Big Switch Networks Expand Their Reach, Now with HCI Integration

Big Switch Networks, the Santa Clara–based software-defined networking company, has just released a new version of the Big Cloud Fabric product. Big Cloud Fabric, a software-defined networking product that has been on the market for over four years, is heavily integrated into VMware. For the uninitiated, its core pitch is that with its product, you …

Moving Home and Troublesome Files: Issue with Cross-Cloud

You may or may not be aware that I have just moved house, and, me being me, I have not done it by halves. My family and I up’d sticks to the other side of the world, and we landed in Perth—not Scotland, but Australia. Call it a cross-cloud migration; this obviously was fraught with difficulties …

The New OpenStack: Collaboration

At this year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, the message was clear. OpenStack needs to pivot from a science experiment to a production system. Even though this is happening, it has been happening slowly. Some would argue that it has been achieved for the likes of PayPal and other extremely large institutions, such as AT&T. However, running, configuring, and …

Getting to OpenStack

In the industry, OpenStack is seen as very hard to implement. Considering this, I began to think that most people who deploy OpenStack try to bite off too a large chunk of OpenStack at one go, to implement it all instead of just what they need. OpenStack is a cloud management platform, not the hypervisor, so …

How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …

Managing Your Cloud from the Cloud

Building a private cloud was a high priority for a number of organizations in 2014. This priority carried over into 2015 because it is hard to execute. For many organizations, it has carried over again into 2016. Of course, the definition of a private cloud has changed in that time, too. Some organizations are happy …