Dave Sobel, Director of Partner Community at Level Platforms, has been selected as an awardee of the 2012 SMB Nation 150 awards. A collaboration between SMB Nation and SMB Technology Network, the awards recognize the crème de la crème of the SMB channel.

Sobel commented, “I’m honored to receive this recognition from my peers and the industry. The SMB 150 is a collaborative list highlighting the leaders in our channel. I’m honored to join the awardees, the five other individuals from Level Platforms, as well as our numerous partners on the list. I believe in the strong community of our channel, and have always worked to further those interactions, and am delighted to be recognized ”

About the award
This annual event is a chance for the SMB community to recognize the achievements from 150 of their peers within the industry. The selection process begins with an open online nomination process in which members of the SMB online community place votes. Community nominations are followed by a review of nominees by a panel of industry experts. Once both parties have voted, the winners are announced and recognized at a gala dinner and in SMB Nation magazine.

About Level Platforms
Founded in 1999, Level Platforms takes advantage of its deep managed services expertise to offer remote monitoring and management software. Solution providers can leverage this expertise and service offering to transition from reactive to proactive managed services. To learn more about Level Platforms please visit their website.

Congratulations, Dave!

(from The Schwartz Cloud Report)


It seems everyone wants a piece of the cloud storage pie.
Cloud storage provider Dropbox this week received a whopping $250 million infusion from Index Ventures, with new investors Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners also contributing.

Dropbox is the subject of a cover story in the Nov. 7 issue of Forbes, which recounts a meeting nearly two years ago between founder Drew Houston and Apple founder Steve Jobs, who apparently had an interest in Dropbox. Jobs, who passed away earlier this month after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, warned Houston that Apple was looking to develop a cloud storage service like Dropbox. That service, of course is iCloud, which debuted last week.

And yet another cloud storage high-flyer, Box.net, last week received $81 million from Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. The infusion brings Box.net’s total amount of funding raised up to $162 million, giving it a reported $600 million valuation.

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(from ReadWrite Cloud)


There are some whose definition of cloud computing includes by rule, not by option, the capability to provision additional resources such as storage and processing into an expanding pool, without regard to brand, format, or protocol. That isn’t exactly what we’re seeing today from IBM, which many will recall was able to bend “grid computing” toward its center of gravity as well.

The new universe of IBM cloud services is covered in a layer of semantic goo. Swimming through it can be suffocating, so instead of replicating it here, we’ve surgically extracted the core elements of today’s multiple announcements, and we present them here all clean and free of metaphor.

This just in: IBM launched its current set of SmartCloud private cloud services for business last April. Not today, but six months ago. This was not IBM’s first entry into the cloud; it has been building Platform-as-a-Service around WebSphere since 2009. Further, IBM extended its private cloud services last June. So articles you may be reading today about IBM premiering private and even public cloud services today for the first time, are victims of the aforementioned semantic goo.

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(from Channelpro SMB)

Choosing a Virtualization Server

Experts weigh in with pointers for selecting the right virtualization hardware

Building efficient virtualization solutions requires server hardware with specific characteristics, such as additional memory, multicore processors, and high-capacity IO. Some hardware makers are even offering “virtualization ready” servers with multicore processors and embedded hypervisors. The result is that VARs and vendors alike are ruggedizing their hardware to stand up to the rigors of virtualization. Here’s why.

STORAGE

“The sooner you think about storage the better,” says Mark Peters, senior analyst focusing on storage at research firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “People find they need more performance and capacity about 99 times out of 100. You’re going to need more storage, and you’ll drive it much harder than before.”

While you can rely on physical storage inside your server to support the virtual machines on that server, you lose many of virtualization’s biggest benefits: moving applications when needed, fault tolerance, and fast backup. So to get the most value from virtualization, use shared storage.

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