AWS re:Invent Day 2 News Includes Highly Anticipated Outposts Release for Partners

AWS RE:INVENT — With 60,000 people gathered in Las Vegas this week for AWS re:Invent 2019, the cloud giant and its exhibitors and sponsors did not disappoint for news on the second day of the event.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy spent three hours on stage discussing the latest cloud trends, and making a flurry of announcements along the way. One of the biggest pieces of news for partners was the official unveiling of AWS Outposts, which Jassy first presented at last year’s re:Invent.

“I’m very excited to give this to you today,” Jassy said on Tuesday.

Outposts stands as AWS’ take on hybrid on-premises cloud equipment and service, all rented on an as-a-service basis. AWS delivers, installs and oversees the product set for organizations.

“We take care of monitoring, maintaining and upgrading your Outposts,” Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, wrote in a Dec. 3 blog. “All of the hardware is modular and can be replaced in the field without downtime. When you need more processing or storage, or want to upgrade to newer generations of EC2 instances, you can initiate the request with a couple of clicks and we will take care of the rest.”

AWS says Outposts features local processing and low latency, all from a single vendor.

“Everything that you and your team already know about AWS still applies,” Barr wrote. “You use the same APIs, tools and operational practices. You can create a single deployment pipeline that targets your Outposts and your cloud-based environments, and you can create hybrid architectures that span both.”

AWS connects each Outpost to a specific region and controls it from that data center. The region treats a collection of up to 16 racks at a single location as a unified capacity pool, Barr said. The collection can be associated with subnets of one or more VPCs in the parent region.

The Outposts hardware, meanwhile, is the same as what AWS uses in its data centers, with some additional security devices, Barr said. AWS delivers the equipment fully assembled.

Go to the AWS re:Invent blog to read all the news released so far. And in what has become tradition for Jassy, the keynote featured the re:Invent band covering artists including Van Halen, Queen, Billy Joel, The Proclaimers, The Doors and more, and tying excerpted lyrics to cloud issues and advancements.

Finally, a number of channel-friendly vendors also released their AWS re:Invent-related news on the second day of the event. Here’s a curated roundup of announcements.

Rackspace Expands Service Blocks

Rackspace on Tuesday announced expansions to its Service Blocks portfolio, which provide professional and managed services for AWS.

Channel partners now may offer:

“The new Service Block patterns consolidate …

… broad expertise across infrastructure, applications, data, strategy and integration, arming our partners with an expanded portfolio to sell and better enable their customers’ adoption of AWS,” Lisa McLin, vice president of alliances and channel chief at Rackspace, told Channel Futures.

Rackspace’s Lisa McLin

Matt Stoyka, chief relationship officer at Rackspace, agreed.

“Our enhancement of Rackspace Service Blocks bridges the skills gap faced by customers who are quickly maturing on AWS,” he said.

Rackspace Service Blocks lets organizations buy blocks discretely and customize the services on a pay-for-what-you-use basis.

Rackspace is exhibiting at AWS re:Invent 2019.

SentinelOne Makes Platform Available in AWS Marketplace

SentinelOne, a company that uses AI instead of antivirus for endpoint and cloud workload cybersecurity, on Tuesday said its combined protection, detection and response platform now is available in AWS Marketplace.

The company, which sells through the channel, says the availability lets AWS customers run SentinelOne through their existing accounts, regardless of endpoint location.

SentinelOne’s Raj Rajamani

“The future of business has moved to the cloud and cloud workloads must be protected with innovative, proactive technology for organizations to succeed in today’s threat landscape,” said Raj Rajamani, chief product officer at SentinelOne. “We are making our solution directly accessible to our extensive channel partner network and direct enterprise customers across industries. This expands both SentinelOne business growth opportunities and AWS customer capabilities in maintaining an optimal security posture.”

The SentinelOne agent can be installed on all major operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux and containers) hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The platform predicts attacks, identifies and defends against rogue IoT devices, and protects cloud workloads from malicious activities.

SentinelOne is demonstrating its capabilities this week at the event in Las Vegas.

FireEye Adds Cloud Security Capabilities to AWS

Cybersecurity firm FireEye has added several of its cloud security capabilities to AWS.

Partners may access new FireEye Helix security analytics, which detects abnormal attacker behavior and unique threats to AWS, and cloud versions of FireEye Network Security, Forensics, and Detection On Demand for customers.

“Threats in the cloud are unique in their nature,” said Grady Summers, executive vice president of products and customer success at FireEye. “Often, organizations lack the necessary expertise to extend their visibility and protection across complex cloud infrastructures.”

Putting FireEye’s technology and intelligence on AWS lets organizations add another layer of protection from advanced attacks in the cloud that bypass traditional defenses, Summers added.

FireEye is exhibiting at AWS re:Invent.

Veeam Debuts New Cloud Backup Product

Cloud data management vendor Veeam Software on Tuesday announced a new backup platform exclusive to AWS Marketplace.

The cloud-native Veeam Backup for AWS comes with …

…. Veeam’s recovery capabilities, and is available in both free and paid versions.

Veeam also has integrated the product with its flagship backup and replication solution, which allows users to manage data – cloud, virtual or physical – all in the same portal.

ESG’s Christophe Bertrand

“Modern organizations are now hybrid and have adopted public cloud for production applications, backup and disaster recovery among top use cases,” Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Our research shows that nearly one out every two firms now uses AWS, which makes this new set of native capabilities by Veeam a great way for IT professionals and service providers to further unify the protection and recoverability of data assets wherever they live, without compromising service levels or usability.”

Veeam is demonstrating the new backup platform throughout the week at the show.

Zadara Unveils SQL Server Migration Product

Zadara Storage unveiled a new platform for migrating SQL Server database apps to the cloud in stages.

The company says its offering lets users meet high-availability requirements using SQL Standard Edition within the AWS environment but without the cost of SQL Enterprise Edition or code changes.

“We are helping customers navigate the hidden risks and unnecessary expenses that have plagued so many SQL Server migrations to public clouds — with greater reliability, faster performance and increased security capabilities,” said Oded Kellner, vice president of product management at Zadara.

Zadara is conducting presentations at its booth during AWS re:Invent 2019.

Druva Launches Extended Data Protection for AWS Workloads

Druva, which provides cloud data protection and management through the channel, on Tuesday launched extended data protection capabilities for AWS enterprise workloads.

The centralized suite includes backup and data management for Amazon Simple Storage Service, long-term archiving for Amazon Elastic Block Store snapshots and new global policies for AWS accounts.

Druva says the additions allow customers to more effectively manage some of today’s most popular workloads, enable consistent storage policies across the platform and reduce costs with automated storage tiering.

451 Research’s Steven Hill

As enterprises continue to expand their AWS footprints, IT teams must stay abreast of data protection and analysis — a complex need, said Steven Hill, senior analyst at 451 Research.

“The global, policy-based data protection and lifecycle automation Druva is adding to its data protection service provides the tools needed to effectively manage that complexity,” Hill said. “In addition, Druva leverages the flexible and resilient Amazon S3 storage, tiering data for cost efficient long-term archiving and governance of AWS EBS volume snapshots.”

Mike Palmer, chief product officer at Druva, agreed.

“Given how easy it is to set up environments in AWS, enterprises look to further reduce business risk, increase operational efficiency and retain visibility of all their data,” he said. “As one of the only data protection solutions built entirely on AWS, and given our intimate knowledge of it, Druva is the ideal solution to help leverage AWS to the fullest and drive our customers’ business forward.”

Druva said its new capabilities will be generally available by the first quarter within Druva CloudRanger, on AWS Marketplace, and immediately available to select customers via early access. The company is exhibiting this week at AWS re:Invent.