell, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco Systems, Brocade and Mellanox Technologies—that have signed on to the year-old organisation, whose goal is to create an open and standard cloud environment for both public and private clouds. All the code for OpenStack is available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Happy Birthday Openstack

A couple of weeks back Equanet were lucky enough to attend the first EMEA forum for OpenStack we have been tracking this solution closely since its inception a year ago and all I can say is watch this space for some exciting developments.

While companies such as VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat hope to use their data center presence to grab significant wallet share of the IaaS, a growing number of technology providers are aligning around open source cloud contender OpenStack as a platform for both public cloud providers and for customers' private clouds.

Well-established vendors and providers such as Dell, NASA, Rackspace and Citrix are throwing real weight behind OpenStack in the form of actual products and implementations.  And to bring real credibility to that Citrix just acquire cloud.com.  That's good news. It means the year-old project isn't likely to fade away anytime soon.

Dell is among the most notable companies to throw its weight behind OpenStack. The company this week unveiled its anticipated package of hardware, software, and services built around OpenStack, aimed at giving organisations the tools to deploy their own IaaS operations.

This is one area to watch and with the backing of major vendors and consultancies we believe that this is going to be a great journey.

Interested in understanding more about Equanet and our cloud capability, contact us.

Windows Server 8 Sneak Preview

Equanet have recently come back from the Microsoft World Partner Conference, which really cemented the reach that Microsoft has with over 15,000 partners attending the conference.  One of the key take aways was the next release of Windows 8 and some of the elements that are going to be included in it.

Windows Server 8, the server complement of Windows 8 client, is on the same development track and path as Windows 8 client.

Microsoft is suggesting Windows Server 8 is a key private-cloud building block, which means virtualisation will be critical to the next release. Microsoft demonstrated only one of what officials said would be several of more than 100 new features coming in the next version of Windows Server: The next version of its Hyper-V hypervisor.

The coming Hyper-V Replica feature provides asynchronous virtual machine replication. All users will need is Hyper-V and a network connection. Users will be able to schedule replication to happen immediately or later. The new feature will allow users to do things such as replicate their mission-critical database to an offsite data vendor such as Equanet Cloud.  Microsoft also is going to allow Windows Server 8 users to replicate unlimitedly without charging additional fees per virtual machine.

Microsoft is also believed to be providing the next version of its Hyper-V hypervisor in the Windows 8 client, as well, though Microsoft has yet to announce this officially.

You can see this demonstration here, and fast forward to 38:00mins.

I’m over here!

OK for those of you who used to follow me, you may be wondering where I have been of late. Well its been an interesting few months, culminating in me taking a position at Equanet to help drive the solutions capability into the market place.

One of the key elements to drive is the positioning of Equanet’s cloud and vdi offering (amongst many others).  And for those of you wondering what we can offer you – all I can say is keep watching this blog, these tweets and this website.  All will become clear and it will be big and innovative and delivered by a fantastic pool of consultants covering the length and breadth of the IT space from advisory engagement through to delivery and support.

As ever, anything that you read on this blog can be delivered from our consulting team and we aim to be thought provoking and informative.  If you have any questions or indeed want to contact me please email me on charles.barratt@equanet.co.uk

Charles.