Cisco Plans to Acquire Piston Cloud Computing

Cisco to Acquire Piston Cloud Computing

Cisco plans to acquire Piston Cloud Computing to help boost the product, delivery and operational capabilities of Cisco Intercloud Services. The Intercloud is a globally connected network of clouds, designed to deliver secure cloud services and built by Cisco and its partners.

In a company blog post, Hilton Romanski, Cisco senior vice president of business development, said: “The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud. Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners.”

Building on Cisco’s recent acquisition of Metacloud, the addition of Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent is expected to enhance Cisco’s capabilities around cloud automation, availability and scale, while improving the delivery capabilities for customers and partners. Piston will join Cisco’s Cloud Services team, which headed by Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organization.

Vijilan Delivers White-Label Security Services

Vijilan Security launched its ThreatDetect, ThreatAnalyze and ThreatRespond security services aimed at helping protect small and midsize businesses (SMBs) from cyber-attacks.  The company’s advanced security services are sold exclusively through the Vijilan Partner Program, a white-label channel sales model that includes IT solutions providers and managed security providers.

To take advantage of growing demand for managed security services, managed security providers and IT service providers must extend their services to include 24/7 security operations, security threat detection and mitigation services, which traditionally require specific expertise and a large capital outlay, the company said. Vijilan’s offering provides detection, monitoring and incident-response guidance from the company’s 24/7 security operations center, which monitors more than 600,000 worldwide hosts, and processes more than 6 billion security events daily.

Partners can white-label the security services with no capital infrastructure or resource costs. Vijilan is 100-percent channel-focused and only offers services through qualified service provider partners, according to company officials.

Tech Data, Saratoga Speed Ink Deal

Tech Data announced an exclusive agreement with Saratoga Speed to provide its full portfolio of products to the company’s channel of solution providers in the United States, helping them capture and monetize opportunities around big data. Available through Tech Data’s Advanced Infrastructure Solutions (AIS) division, Saratoga Speed’s all-flash storage arrays can replace or complement existing storage deployments. The arrays are designed to process and store hundreds of terabytes of data at speeds of tens of gigabytes per second within two or three rack-unit (RU) chassis.

Juniper Networks Unveils New Network Design Training

Juniper Networks announced a new network design and training curriculum and certification program aimed at meeting changing network demands. The Juniper Design Training and Certification curriculum teaches best practices and new techniques across network design, including software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV).

The design curriculum includes the latest approaches, resources and tools that enable companies to build, expand, secure and automate their networks.

Juniper offers training on the full network lifecycle—from initial design through ongoing maintenance. The new program is available to current customers, partners and IT professionals. Three levels of certifications are available: design associate, specialist and professional.