“HashiCorp gives us the powerful automation needed to unlock the cloud operating model to deliver applications faster, enable true self-service and optimize DevOps practices,” said Steve Bishop, Veristor CTO, and Executive Director of Forty8Fifty Labs. “HashiCorp is a core component of our cloud-powered solutions. We use HashiCorp across our DevOps development processes and cloud-powered infrastructure solutions to automate cloud provisioning, compliance and management while also protecting sensitive data based on user and workload identity.”

“Veristor and Forty8Fifty Labs are uniquely skilled at helping organizations shift to a cloud operating model with the expertise and experience to optimize infrastructure, ensure security and deliver applications faster,” said Michelle Graff, Global Channel Chief, HashiCorp. “We welcome them to the HashiCorp Partner ecosystem to build, deliver and support our joint customer leveraging HashiCorp enterprise software solutions. Like HashiCorp, they are focused on helping enterprises shift to the cloud quickly and securely.”

HashiCorp delivers a suite of solutions that deliver cloud infrastructure automation for operations, security, networking and application delivery. Each of HashiCorp’s solutions – including Terraform, which provides reproducible infrastructure as code, Vault, which protects sensitive data, Consul, which automates service-based networking in the cloud, and Nomad, which deploys and manages any containerized, legacy or batch application – are available as part of the suite of field-proven cloud and DevOps solutions from Veristor and Forty8Fifty Labs. For more information, visit: https://veristor.com/devops.

Image licensed by: Upsplash.com

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With the acquisition of Instana, IBM will help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams, and across 2 to 15 clouds, on average. And it is another example of how IBM is building on its AI-powered automation capabilities, including:

–  the launch of IBM Watson AIOps earlier this year, IBM’s AI offering for automating how enterprises self-detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in real time;
–  its acquisition of WDG Automation to provide clients with broader access to intelligent automation through software robots;
–  its expanded partnership with ServiceNow to develop a joint solution to help companies reduce operational risk and lower costs by applying AI to automate IT operations;
–  and continued updates to IBM Cloud Pak for Automation designed to help companies drive innovation across their expanding IT environments and accelerate digital transformation.

“Our clients today are faced with managing a complex technology landscape filled with mission-critical applications and data that are running across a variety of hybrid cloud environments – from public clouds, private clouds and on-premises,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Cloud and Data Platform, IBM. “IBM’s acquisition of Instana is yet another important step that we are taking to provide companies with the most complete portfolio of AI-automated solutions to tackle this enormous challenge and help prevent unforeseen IT incidents that can cost a business in lost revenue and reputation.”

Headquartered in Chicago, with a development center in Germany, Instana provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of complex and modern cloud-native applications no matter where they reside – on mobile devices, public and private clouds and on-premises, including IBM Z.  Instana’s enterprise observability platform automatically builds a deep contextual understanding of cloud applications and provides actionable insights to indicate how to best prevent and remedy IT issues that could damage the business or reduce customer satisfaction — such as slow response times, services that aren’t working or infrastructure that is down.

Once Instana’s capabilities are integrated into IBM, companies will be able to feed these insights into Watson AIOps. The information could then be compared to a baseline of a normal operating application, with AI triggering alerts to resolve issues quickly before negative impacts to that transaction or activity. This can help eliminate the need for IT staff to manually monitor and manage applications, freeing these employees to focus on innovation and higher value work.

“With the added responsibility of ensuring the build and run quality of the software they develop, DevOps teams need a new generation of application performance monitoring and observability capabilities to succeed,” said Mirko Novakovic, co-founder and CEO, Instana. “Instana’s observability capabilities combined with IBM’s AI-powered automation capabilities across hybrid cloud environments will give clients a full view of their application performance to best optimize operations.”

Instana will offer both SaaS and on-premises solutions depending on the client’s unique needs.

Developers can try the Instana offering by utilizing the free sandbox and trials, already available through their website.

Imaged licensed by Adobe Stock

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Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) is well-known for designing a wide range of building types from offices, education, and retail to civic and healthcare. Employing a staff of 200, it’s famous for the Grade I-listed Lloyd’s Building, The Leadenhall Building – the so-called Cheesegrater where its head office is based – Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport and The Macallan Distillery and Visitor Experience in Scotland. The quality of its designs have been recognized by the architectural industry’s highest awards, including two RIBA Stirling Prizes, one in 2006 for Terminal 4 Madrid Barajas Airport and the other for Maggie’s West London Centre in 2009.

“Rather than using standard PCs or laptops, architects follow the film industry and rely on powerful graphics-based software and workstations to do their work. But they were holding us back and we couldn’t get the flexibility we wanted. The idea was to develop a strategy to introduce mobility into the practice so that staff aren’t just stuck to their desks but can work from anywhere irrespective of whether they are in or out of the office.” – Mark Read, RSHP’s head of IT, RSHP

Grid Technology Powers VDI

A key facilitator of this strategy has been the introduction of VDI along with grid technology from NVIDIA. At its on-premises datacenter, RSHP has installed VMware Horizon View running on seven high performance Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 rack servers – each with 24GB of system memory to fuel graphics power – with a further three servers located at its disaster recovery site.

NVIDIA Tesla P40 graphic processing units (GPUs) have been used to ensure that the server-based graphics are then segmented and shared so that each member of staff gets 1GB of performance. This is ample to run key applications like Autodesk Revit, Bentley MicroStation, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office 365 and a project information management system from New Farmer.

IGEL OS Allows Workstations to be Repurposed

To maximize its investment in existing Dell workstation hardware, RSHP has installed IGEL OS, allowing it to convert and repurpose these Windows machines into Linux devices, thereby extending their operational capability to around seven years rather than four as is currently the case – a 75% increase in lifespan.

The IGEL Universal Management Suite (UMS) is then used to centrally manage and control them – a massive benefit to the IT team of four – as it saves time having to go to individual desktops to update software, install patches and so on. The new desktop solution was purchased through IGEL gold partner, Creative Network Consulting based in London.

“We looked at competitive products but they were a bit clunky. We wanted something which offered a good end-user experience, fast login into VDI, was simple to manage and which runs smoothly on each machine. That’s what IGEL delivers.” – says Read

Another reason for the selection was IGEL’s easy integration with Cisco Jabber for instant messaging, video and voice calls and conferencing. Read adds, “Frankly IGEL was the only solution where the telephony worked. With other suppliers, you could see the softphone on the desktop but not actually hear anyone.”

In terms of roll out, further to a proof of concept with one architectural team, RSHP will roll out the solution project by project – equating to about 15 teams – a process expected to take no more than three months.

Work-life Balance Realized; Solution Minimizes the Impact of the Coronavirus Outbreak

While it is early days on the project, RSHP is positive about its move to VDI and use of IGEL OS. By avoiding an annual workstation refresh cycle, budget has been reinvested into VDI – a platform which has delivered the flexibility the practice was looking for, with even specific applications experiencing a performance gain.

“While there are clearly benefits to the IT team in terms of central endpoint management, this project has been all about enabling staff to work as they want to rather than being constrained by technology. VDI has introduced full mobility and encouraged a better work-life balance so that architects can now work when and wherever they like using whatever device they have on hand. And it’s simple to do so. It doesn’t matter who you are, anyone can use the system.” – said Read

Read adds, “In less than a few months, work-from-home and remote work computing demands have gone beyond being simply desired to becoming absolutely essential. VDI and IGEL are certainly helping us address the challenges presented by the Coronavirus pandemic so we can continue to support and serve clients effectively.”

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