Entries by Giles Sirett

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ShapeBlue Has Become an Employee-Owned Business

Today we announcе that ShapeBlue is now a 100% employee-owned business: owned by all of its employees, for the benefit of all of those employees. I will continue as full-time CEO, and am excited to do so, but am no longer a shareholder in the business. The business is now legally owned by a trust that has been set up to act in the best interests of all ShapeBlue staff. In this article, I want to explain the rationale for this decision and how I think it will help ShapeBlue continue to develop and protect our ongoing mission.   Building […]

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What’s new in CloudStack 4.16

Apache CloudStack 4.16 is the latest release of the cloud management platform from the Apache Software Foundation and is a result of months of work from the development community. 4.16 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release so will be maintained for a period of 18 months after release.  As always, the release contains a myriad of small improvements and bug fixes but here we focus on the major new functionality of the release.  New CloudStack Integrations  Two new major storage integrations are shipped with 4.16.  CloudStack and Dell PowerFlex Integration A plugin for Dell PowerFlex (previously ScaleIO ) allows […]

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ShapeBlue enables the University of Sao Paulo to deliver federated cloud services | Case Studies

The University of São Paulo (USP) is Latin America’s largest university and Brazil’s most prestigious academic institution. It produces more doctorate degrees annually than any other university in the world and ranks fifth in the number of scientific articles published. It is one of the world’s leading research institutions, with 100,000 students, 6,000 professors and 17,000 employees spread over 11 campuses. USP successfully built a private cloud environment (Cloud USP) that would help them overcome the challenges of having 150 disparate IT environments and the ever-increasing demands for compute and storage in their dynamic research environment. USP saw the opportunity […]

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OIS and ShapeBlue Announce Apache® CloudStack® v4.11 To Power CloudSchool Platform | Case Studies

Enables rapid development of cost-effective, scalable Cloud-based educational solutions Education IT specialist Oakford Internet Services (OIS) announced today that the latest version of their highly successful and acclaimed CloudSchool platform will be based on the latest edition of Apache® CloudStack®. “Within the UK education sector, budgets are always decreasing whilst the demand on the schools IT infrastructure and supporting applications are increasing,” said Peregrine Sharples, Managing Director of OIS. “The traditional onsite IT infrastructure model simply does not scale alongside these shrinking budgets.” To combat this challenge Oakford launched its CloudSchool solution in 2011 that allows educational establishments across the […]

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Telia Latvia use Apache CloudStack to accelerate move to Next Generation Telco

Telia Latvia was founded in 1992 as a telecommunications company with a focus on data communications and internet services. In 2009 they established one of the most modern data centres in the Baltics and in 2013 introduced new generation cloud and CDN services. They now deliver best-in-class cloud and telecommunication services to customers in the Baltics and beyond. Headquartered in Riga, they are part of the Telia Company group, which is the largest Nordic and Baltic fixed-voice, broadband, and mobile operator by revenue and customer base. Telia Company operates Europe’s largest and fastest-growing wholesale IP backbone and is the 10th-largest […]

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Project Primate – a new UI for Apache CloudStack

There is currently significant effort going on in the Apache CloudStack community to develop a new, modern, UI (user interface) for CloudStack: Project Primate. In this article, I discuss why this new UI is required, the history of this project and how it will be included in future CloudStack releases. There are a number of key dates that current users of CloudStack should take note of and plan for, which are listed towards the end of this article.   We also recently held a webinar on this subject:   The current CloudStack UI The current UI for Apache CloudStack was […]

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Machine Learning and Apache CloudStack | Case Studies

Introduction In this blog we discuss applications of machine learning (ML) in datacenters and how that might integrate with Apache CloudStack (ACS). We also try to identify various places in the lifecycle of datacentres where such tools can be helpful. With any datacentre deployment, the primary goal is to achieve efficient resource provisioning whilst also maintaining performance and availability. Datacentres have become complex and multidimensional, both in terms of software and hardware, and we should also consider a hybrid hosting character. Maintaining an optimal deployment with minimal downtime is consequently becoming more challenging with manual operations. Recent trends show some […]

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Globo chooses CloudStack for its application development & system management platform | Case Studies

Globo.com is the Internet arm of GRUPO Globo, the largest media conglomerate in Latin America, with offices in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. It operates the largest vertical web portals in Brazil, focussing on News (G1), Sports (globoesporte.com), Videos (Globo Videos) and Celebrities (Ego). The company also acts as a service provider for all of the other media businesses in the group , giving strategic and technology support to them for the online elements of their operations. It has excellence on high-volume web distribution and is responsible for the highest simultaneous video streaming audiences in the country. Business situation […]

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Securing CloudStack 4.11 with HTTPS/TLS

Apache CloudStack is generally considered secure out of the box, however it does have the capability of protecting both system VM traffic as well as management traffic with TLS certificates. Prior to version 4.11 CloudStack used Tomcat as the web server and servlet container. With 4.11 this has been changed to embedded Jetty web server and servlet container that makes CloudStack more secure and independent of distribution provided Tomcat version which could be prone to security issues. This changes the management server’s TLS configuration. In this blog post we’ll go through how to implement native TLS to protect both the system […]

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Datacenter Services choose Apache CloudStack to deliver enterprise grade public IaaS cloud

Part of the CSN Group, DATACENTER Services believes that IT parties do not want to invest in IT Infrastructure. It is too expensive in terms of cash and knowledge. Therefore they offer ‘low level’ IT services: CompanyCloud IaaS CompanyCloud On-line backup tooling and storage Company-Box, the secure alternative for DropBox All of them are white labelled and true pay-per-use. Customers are IT Service providers, Independent Software Vendors and IT departments of larger Companies. Business situation DATACENTER Services set about choosing an orchestration platform to underpin their public IaaS offering, as Cees Doets (Director) explained “We needed an IaaS platform that […]

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