Entries by Giles Sirett

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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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University of São Paulo move to open source Apache CloudStack to power Latin Americas largest educational cloud | Case Studies

ShapeBlue, The Cloudstack  Company,  announced that they have been selected to help The University of São Paulo to rapidly scale and enhance their massive “Cloud USP” private cloud by migrating it to Apache Cloudstack open source technology. The project will also involve developing an additional feature set for the USP cloud environment. This follows a public tender process that ShapeBlue successfully won. The University of São Paulo (USP) is Latin America’s largest university, produces more doctorate degrees annually than any other university in the world and ranks fifth in the number of scientific articles published. USP  is one of the […]

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ASG uses Apache CloudStack to build CloudFactory that will help customers plan, deploy and manage internally or externally hosted clouds

ASG provides Global 5000 businesses with world-class professional services and software solutions for Metadata Management, Applications Management, Operations Management, Content Management, Performance Management, Security Management, and Infrastructure Management. Through a wealth of technologies, which have been either developed in-house or gained through strategic acquisitions, ASG enables clients with both mainframe and distributed environments to mobilise their resources, boost productivity, and enhance performance through the intelligent use of technology. Business situation For enterprises looking to automate and simplify the delivery of IT services for the private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud, ASG wanted to offer a comprehensive solution proven to […]

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ShapeBlue’s expertise helps DSS to design new CloudStack IaaS platform | Case Studies

Working with leading-edge technology presents its own unique set of issues. Even technology specialists can encounter problems when faced with designing and building business critical systems on new technology platforms. DSS, headquartered in Greater Reading, Pennsylvania delivers IT solutions that drive business for over 400 regional clients. From their Tier III data centre through a 24/7 service desk to a full portfolio of IT products, the company continually strives to produce high-quality, beyond standard solutions to exceed the expectations of their customers. Proof of concept environment DSS was working on a new proof of concept environment for an IaaS platform […]

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Networking KVM for CloudStack – a 2018 revisit for CentOS7 & Ubuntu 18.04 | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive

Introduction We published the original blog post on KVM networking in 2016 – but in the meantime we have moved on a generation in CentOS and Ubuntu operating systems, and some of the original information is therefore out of date. In this revisit of the original blog post we cover new configuration options for CentOS 7.x as well as Ubuntu 18.04, both of which are now supported hypervisor operating systems in CloudStack 4.11. Ubuntu 18.04 has replaced the legacy networking model with the new Netplan implementation, and this does mean different configuration both for linux bridge setups as well as OpenvSwitch. […]

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ShapeBlue SA extends distribution agreement with NetApp

ShapeBlue SA are pleased to announce the extension of their distribution partner agreement for NetApp in South Africa, building out a successful relationship that started in 2014. ‘ShapeBlue has built a strong partnership with NetApp in this region. Expanding our capabilities to represent the full NetApp portfolio presents a strategic opportunity for us and our partners.’ Says Dan Crowe, Managing Director, ShapeBlue SA. ‘NetApp’s vision, depth of solutions and cloud-centric approach continues to differentiate them. We are seeing a fantastic response, in particular to the Cloud Infrastructure portfolio with HCI and the Cloud Data Services portfolio.’ ShapeBlue, as expert builders […]

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ShapeBlue Security Advisory – Spectre and Meltdown patches in CloudStack 4.9 and 4.11

Overview At the beginning of 2018 a number of vulnerabilities were discovered which allow malicious user space processes to read kernel memory and malicious code in VM guests to read hypervisor memory. These vulnerabilities affect most CPU manufacturers – Intel, AMD, ARM, MIPS, etc. The vulnerabilities were nicknamed “Spectre” and “Meltdown” and are outlined in the following CVEs: Spectre variant 1 – Bounds Check Bypass: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5753 Spectre variant 2 – Branch Target Injection: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5715 Meltdown variant 3 – Rogue Data Cache Launch: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-5754 From a CloudStack point of view the main affected components are the system VM templates. This advisory outlines the fix provided […]

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Working towards CloudStack zero downtime upgrades

As most people know, Apache CloudStack has gained a reputation as a solid, low maintenance dependable cloud orchestration platform. That’s why in last year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant so many leaders and challengers were organisations underpinning their services with Apache CloudStack. However, version upgrades – whilst being much simpler than many competing technologies – have always been the pain point for CloudStack operators. The irony is that upgrading CloudStack itself is usually relatively painless, but upgrading its distributed networking Virtual Routers often results in network downtime for users for a number of minutes, requiring user maintenance windows. At ShapeBlue we have a […]

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ShapeBlue help Ascenty to design and build leading cloud platform for Brazilian market | Case Studies

The cloud is from a long time accepted as a mature technology utilised by companies of all sizes across the world to enable them to carry out their business smarter and faster. As a result, those organisations that can offer their customers a fast, value-for-money and easy-to-use cloud offering are placing themselves at a significant advantage over their competitors. Ascenty, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil, offers on-demand solutions for IT resources that are scalable and highly secure. This gives their customers more control over technology costs and resources without having to invest in new infrastructure, equipment, software licences and training. […]

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CloudStack Usage Service | CloudStack Feature Deep Dive

Introduction CloudStack usage is a complimentary service which tracks end user consumption of CloudStack resources and summarises this in a separate database for reporting or billing. The usage database can be queried directly, through the CloudStack API, or it can be integrated into external billing or reporting systems. For background information on the usage service please refer to the CloudStack documentation set: http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/projects/cloudstack-installation/en/4.9/optional_installation.html http://docs.cloudstack.apache.org/projects/cloudstack-administration/en/4.9/usage.html In this blog post we will go a step further and deep dive into how the usage service works, how you can run usage reports from the database either directly or through the API, and also […]

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