Stories by Brandon Butler

Interop 2015 features products from networking, Cloud, virtualisation and security vendors.

This week's Interop agenda includes more than 125 sessions covering topics as wide ranging as a status update on the latest trends in software defined networking (SDN) to tips for new application development and delivery methods, infrastructure management, and the pervasive issues of security and mobile workers.

Two years ago when Frank Macreery started Aptible to help companies host sensitive healthcare data in the cloud, as CTO he decided that containers would play a pivotal role in the company's operations.

One of the first casualties of the OpenStack world is Nebula, a company founded by a of the pioneer of the open source cloud computing movement.

With all the public cloud storage offerings on the market today, many vendors just want customers to sign up for their services. So, in return for a new account, many offer free cloud storage.

Which cloud is best for building new applications? That depends on your developers and how they like to code, according to new research from Forrester.

During the past year VMware has released a series of network virtualization certifications for network professionals to gain expertise in software defined networking, and specifically how it integrates with existing physical networking.

Amazon Web Services last year was estimated by Gartner to be five times bigger than its next 14 competitors combined. That's a lot of virtual machines. And they all run on a customized version of the open source Xen hypervisor, so when the Xen code has a security vulnerability, that's a big deal for AWS.

There's a rumor that goes around cloud circles about how Amazon.com created what is now the multi-billion dollar infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing industry in the early 2000s.

Google offers lots of services and it has pretty good reliability. How does the company do it?

It's a busy time for container technology in the cloud computing market: IBM this week at its InterConnect conference in Las Vegas announced broad support for containers in its hybrid cloud computing software, while Google partnered with OpenStack distributor Mirantis to enable container technology capabilities in the open source cloud platform.

On Nov. 19, 2014 the IT department of a Texas contracting company started getting reports that the Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based email system was unavailable to its employees. Users couldn't get email on their phones or via Outlook. As the day rolled on some users' email came back, others didn't. When US workers signed off, international employees started reporting similar issues. For some users, email was out for 24 hours.

Fresh off its initial public offering, cloud file synch share and storage company Box has a new Enterprise Key Management (EKM) offering out this week that analysts say could ease customer concerns with using a cloud-based service.

IT can be complicated, so during the past few years the idea of an easy to deploy, all-in-one compute network and storage appliance has taken hold and been dubbed converged infrastructure. What started as a niche market a few years ago has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar business with many of technology's biggest players involved.

During the past week VMware has been making power play moves in the Cloud computing market to position its offering as the premier enterprise hybrid Cloud computing platform. As it does so, however, analysts question how well the grand plan VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has put together stacks up with heavyweights of the cloud computing market, most specifically Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).