The cloud war continues to expand beyond the quest to win the hearts and minds of CIOs to include the partner ecosystem, which is playing an increasingly important role in driving the adoption of managed services.

In one of the latest development, NGINX, Inc., the company behind the widely-used reverse proxy server of the same name, has made  the commercial edition of the open-source project available through the Amazon Web Services Marketplace on an hourly or annual subscription basis. The platform is joined by a cloud optimized version of NGINX Streaming Media Server, which has been slimmed down to provide a more affordable option for video and audio workloads. The release comes in response to the growing number of customers running the software on Amazon’s EC2, NGINX chief executive Gus Robertson said in a statement. They will now have access to professional support from the vendor.

Within an hour of the  traffic delivery firm launching its offerings for Amazon Web Services, co-location stalwart Equinix, Inc. and long-time partner Carpathia, Inc., which are managed hosting providers that cater to government and regulated industries, unveiled a direct access toolkit for Microsoft’s competing Azure.  The so-called Starting Kit provides a high-speed uplink to the platform-as-a-service from Equinix-run data centers and is aimed at addressing the latency challenges associated with hybrid cloud environments.

Dell Computer, Inc. is also going after hybrid computing with the latest release of its AppAsure data protection software. The update, which made its debut alongside two new backup appliances for small environments such as remote offices, introduces the ability to tap into the public cloud for archiving purposes. It supports migration to and from a broad range of services, including Amazon S3, Azure, Rackspace, Inc. and OpenStack-based platforms like Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Helion,  and allows admins to schedule copies or partial updates wherein only changed data is sent off to the target location. That reduces the amount of information that has to travel across the network, thereby freeing up bandwidth for more important workloads.

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