News from the cloud computing sector includes developments from Red Hat, Panzura and Avaya:<\/p>\n
Red Hat collaborates with Code for America<\/strong><\/a>. \u00a0Red Hat (RHT)<\/strong>\u00a0announced a collaboration with Code for America (CfA), a non-profit organization that partners with local governments to foster civic innovation, focused on using technology to increase civic engagement.\u00a0The collaboration brings Red Hat\u2019s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to CfA Fellows and partner communities free-of-charge to help achieve CfA\u2019s goal of fostering collaboration between city hall and city residents and innovative problem solving through technology. In a contribution worth approximately $300,000,the CfA Fellows will have access to OpenShift free-of-charge for one year and have the option of one additional year of free hosting and services.\u00a0OpenShift supports many popular frameworks, such as Zend, Java EE, Spring, Rails, Play, with built-in platform support for node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl and Java.\u00a0OpenShift offers an application platform in the cloud that manages the stack so that developers can focus on their application code.<\/p>\n Panzura selected by California State, Northridge<\/strong><\/a>. \u00a0Cloud storage provider Panzura<\/strong>\u00a0announced that California State University, Northridge (CSUN), selected the Panzura Global Cloud Storage System to transform its off-site data backup protection process by utilizing Panzura\u2019s encrypted Quicksilver cloud storage controllers.\u00a0CSUN will streamline its off-site data protection efforts and significantly reduced storage needs, while also shifting CapEx to OpEx. The university manages approximately 300TB of NAS\/SAN storage, protected by tape and disk storage. Backup processes were becoming increasingly slow and cumbersome and they needed to transition from the endless CapEx cycle of refreshing tape backup equipment and provisioning more capacity for offsite data protection. “Our goal was to increase process efficiency and reduce storage footprint for off-site backups by eliminating tape and avoiding use of campus-owned disk for off-site backup storage,” said Chris Olsen, Sr. Director of Infrastructure Services and ISO at CSUN. “We had some initial hesitations about cloud storage, including the cost to get data to the cloud, data security, and controlling capacity. With Panzura\u2019s Global Cloud Storage System, we simply pointed our Symantec NetBackup application to the Panzura\u00a0Quicksilver Cloud Storage Controller\u00a0and the cloud became our backup target, while RSA 4096-bit encryption protected our data with us owning the encryption keys. The solution was straightforward to deploy and the deduplication exceeded our expectations.”<\/p>\n