Cloud News: Peak 10, Oracle, Joyent

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

Peak 10 launches Recovery Cloud. Peak 10 announced it has enhanced its recovery cloud service, substantially overhauling its scope, processes and technology to help  customers restore services in the event of a site failure. The Recovery Cloud now incorporates technologies that allow customers to securely replicate production systems to a multi-tenant environment, without changing their existing environment or underlying storage platform. Offered as a DRAaaS (Disaster Reovery as a Service) solution, it allows production systems to be housed on the customer's premises, within a Peak 10 environment, or at a third party data center.  The DR management and replication component of the Recovery Cloud is also available as a standalone service. “Unlike many disaster recovery services that schedule data replication a few times a day, the Peak 10 Recovery Cloud makes use of continuous data protection (CDP), which allows for near real-time data replication,” said Monty Blight, Peak 10 vice president of product management. “Customers can select the point in time to test or restore before a site failure occurred and the length of the history for data restoration, ranging from hours to days, can also be specified by the customer.”

Oracle acquires SelectMinds. Oracle (ORCL) announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire SelectMinds, a provider of cloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management applications. SelectMinds products are already fully integrated with Oracle Cloud Recruiting, Performance Management and Human Capital Management solutions and further extend Oracle’s social and mobile initiatives into talent management. “Recruiting candidates through employee referrals is widely acknowledged as the most effective method to find talent through trusted contacts. Making recruiting efforts efficient and seamless by leveraging social connections and through mobile applications helps companies find better quality candidates and continue to build the pipeline for future talent,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “By adding SelectMinds to Oracle’s Talent Management Cloud, Oracle can help customers with a complete talent management solution, enabling streamlined recruiting practices, more quality referrals, faster employee on-boarding, and better performance.”

Joyent selected by Digital Chocolate. Joyent announced a partnership with Digital Chocolate, a leading provider of social games across growing platforms, to dramatically improve overall gameplay while cutting infrastructure costs in half. The company was able to have its infrastructure keep pace with demand by using the Joyent cloud, to support diverse gameplay and high-volume peaks. “As we switched to a Games-as-a-Service model, we had to deal with a growing and shifting global audience that carried its own micro-P&L by game, geo, even player pool,” said Jason Loia, COO at Digital Chocolate. “Accommodating our very sector-specific needs can be a tall order, because they don’t fit into the traditional one-size-fits-all menu of cloud services. In order to manage the complexity, we needed a provider that could grow with our business needs, and with Joyent, we’ve found a model that enables us to manage the business to our desired level of granularity, not the provider’s.”