Cloud News: Red Hat, Panzura, Avaya

News from the cloud computing sector includes developments from Red Hat, Panzura and Avaya:

Red Hat collaborates with Code for America.  Red Hat (RHT) announced a collaboration with Code for America (CfA), a non-profit organization that partners with local governments to foster civic innovation, focused on using technology to increase civic engagement. The collaboration brings Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA Fellows and partner communities free-of-charge to help achieve CfA’s goal of fostering collaboration between city hall and city residents and innovative problem solving through technology. In a contribution worth approximately $300,000,the CfA Fellows will have access to OpenShift free-of-charge for one year and have the option of one additional year of free hosting and services. OpenShift supports many popular frameworks, such as Zend, Java EE, Spring, Rails, Play, with built-in platform support for node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and Java. OpenShift offers an application platform in the cloud that manages the stack so that developers can focus on their application code.

Panzura selected by California State, Northridge.  Cloud storage provider Panzura announced that California State University, Northridge (CSUN), selected the Panzura Global Cloud Storage System to transform its off-site data backup protection process by utilizing Panzura’s encrypted Quicksilver cloud storage controllers. CSUN will streamline its off-site data protection efforts and significantly reduced storage needs, while also shifting CapEx to OpEx. The university manages approximately 300TB of NAS/SAN storage, protected by tape and disk storage. Backup processes were becoming increasingly slow and cumbersome and they needed to transition from the endless CapEx cycle of refreshing tape backup equipment and provisioning more capacity for offsite data protection. "Our goal was to increase process efficiency and reduce storage footprint for off-site backups by eliminating tape and avoiding use of campus-owned disk for off-site backup storage," said Chris Olsen, Sr. Director of Infrastructure Services and ISO at CSUN. "We had some initial hesitations about cloud storage, including the cost to get data to the cloud, data security, and controlling capacity. With Panzura’s Global Cloud Storage System, we simply pointed our Symantec NetBackup application to the Panzura Quicksilver Cloud Storage Controller and the cloud became our backup target, while RSA 4096-bit encryption protected our data with us owning the encryption keys. The solution was straightforward to deploy and the deduplication exceeded our expectations."

Avaya Collaborative Cloud for Cloud Service Providers. Avaya announced additions to the Avaya Collaborative Cloud with new offers specifically designed for cloud service providers (CSPs) that allow them to brand and deliver Avaya’s unified communications, contact center and video solutions. With these new solutions CSPs can help organizations off-load the challenges of managing BYOD environments, widely dispersed workforces and the shifting demands of end-customers. The new offers enable CSPs to evolve and augment enterprise communications with cloud-based solutions as well as provide greater interoperability across vendors, domains and protocols. "With Avaya Collaborative Cloud, cloud service providers can offer a differentiated UC, contact center or video solution to enterprises," said Joel Hackney, SVP and general manager, Cloud Solutions, Avaya.

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