10 Hot New Software Products For Enterprise IT

Facing The Future

Enterprise IT has been changing fast, but the transformation is nowhere near finished. If anything, it's only accelerating. At CRN we've been busy talking to innovators and learning about their products to help give solution providers an idea of where things are headed next. In the following slides we've rounded up 10 of the most transformational enterprise IT products -- across application, networking, storage and security -- that have been introduced since March.

Along with a common goal of moving enterprises into the future, these products share an emphasis on the importance of software over hardware. Recurring themes include web scale IT, containers, hyper-convergence and, of course, cloud.

Here are 10 of the newest software products changing IT that solution providers should know about.

Acropolis 4.7 (Nutanix)

As CRN's Kevin McLaughlin noted in his post this week about Nutanix's latest moves, the company's new version of its Acropolis software represents a major broadening of the company's focus from hyper-convergence to enterprise cloud. One of the key pieces of the strategy is the addition of support for containers -- an alternative to virtual machines that is surging in popularity among application developers, as they run on any infrastructure without needing changes to code. The new tool should allow developers to containerize more of their applications, according to Nutanix. The new Acropolis Container Services will be available in July, the company said.

Cumulus Linux 3.0

Cumulus Networks, which describes itself as "Red Hat for networking," in May debuted the latest release of its Linux Network Operating System that helps enterprises increase the bandwidth they can apply to solving complex business problems. The company's open-networking, software-defined approach is ultimately aimed at helping customers build public and private clouds that match the web-scale IT achieved by the Amazons and Googles of the world. The new release of Cumulus Linux added a number of platforms to its list of compatible hardware platforms, including Dell Z9100 and Mellanox SN2700, two 100-gigabit platforms.

Docker 1.12

While companies such as IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Nutanix are moving to embrace containers, software containerization platform Docker is pushing ahead with new functionality for developers. As CRN's Joseph Tsidulko reported, Docker is adding a new feature called Swarm Mode that will enable container orchestration -- crucial for resiliency, performance and security of distributed applications -- to happen automatically through Docker's core engine. The new version of Docker comes out in July.

DriveScale

Building next-gen, data-intensive applications is great, but only if there's data center infrastructure that can support them. In May, DriveScale debuted a new software architecture that makes standard rack servers more flexible in terms of the workloads they can handle. Specifically, the software makes standard servers capable of accommodating modern app workloads such as big data Hadoop deployments, according to DriveScale. The promise is that enterprises will be able to use standard servers and commodity storage to achieve "scale-out" computing, bringing efficiencies on costs and data center resources.

Habitat (Chef)

Chef, the maker of a popular IT automation platform, believes the choice between "the way enterprises build software" and "the way the Big Web players build software" is a false choice. This month, Chef launched a new open-source product, dubbed Habitat, that aims to offer another way to create applications. Through providing better application automation, Habitat aims to simplify every step of the application creation process. Habitat seeks to do so by combining a new system for packaging software (which bundles all the configuration options needed by the application with the app) along with a supervisor component (which ensures that the app configuration and other essentials are coordinated correctly).

Illumio ASAP

With the arrival of the cloud and other new technologies, the traditional idea of a security perimeter is long gone, as CRN's Sarah Kuranda has reported. One of the companies looking to confront security threats for customers wherever they occur -- in an on-premises data center or in the cloud -- is Illumio, which in April debuted its new ASAP (Attack Surface Assessment Program) product. The tool allows customers to map out their high-value assets in the data center and cloud -- as well as discover any communications pathways between apps that might make the apps vulnerable to a hack.

Qumulo Core 2.0

A key challenge to scaling out storage is that organizations don't necessarily end up with a good view into their data. What data is the most important data? Where is it stored? Who is accessing the data? Qumulo, which released its Core 2.0 software in April, aims to answer all of those questions for customers as a way to boost both performance and efficiency (the new version of the product offers an "up to 33 percent increase in usable storage capacity," Qumulo said).

TrilioVault 2.0 (Trilio Data)

Getting into the cloud computing game using open-source software from OpenStack is supposed to make life better for the enterprise. But many organizations will find that they'll need a data assurance service that works with OpenStack to ensure they're meeting their compliance requirements. In April, startup Trilio Data launched an updated version of its TrilioVault backup and recovery service for OpenStack. TrilioVault is the only native OpenStack backup service to hit the market so far, with the alternative being for organizations to develop their own data assurance solution for OpenStack.

ZeroStack Cloud Platform

The move to a private cloud is a lot of things for enterprises -- but easy isn't necessarily one of them. Which is why the comparative simplicity of the public cloud continues to be so appealing to many businesses. ZeroStack is trying to change that with the release of its software, in March, that aims to make moving to a private cloud less complex for enterprises (and easier for their IT administrators to manage once it's up). ZeroStack does this through a hyper-converged integration of compute, storage and software-defined networking, paired with new management software.

Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5

Zerto has been a fast-growing IT player for its data recovery software for cloud and virtualized data centers, but the company's Virtual Replication service was missing a feature, until the release of 4.5 in March. That feature is called Journal File Level Recovery, which lets users restore a file up until seconds before deletion or corruption. The feature had been the most requested item by data center IT users, Zerto said, and covers data from sources including SQL, Oracle and Exchange.