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Flexential | August 16, 2022
Flexential, a leading provider of data center, colocation, cloud and connectivity, today further extended its FlexAnywhere™ hybrid IT solutions portfolio that address key CIO pain points by improving application performance, providing business agility and the ability to scale IT infrastructure, and delivering superior interconnection capabilities.
The new enhancements to Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud (HPC) – Advanced Access solutions provide full control of enterprise private cloud environments with new capabilities for rapidly migrating applications, workloads and data as business requirements change. The company also today added support for advanced metrics and reporting tools backed by Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Long-term adoption of hybrid work environments has reduced reliance on traditional infrastructure. Gartner® forecasts that "worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, up from $494.7 billion in 2022".* It's essential that businesses have the operational control and flexibility to adjust, plan and scale workload placements accordingly.
Flexential's HPC Advanced Access solution is a high-performance hosted private cloud offering that allows customers to have full administrative control over the provider-owned VMware vCenter server. Originally launched in 2021, the solution has seen rapid adoption, with the number of hosted private cloud customer deployments more than doubling across the national FlexAnywhere™ platform of 40 data centers in the last year.
HPC Advanced Access continues to provide unique levels of customer control and resource management with performance that was previously unachievable. The solution will now support more flexible workload movement and placement, self-driving application operations and performance optimization.
Core enhancements include:
Application Mobility: Enabling customers to reliably move workloads without downtime or performance degradation.
ML and AI-driven Performance Management: Providing continuous performance optimization, capacity and cost management, intelligence remediation and integrated compliance across customer operations.
Advanced Metrics and Reporting Tools: Offering self-service capabilities across applications and infrastructure, allowing businesses to optimize, plan and scale their VMware Cloud.
"Flexibility has never been more essential to the modern-day enterprise," Mike Fuhrman, chief operating officer of Cloud and Managed Services, Flexential. "With the latest enhancements to our HPC Advanced Access solution, our team is providing customers with the tools and insights they need to be more agile in their workload placements, application operations and overall performance. As business needs shift, we continue to meet customers with the solutions that will drive efficiency no matter their operational location."
"Hybrid IT solutions continue to grow in popularity as enterprises increasingly turn to professionally managed data centers to deploy key elements of their infrastructure. By providing direct access to vCenter coupled with advanced analytics, Flexential's customers can now benefit from the best of both worlds. These advanced capabilities enable new levels of AI-powered visibility in a solution that already delivers maximum configuration flexibility to enterprises for managing their own applications, while providing peace of mind as their data is hosted and replicated securely in Flexential's hosted private cloud,"
Geoff Thompson, VP, VMware Cloud Provider Sales
BRIDGE Healthcare Partners is a managed service provider (MSP) that focuses on servicing the IT needs of clients in the highly regulated healthcare space and other non-profits throughout the US. As a result it needs a dependable, secure environment to ensure the availability and safety of its clients' applications and data—including electronic health records (EHR) and billing information. The company utilizes Flexential Private Cloud and Hosted Private Cloud - Advanced Access to protect its clients' Electronic Healthcare Records and enable seamless operations.
"Flexential is in complete alignment with our strategic plan—from its people and service to its growth perspectives," said Tracey Campbell, CEO of BRIDGE Healthcare Partners. "Our clients rely on us to deliver high-performing, reliable IT environments so their healthcare data and applications are secure and always available. Flexential is key in helping us deliver this essential service."
"Our clients look to us to simplify their IT infrastructure and provide the flexibility and agility to grow the business into the future. Flexential's Hosted Private Cloud – Advanced Access solution provides them with the control and visibility they need to be confident in deploying their most critical data in a hybrid environment," said John Simonton, VP and COO of PEAK Resources, Inc.
About Flexential
Flexential empowers the IT journey of the nation's most complex businesses by offering flexible and tailored hybrid IT solutions comprised of colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, managed, and professional services. The company builds on a platform of three million square feet of data center space in 19 highly connected markets, and on its 100GB private backbone to meet the most stringent challenges in security, compliance, and resiliency.
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Verge.io | August 18, 2022
Verge.io, the company with a simpler way to virtualize data centers, has added significant new features to its Verge-OS software to give users the performance of GPUs as virtualized, shared resources. This creates a cost-effective, simple and flexible way to perform GPU-based machine learning, remote desktop and other compute-intensive workloads within an agile, scalable, secure Verge-OS virtual data center.
Verge-OS abstracts compute, network, and storage from commodity servers and creates pools of raw resources that are simple to run and manage, creating feature-rich infrastructures for environments and workloads like clustered HPC in universities, ultra-converged and hyperconverged enterprises, DevOps and Test/Dev, compliant medical and healthcare, remote and edge compute including VDI, and xSPs offering hosted services including private clouds.
Current methods for deploying GPUs systemwide are complex and expensive, especially for remote users. Rather than supplying GPUs throughout the organization, Verge.io allows users and applications with access to a virtual data center to share the computing resources of a single GPU-equipped server. Users/administrators can ‘pass through’ an installed GPU to a virtual data center by simply creating a virtual machine with access to that GPU and its resources.
Alternatively, Verge.io can manage the virtualization of the GPU and serve up vGPUs to virtual data centers. This allows organizations to easily manage vGPUs on the same platform as all other shared resources.
According to Darren Pulsipher, Chief Solution Architect of Public Sector at Intel, “The market is looking for simplicity, and Verge-OS is like an ‘Easy Button’ for creating a virtual cloud that is so much faster and easier to set up than a private cloud. With Verge-OS, my customers can migrate and manage their data centers anywhere and upgrade their hardware with zero downtime.”
“The ability to deploy GPU in a virtualized, converged environment, and access that performance as needed, even remotely, radically reduces the investment in hardware while simplifying management, Our users are increasingly needing GPU performance, from scientific research to machine learning, so vGPU and GPU Passthrough are simple ways to share and pool GPU resources as they do with the rest of their processing capabilities.”
Verge.io CEO Yan Ness
Verge-OS is an ultra-thin software—less than 300,000 lines of code—that is easy to install and scale on low-cost commodity hardware and self-manages based on AI/ML. A single license replaces separate hypervisor, networking, storage, data protection, and management tools to simplify operations and downsize complex technology stacks.
Secure virtual data centers based on Verge-OS include all enterprise data services like global deduplication, disaster recovery, continuous data protection, snapshots, long-distance synch, and auto-failover. They are ideal for creating honeypots, sandboxes, cyber ranges, air-gapped computing, and secure compliance enclaves to meet regulations such as HIPAA, CUI, SOX, NIST, and PCI. Nested multi-tenancy gives service providers, departmental enterprises, and campuses the ability to assign resources and services to groups and sub-groups.
Currently Verge.io supports NVIDIA Tesla and Ampere cards; additional licenses must be purchased for vGPU capability.
About Verge.io
Verge.io provides a simpler way to virtualize data centers and end IT infrastructure complexity. The company’s Verge OS software is the first and only fully integrated virtual cloud software stack to build, deploy and manage virtual data centers. Verge-OS delivers significant capital savings, increased operational efficiencies, reduced risk, and rapid scalability.
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Avast | August 10, 2022
Avast One, the all-in-one digital protection service from Avast (LSE: AVST), a global leader in digital security and privacy, has extended its cross-platform support by adding its Online Safety Score feature to both the Mac and iOS platforms of Avast One. Previously available on Windows and Android, Online Safety Score helps people take control of their online safety by providing a simple, easy to read score with regular feedback and tips on how to improve it further. Network Inspector, formally known as WiFi Inspector in Avast Free Antivirus, has also been added to the Mac platform so that networks and devices can be scanned for vulnerabilities. The update follows Avast One's recognition by AV-Test as a 'Top Product' in the industry, achieving full points in malware protection, performance and usability.
Earlier this year, Avast bolstered the free and premium versions of Avast One with new and innovative privacy and scam prevention features across all major platforms, including Email Guardian, Private Mode, Scam Protection for mobile, and a Smart VPN which launches automatically for activities such as online banking. In this latest update, Avast has strengthened its cross-platform support further with Online Safety Score and Network Inspector which provide more guidance and user control over online safety for greater peace of mind no matter the device used. Premium customers can benefit from Avast One's leading protection and performance capabilities for up to 30 computers and mobile phones across PC, Mac, Android and iOS, ensuring families and their devices stay private and secure.
Last year, Avast's Digital Citizenship study of over 16,000 people found that despite the internet's increasing importance day-to-day, heightened online safety and privacy concerns are stopping people from fully engaging in online activities. With this in mind, Avast has enhanced the protection capabilities of Avast One across all platforms, to provide online citizens with greater control and confidence at a time of rising online scams, fraud, and other malicious activity.
"Across the world, safe and free access to digital services is increasingly becoming an everyday requirement. Yet our Avast Digital Citizenship Report found that two out of three people decided not to do something online because of security and privacy concerns, It's a wake-up call for us that many people do not feel confident about using critical online services and are abandoning decisions to shop, bank, or register new accounts because of concerns about security, privacy and identity. We understand that effective protection means protection on our customers' terms, and with Avast One we've made sure it's available on every major platform, wherever and whenever it's needed."
Vita Santrucek, Chief Product Officer at Avast
In addition to Online Safety Score, the features available in the latest update of Avast One include:
Network Inspector: automatically scans networks and connected devices for vulnerabilities, and offers recommendations to improve device security when connected to public networks, as well as tips to strengthen the protection of home networks so that intruders are unable to access them and obtain personal data
App Lock: locks sensitive apps and photos with a PIN, pattern, or fingerprint that's different to the authentication used to unlock a phone, providing the user with an additional layer of protection. Available on Avast One Individual and Family for Android. For individuals or families with iOS devices, the Photo Vault feature secures photos in an encrypted folder inside the Avast One app, protected by a PIN, Touch ID or Face ID to improve privacy on shared mobile devices.
Avast One is available in Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is available for download now at www.avast.com and is compatible with Android, iOS, macOS and Windows.
About Avast:
Avast a FTSE 100 company, is a global leader in digital security and privacy, headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic. With over 435 million users online, Avast offers products under the Avast and AVG brands that protect people from threats on the internet and the evolving IoT threat landscape. The company's threat detection network is among the most advanced in the world, using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to detect and stop threats in real time. Avast digital security products for Mobile, PC or Mac are top-ranked and certified by VB100, AV-Comparatives, AV-Test, SE Labs and others.
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