Cloud Computing Product Updates, 5/5/10

BIG-IP Helps Organizations Shift Focus to Cloud
F5 Networks has released BIG-IP 10.2, the latest version of the company's product software to support the F5 device which, according to the vendor, "delivers high availability, improved performance, application security, and access control, all in one unit." F5 sees BIG-IP as a solution moving organizations closer to what the company calls "On-Demand IT," bringing organizations to build an entire architecture that moves in and out of the cloud.

The solution offers added security and management features, in an attempt to compensate for many of the concerns people have about the cloud. With F5’s unified application delivery architecture, enterprise customers can create security enforcement policies that provide user access according to specific IT requirements and business needs. For instance, F5's new BIG-IP Edge Gateway solution lets enterprise customers simplify the management of application services—such as access, security, and optimization—within a dynamic services model using both traditional data center and cloud computing environments.

“The cloud is evolving as the next generation of IT,” said Erik Giesa, VP of product management and product marketing at F5. “Whether a business is planning to deploy a private cloud or take advantage of external public cloud services, it needs to put its enterprise requirements first and leverage an integrated architecture for on-demand mobility, orchestration, and automation. F5 is committed to helping customers utilize their existing infrastructures, while extending and reusing them to enable a common cloud architectural model—regardless of where IT resources actually reside.”

To learn more, visit F5's website.

Maintain BlackBerry Email Access Despite Outages
Mimecast has today announced the launch of Mimecast Continuity Services, a product that lets IT managers provide uninterrupted email access to BlackBerry smartphone users in the event of a Microsoft Exchange outage, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) failure, or Research in Motion infrastructure downtime. By bypassing the BES and communicating directly with the handset from the cloud, Mimecast’s Continuity Service ensures that critical mobile workers can remain connected—sending, receiving, and deleting mail as normal—during server downtime. Integration between Mimecast’s security, continuity, and archiving service elements manages enforcement of email security, data loss prevention, and archiving policies. 

“Our own research recently revealed that just 36 percent of UK companies had a proper email continuity strategy, despite 97 percent of written business communication being over email.  With the BlackBerry solution established in an ever growing number of IT departments, extending business critical email continuity to BlackBerry devices has become an essential requirement,” said Peter Bauer, founder and CEO of Mimecast.

To learn more, visit Mimecast's website.

CloudAFS Offers Combined Cloud and On-Premises Storage Solution
Gladinet has released Gladinet CloudAFS, a new approach to data storage management that attaches cloud storage to existing file servers and manages data transfer between the on-premises network and the cloud. In this way, CloudAFS offers the fast access of on-premises storage with the expansive storage of a cloud solution, offering an intriguing compromise for organizations that have reservations about the cloud but also see its potential strengths. Access control is provided by native integration with Active Directory or NT Domains, and scheduled backups are supported and can be based on folders or file types. A free trial is available, or the solutions costs $4.99/month for one license. 

"Tiering is not a new concept in enterprise data storage management," said Jerry Huang, CEO, Gladinet. "All data is not created equal. And since some storage mediums are much more expensive than others, organizations use hierarchical storage management to put the most important data on the best storage. By adding the cloud as a tier in the hierarchy, Gladinet CloudAFS changes that paradigm and ranks data importance according to use. In other words, the data that is most often used is kept close for fast access."

To learn more, visit Gladinet's website.