Articles on Datacenters - GURU advisor

CentreStack: the object storage platform by Gladinet

Details: Published: Friday, 31 March 2017 17:22; Written by Lorenzo Bedin

CentreStack is a managed server for the creation of an object storage platform that can be deployed between the walls and in Managed Service Provider mode to be offered as a service to clients.

The product of the american Gladinet is a system halfway between classic file servers for companies and off-premises Cloud storage platforms usually used in SaaS/PaaS mode (think of Dropbox, Onedrive, etc..). By taking the best from both worlds, CentreStack can leverage the internal IT infrastructure (servers, storage, etc..) to offer a file sharing service also suitable for BYOD purposes in a Cloud mode. Management indeed is completely Web based with a dashboard from where you can control and act on all aspects of the platform, be it multi-tenant and multi-node as well.

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Structure and requirements

CentreStack is composed by three main parts, or nodes: Web Front Node, Worker Node and Database Node. Nodes can be deployed as physical hosts or as separate virtual machines, or in an all-in-one mode on a single host (a solution which is particularly suitable for small dimensions scenarios or testing purposes) where all components are installed at once. In some situations Web Front and Worker nodes can be condensed on a single machine.

A range of solutions for datacenter monitoring by AKCP

Details: Published: Friday, 31 March 2017 17:21; Written by Guru Advisor

Leveraging its 35+ years of activity, AKCP offers a wide range of products devoted to monitoring: let’s see what are the most interesting.

The offering by AKCP is composed by sensors, control units and software management server. Its range of products aims to datacenters and whichever space that has to be monitored in terms of security (cameras, smoke sensors), access control (door and presence sensors), environmental data (temperature, humidity, water presence) and power (AC/DC sensors, amperage, relays control).

An AKCP monitoring system is made up of a number of sensors, a control unit that sensor must be connected to and a management sensors. Sensors will measure specific conditions (presence of water, temperature, doors open, etc..) and transmit such information to the control unit for its elaboration. If needed, they can also activate relays switches. Sensors are composed by the sensor itself and a cable terminating with a RJ-45 connection that can be connected to the control unit; you can also use network cables as extensions as long as they fall within the limits recommended for each sensor, so already existing structures, like conduits, can be used.

Cloud and Datacenter Bulletin - January 2017

Details: Published: Tuesday, 24 January 2017 16:15; Written by Riccardo Gallazzi

Amazon adds a Cloud region: Central Canada

Amazon announced at AWS Executive Insights a new AWS region called Central Canada with two Availability Zones, which adds to the regions already presents on the american soil: Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California and AWS GovCloud, thus bringing to 15 the number or global regions with 40 Availability Zones.

Just last year AWS opened its first office in Canada, despite having tens of thousands of clients, and last august it added CloudFront sites in Toronto and Montreal to satisfy the request. The nes region will be hosted in Montreal data centers.

“For many years, we’ve had an enthusiastic base of customers in Canada choosing the AWS Cloud because it has more functionality than other cloud platforms, an extensive APN Partner and customer ecosystem, as well as unmatched maturity, security, and performance,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “Our Canadian customers and APN Partners asked us to build AWS infrastructure in Canada, so they can run their mission-critical workloads and store sensitive data on AWS infrastructure located in Canada. A local AWS Region will serve as the foundation for new cloud initiatives in Canada that can transform business, customer experiences, and enhance the local economy.”

The new Central Canada is available for all AWS service including S3, EC2 and RDS. The first January 2017 a new AWS office in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) opened.

Pritunl: an enterprise and on-premises SDN based on OpenVPN

Details: Published: Friday, 20 May 2016 17:50; Written by Lorenzo Bedin

Pritunl is an open source platform capable of realizing distributed VPN networks. By leveraging the OpenVPN protocol it allows -according to the chosen licensing model- to setup virtual network architectures. In practice, it allows to easily connect devices inside or outside the walls, also in companies with two or more branches, creating a VPN managed with advanced rules and a centralized authentication system.Pritunl integrates several services of third parties like Amazon AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud, it’s a virtual network space in the Cloud available to users within the AWS suite) with automated failover and Single Sign On (SSO) authentication. Integration for the use of SSO include services like Google Apps, Slack, OneLogin Okta, DUO and Radius: each one of these service can be used to guarantee users the access to the Pritunl infrastructure with their own accounts and without having to use dedicated credentials. In case the Enterprise license is chosen, which allows the installation on an unlimited number of Pritunl server, the high availability with automated failover feature can be leveraged, also given the fact that there are no master nodes, instead each node acts as the same functional level of the others. Pritunl also integrates a server replication feature, thus offering an high level of scalability for clusters. With the aim of geographically distributed installations, the platform is based on the renowned MongoDB which offers an high level of reliability (in particular as the number of nodes and users grows) associated with the chance of replication.

Here's the secret to compete with AWS: interview with Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp CEO

Details: Published: Monday, 09 November 2015 18:51; Written by Filippo Moriggia

Ditlev Bredahl, CEO OnApp

We’ve talked with Ditlev Bredahl, OnApp founder and CEO, during VMworld 2015 in Barcelona. This is what he told us.

Tell us about how the OnApp adventure began.

I founded OnApp in 2010. Before 2010, I was personally managing a Service Provider, i was providing several companies with hosting services and I decide to sell mine and dedicate to a new project. As Amazon Web Service continued to grow, I wanted to realise something that could compete with such colossus. No small cloud provider can compete with Amazon: it cannot provide the same global coverage, it’s not able to build an infrastructure that scales the same way and it can’t include in the offer all the services that Amazon proposes.

OnApp is a revolutionary service because it allows all the Service Provider of this world to ally creating a sort of federation, making a competition with Amazon possible.