Server Virtualization, Virtual Server Infrastructure

MacStadium’s Orka Platform Offers Alternative to VMware for MacOS Virtualization on Apple Silicon

VMWare Alternative Orka Platform from MacStadium

MacStadium, a company that makes Mac private clouds and software-as-a-service, said that its Orka Platform is a great alternative for businesses that want to switch from VMware's vSphere ESXi running macOS on last-generation Intel-based Mac computers to its Orka Platform. The Orka Platform from MacStadium is a complete solution that lets businesses switch from VMware's vSphere ESXi running macOS on Intel-based Mac computers from the last generation to their own private cloud.

The Orka Platform works with Apple chips and gives a smooth alternative to VMware's announcement in October that vSphere ESXi 7.0 will no longer support macOS. The Orka Platform has everything developers need to replace vSphere ESXi workloads on Mac platforms, such as high-performance virtual macOS environments, easy orchestration through RESTful APIs, enterprise-grade performance, and Kubernetes support.

Greg McGraw, co-founder and CEO at MacStadium, said, “Orka Platform represents the perfect tool for application development teams who rely on using virtualized Mac compute and must now move on from VMware.” He added, “MacStadium already has helped leading organizations seamlessly transition to the Orka Platform from VMware. He also said, "Orka Platform supports Apple silicon, and the MacStadium team will assist those making the migration with a customized proof-of-concept environment, as well as all the technical support they require.”

(Source: Businesswire)

Customers who switch from VMware can get a free, customized proof-of-concept environment as well as technical support from MacStadium. MacStadium's Orka Platform has a number of benefits for businesses that want to move away from VMware's vSphere (ESXi) running macOS.

About MacStadium

MacStadium provides enterprise-level infrastructure-as-a-service for workloads that require macOS. They offer private clouds and dedicated servers, all-flash and disk-based SAN storage, and Mac private cloud solutions. Their services are trusted by iOS developers, mobile testing teams, and DevOps engineers worldwide. They have five data centers for reliability and offer support from trained experts. MacStadium was started in 2011 in Atlanta and only makes cloud solutions for macOS that are scalable, secure, and new. They also offer the Orka® Platform, the only virtualization layer available for Mac-based infrastructure.

Spotlight

Other News
Backup and Disaster Recovery

GRAX Introduces Free Data Backup and Recovery Service for Salesforce

businesswire | September 12, 2023

GRAX, Inc., a leading innovator in Salesforce data management and protection, announces the general availability of GRAX Lite for free Salesforce backup and recovery. GRAX Lite is a game-changing free solution that enables businesses to prevent data loss by safeguarding their Salesforce data. GRAX Lite addresses a critical need in the SaaS data protection market by offering comprehensive free backup software. In an era marked by escalating cyber threats and stringent compliance regulations, GRAX Lite arms businesses with a powerful tool to shield their vital Salesforce data. Built on the principle of data ownership, GRAX Lite gives Salesforce users the power to take back that ownership and control of their valuable Salesforce data with a couple of clicks. "At GRAX, we have always believed that data protection is an unassailable right," said Joe Gaska, Head of Product at GRAX. "With the launch of GRAX Lite, we are breaking down barriers and providing businesses with the tools they need to secure their mission-critical Salesforce data so that they can focus on growing their business." Key capabilities of GRAX Lite for Salesforce Backup and Recovery Effortless Backup and Recovery: GRAX Lite simplifies the backup process allowing users to protect and easily restore their Salesforce data with just a couple of clicks. 100% Data Ownership: GRAX Lite empowers users to retain full ownership of their data by enabling backups into the customer-owned storage service – Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Azure cloud storage environments. Maintain Your Digital Chain of Custody: With GRAX, users retain full control over their data’s Digital Chain of Custody – GRAX runs entirely in the customer-owned cloud. Unlimited backup storage: GRAX Lite enables users to capture all of their data into their cloud of choice, where users can leverage their existing cloud agreements. Daily Automated Backups: Users gain peace of mind with automated incremental backups of Salesforce data, including files and attachments, ensuring no critical information is lost. Granular Control: Swiftly restore individual records, making it simple to bring back data quickly when you need it. User-Friendly Interface: The user-centric design of GRAX ensures that any user can navigate and deploy free Salesforce data protection from the GRAX Platform with ease. GRAX Lite is a testament to GRAX's commitment to data sovereignty and data governance. By providing a free and user-friendly solution for Salesforce backup and recovery, GRAX Lite empowers organizations to take back ownership of their data assets, create a comprehensive backup strategy, and focus on driving business growth. About GRAX GRAX helps organizations adapt faster by making it easier to get strategic value out of their historical SaaS application data. Customers can fully own, access, and reuse all versions of their cloud application data anywhere, anytime by simply backing up or archiving it to their own cloud environment and seamlessly pushing it into their data ecosystem. GRAX delivers unparalleled SaaS data backup, archive, recovery, and reuse functionality in a fully integrated solution, helping leading organizations improve business continuity, regulatory compliance, customer retention, and revenue growth.

Read More

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Expedient Announces Partnership with Kyndryl to Deliver Disaster Recovery as a Service

PR Newswire | October 03, 2023

Expedient, a Full-Stack Cloud Service Provider, announced a partnership with Kyndryl the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider. Through this collaboration, Expedient's robust data center colocation and cloud infrastructure will enhance Kyndryl's industry-leading cyber resilience offerings to customers. By joining forces with Kyndryl, Expedient is extending the reach of its state-of-the-art data center colocation and cloud infrastructure known for its reliability, scalability, and security capabilities. Expedient's award-winning infrastructure is an integral element of its Cloud Different™ multi-cloud services and is delivered across a nationwide network of highly interconnected data centers. Infrastructure is available in dedicated, private cloud, and VMware-based Expedient Enterprise Cloud configurations to meet the needs of customers and prospects across regions and industries. This partnership will enable Expedient and Kyndryl to extend the reach and effectiveness of security and cyber resilience services to a wider range of customers, helping organizations across various industries strengthen and fortify their cybersecurity posture while further mitigating the risks associated with data breaches. "We are excited to partner with Kyndryl, a company known for its excellence in cybersecurity services, cyber resilience services and Disaster Recovery as a Service," said Dennis Musolino, Chief Revenue Officer of Expedient. "Expedient has a more than 20-year history and expertise in delivering unmatched disaster recovery and data center infrastructure solutions. We are proud and excited to be providing our data center and cloud infrastructure to help augment the comprehensive resiliency services that Kyndryl delivers to its array of clients nationally. Together, we will empower businesses to proactively protect their digital assets and maintain operational resilience in an increasingly complex digital landscape." "We're dedicated to helping customers navigate their ever-evolving cybersecurity challenges," said James Carrigan, Jr., VP, US Security Practice Leader at Kyndryl. "Partnering with Expedient will allow us to further provide our customers with access to a flexible, robust and security-rich infrastructure that supports their cybersecurity and cyber resilience needs and enables the uptime and availability of their most critical applications." About Expedient Expedient is a full stack cloud service provider, helping companies transform their IT operations through award-winning multi-cloud solutions and managed infrastructure services including enterprise cloud, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, data center colocation, edge computing, security and compliance, and more. The company's Cloud Different™️ approach provides an on-ramp to the cloud, supporting the optimization and delivery of all applications. Named VMware's Americas Cloud Partner of the Year and acknowledged in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, Expedient eases a customer's transition to the cloud by providing curated and bundled best of breed solutions backed by "white glove" services and support. Expedient data centers are compliant with a variety of regulatory mandates, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) service.

Read More

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Pure Storage Simplifies Data Resilience and Enables an Enhanced Service Operations Experience For Enterprises Everywhere

PR Newswire | October 12, 2023

Pure Storage® the IT pioneer that delivers the world's most advanced data storage technology and services, announced critical new data resilience offerings, including the introduction of Pure Protect™//DRaaS, a unique Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution, new energy efficiency guarantees for its Evergreen® portfolio, and scalable AI-powered storage services via its Pure1® management platform to global enterprises. With the introduction of consumption-based disaster recovery via Pure Protect, a unique data resilience scoring system via Pure1, and updates to Evergreen subscriptions that include a new Paid Power and Rack commitment, Pure Storage enables enterprises to adopt a complete, end-to-end storage strategy that assures data resilience, reduces labor costs, accelerates sustainability initiatives, and delivers unrivaled TCO benefits. Industry Significance The rate of devastating ransomware attacks and the increasing frequency of natural disasters are upending business continuity more often each day. While many organizations recognize the importance of a disaster recovery (DR) plan, current DR solutions on the market are complex, expensive, and disruptive. Likewise, the current energy crisis, new environmental regulations, and ethical imperatives to improve corporate sustainability have led companies to set ambitious net-zero goals, but reckoning with the typical data center's power demands has remained challenging. And with digitization at scale and data proliferation and fragmentation, end-to-end operations management further aggravates the skill and budget shortages for IT. Today's introduction of Pure Protect //DRaaS and updates to the Pure Storage Evergreen portfolio not only address these critical industry pain points, but also set new milestones for customer-centricity with compelling guarantees. News Highlights Assured Data Resilience: Pure Storage enables enterprises everywhere to maximize data protection with a complete, multi-layered data resilience strategy built from the ground up. With intrinsic data protection built into its Evergreen architecture via ActiveDR™, ActiveCluster™, and SafeMode™ Snapshot capabilities, Pure Storage has now expanded data resilience with new trusted operations capabilities and a new disaster recovery service: Pure Protect //DRaaS, a new consumption-based Disaster Recovery as-a-Service solution, drastically reduces complexity, cost, recovery time, and business disruption in the wake of disasters and cyber disruptions. Organizations now have clean environments with multiple restore points to recover clean copies of their on-premises vSphere data, to native AWS EC2, no matter what underlying storage infrastructure it is, while ensuring data centers remain isolated for investigation. Data Resilience Score, within the Pure1 Data Protection Assessment, underscores Pure Storage's trusted operations by providing better transparency in the adoption of Pure Storage and industry-leading data protection and backup partner technologies, while offering the ability to assess entire fleet configurations against leading practices. Zero Data Loss Guarantee, across the Evergreen portfolio, provides peace of mind that customers data will not be lost due to Pure Storage hardware or software issues. In the rare case of any data corruption, Pure Storage assures data protection with advanced data recovery services for any hardware or software product-related incidents, at no cost. Enhanced Service Experience, Everywhere: With Pure Storage's AI-powered asset and lifecycle management services and policy-based automation, customers can achieve operational excellence, anywhere and on any scale. Asset Management and Genealogy allows customers and Pure Storage to jointly optimize Labor costs to run and operate storage. Customers get full transparency to manage Evergreen assets, contracts, subscriptions, and lifecycle, and get visibility into capacity, energy, and rack space usage. Customers can also view how each asset or subscription has evolved over time, including software updates, ramps, expansions, and renewals, and gain insight into upcoming lifecycle events such as EOL, upgrades, or contract expiration. Subscription Lifecycle Operations: Customers now benefit from a subscription viewer to understand when subscriptions require attention and renewal, predictive tracking of capacity utilization with actionable alerts to optimize reserve commit vs on-demand consumption, and new SLA indicators to track how well Pure Storage is meeting performance and efficiency SLAs. Customers can plan for future demand, trigger in-app workflows to request quotes, or use the new Pure1 Marketplace for a simplified subscription shopping experience. Partners can take advantage of these capabilities via APIs and early notifications of lifecycle events (EOL, renewal) to deliver seamless procurement experiences to joint customers. Policy-driven Upgrades take the guesswork out of choosing the right Purity release and simplify fleet management. They help customers strike the right balance between frequent upgrades and maintaining a secure and supported storage environment based on their organization's goals. Pure1 Mobile App enables customers to get insights and alerts even on the go as well as manage cases and get the latest information and news from Pure anywhere in the world. Guaranteed Energy Efficiency While Saving Money: With the only Paid Power and Rack Space commitment in the enterprise Storage as-a-Service market, and unique energy, density, and upgrade guarantees, Pure Storage is not only committed to providing the most sustainable storage solutions in the industry, but is also determined to make being green easier and more affordable for global customers. About Pure Storage Pure Storage uncomplicates data storage, forever. Pure delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most from their data while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it. Pure's commitment to providing true storage as-a-service gives customers the agility to meet changing data needs at speed and scale, whether they are deploying traditional workloads, modern applications, containers, or more. Pure believes it can make a significant impact in reducing data center emissions worldwide through its environmental sustainability efforts, including designing products and solutions that enable customers to reduce their carbon and energy footprint. And with the highest Net Promoter Score in the industry, Pure's ever-expanding list of customers are among the happiest in the world.

Read More

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Veeam Announces Backup-as-a-Service for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure

Business Wire | October 05, 2023

Veeam® Software, the leader in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, announced two new offerings which combine the confidence and reliability of Veeam’s backup and restore capabilities with the ease-of-use of Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS). Cirrus by Veeam, which is available today for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure customers, provides a simple, flexible, reliable and powerful BaaS offering. It gives companies the option of simplifying the management and administration of their backup operations with all the resiliency of Veeam technology. Veeam will launch a new, enhanced version of the BaaS offering in Q1 2024, available through Veeam service providers, the Microsoft Azure marketplace, and Veeam’s online store. "450,000 customers trust Veeam to protect their business and keep it running, which has led us to become the #1 global provider of data protection and ransomware recovery," said Danny Allan, CTO at Veeam. "We're now giving customers those trusted capabilities - for Microsoft 365 and for Microsoft Azure - delivered as a service. Through this new BaaS offering, customers have increased flexibility in how they wish to use Veeam to protect their business, whether in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid model." Cirrus by Veeam was acquired from CT4 who developed the cloud-native service utilizing Veeam’s industry-leading data backup and ransomware recovery platform. Customers can now choose from several options in how they wish to utilize Veeam and manage their Microsoft 365 and Azure data New Cirrus by Veeam: Delivers a simple, seamless SaaS experience, without having to manage the infrastructure or storage. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure: Deploy Veeam’s existing software solutions for Microsoft 365 and Azure data protection and manage the infrastructure. A backup service from a Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner: Built on top of the Veeam platform, with value-added services unique to the provider’s area of expertise. Cirrus Cloud Protect for Microsoft 365 Cirrus for Microsoft 365 builds on the industry's leading Microsoft 365 backup solution – Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 – and delivers it as a service. It simplifies a customer’s backup strategy with software, infrastructure, and unlimited storage in an all-in-one cloud service, allowing organizations to leverage powerful data protection and security technology with a simple, seamless user experience. Trusted, reliable technology: Customizable backup, flexible recovery options and powerful search capabilities. All-inclusive backup service: Simplifies Microsoft 365 backup by providing everything a customer needs, bundled together at one price. Modern, secure and intuitive: Keeps business-critical data protected with built-in immutability; no software to download or infrastructure to maintain. Cirrus Cloud Protect for Microsoft Azure Data on Microsoft Azure is exposed to the same cyber threats and data loss as anywhere else, and it’s the owner’s responsibility to protect it. Cirrus Cloud Protect for Microsoft Azure is a fully hosted and pre-configured solution that delivers proven, resilient backup and recovery. Quick ROI: Speed time to value by removing blockers like implementation, patching and remediating misconfigurations. Enterprise-readiness: Leverage backup, security and FinOps best practices in a service built for Azure Well-Architected Framework. Confident recoverability: Comprehensive, native protection with the most customizable RPOs and recovery to any location. About Veeam Software Veeam®, the #1 global provider of Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, provides organizations with resiliency through data security, data recovery and data freedom for their hybrid cloud. The Veeam Data Platform delivers a single solution for Cloud, Virtual, Physical, SaaS and Kubernetes environments that give businesses peace of mind their apps and data are protected and always available so that they can keep their businesses running.

Read More