Cloud News: Cisco, BMC, Sungard, Nimsoft, F5

Here’s a roundup of  some of this week’s headlines from the cloud computing industry:

Cisco and BMC announce alliance. Cisco (CSCO) and BMC announced a strategic alliance to develop and market new solutions for large-scale multi-tenant cloud computing infrastructures.  As a part of this announcement they have made available the Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform to meet the requirements of service providers and large-scale private cloud computing environments.  The solution aids in the deployment of end-to-end cloud services running on a cloud computing infrastructure that spans data center networks, computing systems, storage and applications.  The integrated system will build on both BMC's Cloud LifeCycle Management (CLM) and Cisco's Unified Service Delivery solutions. "Cisco and BMC have a common vision for advancing Cloud computing with unified infrastructure combined with seamless management. The Integrated Cloud Delivery Platform enables our customers to deploy end-to-end IT services running on a cloud infrastructure that spans networks, systems, storage and applications," said Padmasree Warrior, CTO and senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise, Commercial and Small Business for Cisco. Cisco and BMC representatives discuss the new strategic alliance in this YouTube video.

Sungard selects Nimsoft.  Nimsoft announced that SunGard has selected the Nimsoft Monitoring System (NMS) as the underlying platform for its new cloud services offering, giving its clients high availability and rapid elasticity, while providing true automation that simplifies service management.  "Our customers rely on us to provide highly available services to support their mission critical applications," said Rob Walters, vice president of product management at SunGard. "Nimsoft intuitive APIs enable us to provide comprehensive, proactive managed services and allow us to deploy customized monitoring policies on the fly."

F5 extends products to the cloud. F5 Networks (FFIV) announced major enhancements to its Data Solutions portfolio, including the ARX Cloud Extender solution, which supports a variety of cloud storage providers and object storage platforms, an ARX Virtual Edition appliance, and the F5 Control file services solution. Intelligent, automated storage tiering capabilities are built into the ARX solution, making it easy for companies to integrate cloud storage into an existing infrastructure.  The new solution is fully qualified foruse with Amazon S3, Iron Mountain VFS cloud storage and NetApp StorageGRID. "Our mission is to help the future learn from the past, which means we need to save enormous volumes of data indefinitely,” said Sean Maisey, Manager of IT Operations and Engineering at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. “We’ve used ARX for years to tier data between our NAS devices, but cloud storage offers us a tremendous opportunity to more cost effectively support our mission. F5’s ARX Cloud Extender allows us to use the automated tiering capabilities of the F5 platform to front-end the cloud and treat it as another tier for secure deep archive and recovery purposes. This, in turn, will free up space on our NAS devices. And best of all, it will happen automatically, without disrupting users or applications, and without IT intervention.”